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Non-Traditional Marriages

Steve Russell
6 min readFeb 13, 2020

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How I Imagine it Now. Photo from Pixabay

In these times, staying married seems as likely as Donald Trump telling the truth.

A quarter century. Damn. Can it be 25 years? If you had asked me my life expectancy on my wedding day, I would probably have answered in double digits….just barely.

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I was wearing a guayabera. Tracy was wearing a dress of similar design and similar comfort. My ex-law partner, Vivian Mahlab, had put out a most impressive spread and she had an Indian flute playing on a sound system of crystalline quality. It would, I hoped, be the last of many times Vivian would spend money on me.

Tracy and I had each “invited a few friends” and that turned out to be a lot of people, but Vivian was prepared. My pal Brady Coleman — a recovering lawyer using his Screen Actors Guild card at every opportunity and picking guitar on the side — was, I learned, an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, and so authorized to perform weddings.

Those of our age know all about the Universal Life Church. I will just say that it lived at the edges of the First Amendment, but was much more practical than the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster AKA Pastafarians. Send in five bucks and you would be ordained for life. I always pictured the founders of…

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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