❤️ Fellow @ Harvard 📚 Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics & Public Policy 👩🏻💻 Research on Media & Innovation 💍 to @ProfNoahFeldman 😍
Cambridge, MA
Joined March 2008
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The Bohemian Embassy Weddings Book I, Chapter VI: The Officiant's Sermon - Senator Cory Booker, the Rainbow Covenant & Love's Alchemical Fire
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Senator @corybooker, a close friend of Noah's since they studied together in Oxford as Rhodes Scholars thirty years ago, officiated the Harvard Widener Library wedding of @juliaallison & @professornoahfeldman, assisted by Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer, an accomplished cantor who presided over the Jewish component of the ceremony.
"Cory knows a tremendous amount of Torah - and he is also a bit of a bohemian at heart," Noah explains. "Cory's speech-sermon was pure poetic genius. Julia's middle name is Rainbow, and Cory managed to connect God's rainbow covenant with Noah, James Baldwin's interpretation of the rainbow sign in The Fire Next Time, and Cory's own idea of alchemical fire as the essence of love that transmutes and creates. There are 535 people in the House and the Senate, and not one of the others could have conceived or delivered it."
This reel is Cory's full sermon. It's ten minutes, and I HIGHLY recommend watching. His beautiful delivery is part of what makes the spoken-word poetry so powerful.
More than a sermon about our marriage, it is a meditation on love as a force of spiritual transformation. It is the most beautiful and profound sermon on love I have ever heard, and it makes me cry every time, both because Cory sees our unusual love so clearly, but also because of the enormous hope imbued in his mystical words. It is, as my tribe likes to say, a transmission.
Follow along: A Tale of Two Weddings on TheBohemianEmbassy.com ♥️
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings Book I: The Harvard Library Wedding Album ♥️
BRIDE & GROOM
👰🏻♀️ Bride — @JuliaAllison
🤵🏼♂️ Groom — @ProfessorNoahFeldman
VENUES & CEREMONY
⛪ Ceremony Venue — @HarvardLibrary
🍽️ Dinner Venue — @TheBohemianEmbassyHQ
📖 Officiant — @CoryBooker
✡️ Rabbi — Jessica Kate Meyer
PLANNING, DESIGN, FLORALS & STATIONERY
🪄 Creative Direction — @TheBohemianEmbassyHQ
🌸 Florist — @OrlyKhonFloral
✉️ Stationery — @LedgeWoodFineStationery
🪑 Rentals — @PeakEventServices
📋 Coordination — Michelle Smyth
📋 Wedding Doula — @Sophia.Feminine.Wisdom
🤩Astrocartrographer — @the.oracle.mother
PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO & CONTENT
📸 Photography — @Bottega53
🎥 Cinematograpy — @Gione.Silva
📱 Content Creator — @SoBridalSocial
📱 Photography & Content — @BeneathTheWaves
BRIDAL FASHION & BEAUTY
💇 Hair — @Romina_Hairstyles
💄 Makeup — @BeautyByNelse
🛍️ Bridal Shop — @BridalReflectionsNY
👗 Custom Gown — @TheAtelierStudioOfficial (Jimmy Choo)
🧤 Custom Gloves — @Cornelia_James
👠 Shoes — @JimmyChoo
🕊️ Custom Veil — @BoutiqueDeVoile
GROOM’S ATTIRE
🤵♂️ Tuxedo — @Isaia
👞 Shoes — @CarminaShoemaker
👔 Custom Shirt — @LucaAvitabile
🤵♂️ Tie — @RalphLauren
FOOD & CAKE
🍴 Caterer — @SarmaRestaurant
🎂 Cake — @PartyFavorsBrookline
MUSIC
🎻 String Quartet — @BostonStringEnsemble
🎺 Trumpet — @GeoffreyShamu
🎺 Trumpet — @MishaGrandel
🥁 Percussion — @TomSchmidtPercussion
🎤 Singer — @JerrellMelton.Music
🎤 Singer — @NikkiNicoleMusic
WEDDING PARTY
🧜♀️💜 Mermaid (& Maid of Honor) — Starielle Hope — @StarielleHope
💜 Maid of Honor — Cailleach De Weingart-Ryan — @CailleachDe
💜 Bridesmaid — Annie Lalla — @LallaBird
💜 Bridesmaid — Natasha Martin — @NatashaMartin2020
💜 Bridesmaid — Via Osgood Strong — @strong.via
💜 Bridesmaid — Laura Styler — @AwakenYourPower
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings Book I, Ch. IV: The Gown ♥️
There are very few moments left in modern life when an ordinary person gets to dress ceremonially (too few, IMO), to wear something gloriously impractical because the occasion calls for it. A fifteen-foot train has no utility! But ritual has never been concerned with utility.
