But the wedding. Oh my goodness. A Presbyterian bride marrying into a Mexican family. This is a whole new vision of human existence. I have loved the English language all my life and plan to go on using it, but English has its limits and that’s the time to break into dance. The mother of the groom approached me and I took her in my arms, despite my aching hematoma, and it made me very happy. I saw the father of the bride dancing like a wild man. The music was so loud I sang along at the top of my voice and nobody could tell that I didn’t know the words.
I’d never been in the Chelsea Hotel before because Dylan Thomas’s death there in 1953 made it a literary landmark and I despise that sort of landmark. Thomas was a great poet who drank himself to death while living at the Chelsea and having an affair with a lady who took him to her doctor who shot him up with cortisone and morphine and he was taken comatose to St. Vincent’s where the combination of whiskey and bad medicine killed him.
