Page 327 - WhyAsInY

WHat’s in a naMe?
Phyllis and I would be able to pick the music that we liked, and we already knew whose band it would be. The orchestra, for it was closer in size to an orchestra than to a band, would be led by Herb Sherry himself (the father of Marc Sherry of Harvey “Cheatin’baum” fame). That Herb himself would lead was a tribute to Harry; on any given Saturday, Herb might have five bands in action. That it would be a Herb Sherry band was not a coincidence. His operation was very much tied in with the caterer at Beth El who, you got it, was Kotimsky & Tuchman (no sur- prise that the Sherry kids were at Brookwood), as was the operation of the photographer-to-be, Valache Studios (Hal Valache, the son, was also at Brookwood).
All of this and many other details were worked out with military precision before, it seemed, Yom Kippur. I left 137 Girard Street that day with the feeling that I was marrying into the Jewish version of the Kennedys, the only other large and tight wealthy family with a strong paterfamilias with which I was familiar. I, not yet twenty-four years old (Phyllis was twenty-two), was duly impressed. My feelings about the Rebells were not yet at the point that my mother’s feelings about them were (at least as I perceived them), but I was getting there.
Unfortunately, I felt the pressure of my mother’s near reverence for the Rebells—and an example of her vulnerability to the views of oth- ers—in a telling sequence that related to the sealing of the engagement. Inasmuch as I was a tender and callow fellow when Phyllis and I became engaged, and, it need not be added, not entirely sophisticated when it came to such things as the customs and protocols that attach to such momentous and apparently highly choreographed events as betrothals, I made the rookie mistake of turning to my mother when it came to such questions as “Okay, I’ve made my decision; what do I do now?” (I believe that none of my contemporaries to whom I might have turned for guid- ance had become either married or engaged; and my mother would have been the strong force even if they had.)
The first, and in some way most telling, event that resulted from my placing myself in the capable, but vulnerable, hands of my mother related to the rings. The rings? Yes, there had to be a ring to signify the
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