It took almost a year to find. I wanted the archetypal ball gown, enormous & timeless, grand enough for Widener’s marble & monumental scale. I searched Chicago, Boston, LA & New York before finding @theatelierstudioofficial (by Jimmy Choo) at @bridalreflectionsny. I loved the voluminous satin skirt & 15ft train, but simplified the bodice: strapless, with detachable off-the-shoulder sleeves for the ceremony. I designed a custom veil & added elbow-length opera gloves by @cornelia_james.
The finished concoction was so big-big that I couldn’t do much without help. My bridesmaids had to arrange me inside the gown, carry the train & eventually unleash me from its satin confines. Between the corset, heat, nerves & sheer weight, I was so worried about fainting that I brought smelling salts. (Which I actually used!)
But all of that was a feature, not a bug. The more unlike ordinary life this day became, the more meaning it held. Even needing other women, sisters I have loved for years, to support me felt symbolic: we do not cross the great thresholds of life alone.
The gown changed how I felt: I felt like a BRIDE. And it kept bringing me back to what I most wanted to remember: “This is a wild & sacred day that will never come again.”
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Follow the story on TheBohemianEmbassy.com
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings Book I: The Harvard Library Wedding Album ♥️
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I had been dreaming about my wedding for 30 years. (The benefit of waiting a very, very long time to get married, as I did.)
Senator Cory Booker, Noah’s close friend since their days as Rhodes Scholars at Oxford 30 years ago, officiated, assisted by Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer. Cory’s speech-sermon was pure poetic genius. My middle name is Rainbow, and he connected God’s rainbow covenant with Noah, James Baldwin’s interpretation of the rainbow sign in The Fire Next Time, and his own idea of alchemical fire as the essence of love: that which transmutes and creates.
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I - Chapter III: The Wedding Morning (Part 5/5)
My childhood best friend Natasha rode w me to the library as “Going to the Chapel” played. We arrived, bridesmaids waving, crowd cheering. My ♥️ exploded.
As I climbed the steps, I turned to the crowd & shouted: “TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE!” (It is.)
Follow the story at TheBohemianEmbassy.com
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I - Chapter III: The Wedding Morning (Part 4/5)
Now it was all here, actually happening & my psyche could barely absorb it. Despite my best efforts to stay in my body, I struggled to be fully present.
Eventually, my bridesmaids laced me into 30 lbs of gown, arranged the 15-foot train & got me out of the house. We were very, very late.
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I - Chapter III: The Wedding Morning (Part 3/5)
It turns out you can be both a feminist and also very, very, very excited for your wedding.
I hadn’t expected it to take until 39 to find Noah, or until 44 to marry him. The long engagement was admittedly my doing; it turns out that planning two weddings while getting a master’s degree is tricky! I had wanted, so intensely & for so long, to find my life partner, my soulmate, and yes, to have the fairy-tale wedding.
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I - Chapter III: The Wedding Morning (Part 2/5)
The whole house felt like the getting-ready montage from Father of the Bride, which was exactly my goal.
Why was I so nervous? I don’t know. Twenty years of expectations, probably. I had dreamt of this day since I was eight years old. The feminist in me winces slightly at that sentence, but the truth is that I was raised on equal parts Disney & Ms. magazine. I always wanted happily ever after … who doesn’t!? But I wanted it on my own terms. (I did not, for example, take Noah’s last name when we married.)
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I - Chapter III: The Wedding Morning (Part 1/5)
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I woke up at 7 a.m. The weather had been miraculously taken care of (thanks to my frantic prayer & a strategically placed rosary, perhaps?), but I was nervous. Like, really nervous. Like probably-should-have-taken-a-beta-blocker nervous.
