What do we talk about when we talk about snow ? Does it matter? Those are some cute dogs, right? [CLICK THEM.] It matters to the NYT’s Weddings & Celebrations section, though, and thus, matters to Gawker Weddings Expert Phyllis Nefler . In today’s op-ed in the New York Times Thomas ” The World Is Phat ” Friedman implored Americans to join together and become a “generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century,” dubbing this utopian cohort “The Regeneration.” Note to Friedman: you may want to skip over the Styles Section this weekend, lest you see the truth that we’re really just The Ski Generation. Perhaps it’s Olympic fever; more likely it’s just the Times relying on ski-related stories in the winter the way they’re all Montauk this and Wainscott that in the summer. Whatever the reason, Styles leads with a story about “the return of the American ski bum,” that Cloudveil-clad archetype, and later reminds us that the couples who ski together surely will be together. [ Ed. Projecting much hmm?!? ] Elizabeth Scott and Kris Barber first met when they worked together at Kansas City investment bank. (Is that like Equities in Dallas ?) It wasn’t until they “were part of a ski house in Breckenridge, Colo. for several winters” that their romance blossomed “through winters of skiing and summers of biking.” And because he didn’t want to get engaged on a pending trip to Europe — “too much of a cliche” — Barber instead went with a completely novel plan: on a hike in the the mountains. Near the ski house, natch. Scott and Barber are well on their way to becoming as badass as Polly Samuels and Andrew McLean , who were featured in Vows in 2005 and are checked up on this weekend. The pair’s love for the sport was such that they were married at “Our Lady of the Snows” chapel in Alta, walking out of the chapel “under an archway of ski poles held aloft by friends, many in ski boots.” McLean is well known in the skiing community for his backcountry prowess—he has skied in areas as far flung as New Zealand and Iran, was featured in the excellent and mindboggling documentary Steep , and keeps a website called StraightChuter.com —while Samuels went from being a prosecutor in the New York DA’s office to working as a lawyer in Park City. Ms. McLean, once a Type A Manhattan girl, is now a Type A mountain girl. In her own way, she is even more extreme than he is. In 2007 while five months pregnant with their first child, Mira, she accompanied him on a hut-to-hut trip in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In New Zealand in 2006, he went ski mountaineering while she spent a week swimming with dolphins. Now 40, she competes with him in endurance races, including an annual one in which competitors climb up and ski down Sunlight Mountain Resort in Glenwood Springs, Colo. – continuously for 24 hours. “It doesn’t get really interesting until after midnight when you start hallucinating,” she said. They met in a yurt, and he proposed atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Their daughter, who is 2, “already has her own quiver of skis — ones for backcountry, others for resort skiing, all about the lentgh of a baguette.” Her name is Mira, after “a craggy, steep, continuous, daunting alpine face in Alaska.” Maybe you should try out that bunny hill after all. Elsewhere this weekend, a freelance photographer married a videographer who filmed “a whale rescue on ‘Untamed and Uncut’ on Animal Planet” (insert dork jokes here); the daughter of New York Knicks announcer John Andariese married a flight lieutenant in the British Royal Air Force , and I really hope Gus Johnson gave a toast at the wedding; and a raging health care reformer — hey, she likes Nader! — finally agreed to get married so that her fiance could get something a lil stronger than medicinal tea for his kidney stones. Say what you will, she’s got the “something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue” thing down pat. That last couple’s story, by the way, included this romantic vignette: Then, in 2004, Mr. Swift returned to Akron for Christmas and encountered Ms. Robbins at a local bar. When she said, “Let’s do a shot later,” he interpreted it as a polite yet definitive blow off. But as last call rolled around, Mr. Swift sidled up to her and said, “How about that shot?” “It was one of those running-through-the-lilies kind of moments,” she said. If that’s running through the lilies then my life is freaking Chariots of Fire. Emily Fong Mitchell and Stephen Samuel Fleming • The wedding was in Maui: +1 • The bride and groom both graduated from Harvard: +7 • The bride received an MBA at Wharton and the groom from Harvard: +9 • “The bride’s maternal grandfather, the late Hiram L. Fong of Hawaii, was the first Asian American elected to the United States Senate, serving from 1959 to 1977”: +2 • The bride’s father is the president of the Maui Medical Group: +1 • The bridegroom’s mother “retired as a French teacher and the chairwoman of the foreign language department at the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in San Francisco: +1 TOTAL: 21 Erin Elizabeth Kotheimer and Pepijn Marijn Helgers • Those dimples!: +1 • Both the bride and groom work for the State Department, she as “a political advisor at the United States Mission to the United Nations in charge of Security Council matters involving topics like the Horn of Africa, piracy and the impact of armed conflict on women” and he as “a Foreign Service officer in Washington, working on security-related issues regarding the Republic of Georgia”: +9 • The bride graduated magna cum laude from Marymount Manhattan College and received a master’s degree from Columbia: +6 • The groom graduated magna cum laude from the University of New Mexico and received a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins: +4 • The groom was awarded the Bronze Star in April 2009 for service in Iraq: +1 • The bride’s father is the chief of staff at the Commonwealth Health Center in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands: +1 • The groom’s previous marriage ended in divorce: -1 • The groom’s mom’s name is Wilhelmina Helgers-Dirkx: +1 TOTAL: 22 [ Pretty photo of those ridiculously cute dogs used with permission via Keith Loh . ]
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Scoring Sunday’s Nuptials: Fly High, Snowbirds of Love. Fly High.
