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Joy and I went to my mom’s in SoCal for the long weekend, and before plans had even taken shape, all three of us said, “Let’s go to Luna Luna!”
Luna Luna was a combination art extravaganza and amusement park, conceived by André Heller and created by an incredible roster of artists: Sonia Delaunay, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Salvador Dali, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, Rebecca Horn, Roy Liechtenstein, Georg Baselitz, and many others. Heller asked them if they wanted to create an art amusement park, and they said YES. It opened in Hamburg in 1987, ran for six weeks, and then . . . disappeared. The plans to go on to more cities fell through, and there was nothing to do but pack it all up into 44 shipping containers.
There was a documentary at the time, and these artists weren’t exactly obscure, yet it was all but forgotten. Several years ago, after pulling together a team that crucially included Drake as a funder, Heller and his son brought the pieces out of storage. A small number of them are resurrected in Los Angeles, and even though you can’t go on the rides, it really feels like an amusement park, not a gallery. After this run ends in May, Luna Luna will go to New York. Maybe one day kids will be able to ride the Keith Haring carousel and a classical violinist will once again perform with a professional flatulist in Manfred Deix’s Palace of the Winds (fart jokes were apparently even more amusing to 18th-century Austrian adults, including Mozart, than they are to 21st-century US American fourth graders).
No one need wait for another of Luna Luna’s features, however: André Heller’s Wedding Chapel. “Do you want to get married?” I joked to Joy. “Yes!” she said, sincerely, and soon we were standing before a very sweet celebrant, who took the time to ask how long we’d been together and other details of our lives, sighing sympathetically when we said our first wedding wasn’t recognized by the law. Then we picked up bouquets and I put on a top hat. Joy already had her Flying Spaghetti Monster baseball cap, and I thought that it introduced a key spiritual element, so I urged her to stick with it rather than take one of the top hats or veils the chapel offered. We re-exchanged rings and kissed. My mom video’d the whole thing, and the people gathered around cheered, while one impresario rang a bell and another took our photo. It was fun and funny and lighthearted and art-infused, just like our life together. And to look into my wife’s eyes as she was asked if she would “venture an adventure through galaxies of love” with me, and to have her gaze back as she said that she would–that was a sacred moment I will always remember.
We were married in the eyes of our family and church in 2005, and again in 2008 when the state of California opened its eyes. So now we have our third marriage certificate. It’s good to revisit our decision now and then and remind ourselves that we would marry each other all over again.



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