Our Program Speech

Well, we did it! We had our big celebration on Saturday. The weather was cooperating, all our expected guests came, we danced the night away, and can't wait to share with you all our pictures.

We're going to share with you our big day, but in segments, as we are still running around post-big day doing all the errands that go with post-party work - clean-up, taking down, returning things, eating things, packing up, unpacking, writing thank-yous, paying bills, you name it! We don't want to forget a single detail, and we especially don't want to forget a single moment of our big day - it all went so fast!

Being on Toronto Island was a blessing as we heard that Toronto reached a record high heat wave. With a thunder shower to cool us off on Friday night, we set up and watched the beautiful Toronto skyline as a break from the madness. We promise to post pictures and tid bits of story all this week, but here is our most important piece of info: our speech.

As you may already gather, this was not a typical wedding. We had a friend be our 'facilitator' and she acted as a master of ceremonies to help with the flow of things. The party began at 4:30, after a slight delay caused by the meaham of ferry line-ups. We had all our guests sitting on chairs in a circle but we did not have asigned seating. We also made sure we had cold punch and fans on hand to help with the heat! When our DJ Mark pressed 'play' on the boom box, Open Window by Sarah Harmer started, and Joel and vania, with their flower girl Kiki, started to make their way across the field. Along the way, vania and Joel picked up flowers that were given to us by our 12 key women - close friends and family members - as a symbol to acknowledge their approval of our union. This made up vania's bouquet - all individual flowers that characterized our ties to these women. Kiki was a perfect flower girl, dropping marigold flowers across the path.

After Krista the facilitator introduced us, we said this:

"Vania and I are very excited to see everyone here today. In fact, all of you are the reason we wanted to host this celebration. In order for a loving relationship to work, it needs to be surrounded by a community of friends and family. It is your love, friendship, and commitment to us and your community that has encouraged our relationship to grow. By coming and celebrating with us, you have agreed to support us in our life commitment. So, today is not only about celebrating us, but also the wonderful community we belong to. We want to acknowledge our struggles with having this celebration. We feel that celebrating loving relationships is important, but we are also aware that marriage is an institution tghat is political and has been much talked about in the last couple of years. We see our commitment of love here as being rooted in our struggle against violence, sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia and our commitment to a more just, equitable, and democratic world.

Last week, we had a ceremony at City Hall to have our relationship legally recognized as a marriage. We did this so that the law would recognize us as a family, and therefore the joining of our two families. Today, however, is a more important celebration of this for us. We thank all of you for coming and celebrating with us today. "