Still, I loved waking up at home on our wedding morning. My bridesmaids filled the bedrooms, bouquets and decorations arrived from the florist, makeup artists crowded into the pink-monkey-wallpapered kitchen, and my unbelievably cheesy ’80s-baby-playlist played over the Sonos. (If you can’t play cheesy love songs on your wedding morning, when can you play them?)
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I - Chapter I: On Marrying in Harvard’s Widener Memorial Library
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Everyone asks how we came to be the first couple married in the Library’s 110-year history.
The answer is below, in the words of my brilliant husband @professornoahfeldman. It’s a love letter to Harry, libraries & impossible dreams being made (somehow) possible. Worth reading in its entirety at TheBohemianEmbassy.com
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“I got married in Harvard’s Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library last year in the rotunda, the place where Harry dwells. The marriage has changed who I am; the wedding has changed, and enhanced, my understanding of the library, and of Harry’s place in it and in my life.
Harry Elkins Widener was the promising young man, just out of college, who had died in the wreck of the Titanic, as had his father. His mother had built the library in his memory. Widener, who was graduated in the Class of 1907, had collected 3300 rare volumes by the time of his death in 1912.
After we became engaged, Julia and I conducted a kind of procession through the public spaces of Cambridge and Boston to see if any would match her senses of drama, beauty, grandeur, and uniqueness sufficiently to be suitable for a wedding. One or two came close. But the only place in either town that Julia deemed worthy of the wedding she envisioned was Widener; specifically, the rotunda.
Of course, there was, as in any good story, a substantial roadblock to be overcome. No weddings are permitted in Widener Library.
‘It’s my dream to marry you in Widener,’ Julia said to me. ‘But it’s not allowed,’ I replied. ‘I know! So we’ll just need to pray to Harry and manifest it,’ she insisted, completely undeterred.
And so it was that we got married in Widener Library. That is, in its essence, all you need to know to understand Julia and to understand our relationship.
The library is Harry’s temple, architecturally and spiritually. He lives at its beating heart. What a place to join with my beloved Julia in a life that incorporates what is, learns from what has been said and known and asked, and strives to create for the future.”
♥️ More on TheBohemianEmbassy.com
The Bohemian Embassy Weddings
Book I, Prologue
Reader, I Married Him (Twice!)
To be fair, I’d been married before, to myself, at Burning Man (as a feminist performance art piece, I’ll have you know).
But this time I was marrying @professornoahfeldman, which introduced a host of complexities.
For one, he and I did not share the same culture, religion, or hometown.
For two, well… see number one.
So we toured 30+ venues across the world searching for one place that could hold both of us.
Everything felt wrong.
We were looking for a single country that could contain two nations. But no such country exists!
His: Academia. Born blocks from Harvard, Noah has been a professor there for 20+ years.
Mine: Bohemia. Not a place, per se, but a roving band of artistic, mystical marauders migrating the globe from Black Rock City to Ibiza, palo santo & psychedelics in tow.
The jungles of Ubud, Bali, the land of 10,000 gods & 10,000 healers, have a permanent spot on the bohemian itinerary.
Bali is the home of my soul, the place on earth where I’ve felt safest & closest to the divine. I lived there on sabbatical in 2017, I’ve returned every year since; I have a Balinese family I love deeply and consider my own. They were strongly (strongly!) urging me to get married “at home.” 🥹
So we said yes! But of course, there was a hitch, or two, or three:
1) Bali is (if you hadn’t noticed) very, very far away. Too far for our parents.
2) Legal marriage requires American soil.
3) In Bali, our full focus would be on our guests. In Cambridge, we could focus on each other.
So we divided & conquered:
Cambridge - 6.15.25: an intimate Jewish ceremony with our parents, Noah’s kids & my closest girlfriends in Harvard’s Widener Library, the 1st wedding ever held there.
Bali - 8.5-8.10.25: five days in the jungle with 140 guests. Half run institutions & negotiate peace treaties. The other half have never filed a W-2. Burning Man meets Black Tie. Balinese Hinduism meets new-age spirituality. Professors dancing barefoot with shamans. A magical, colorful, chaotic collision of worlds.
Follow the story @ TheBohemianEmbassy.com ♥️
