Dave and Sylvia are my brother- and sister-in-law, and I just came back from their wedding. It was a weekend full of bacon-wrapped scallops, surreptitious hot tubbing, and as I discussed last week, amazing music. (Big ups to my fellow DJs!)

For me,  the wedding was also a breathtaking reminder of how the theatre storms into actual life, turning a few seconds into a Moment.

Weddings are always full of performance and ritual, of course, but Dave and Sylvia’s ceremony included an element I’ve never experienced before.

Let me set the scene: Dave and Sylvia are on a hill, under a pair of beautiful trees in a California vineyard. The sky is  blue. The sun is warm. There are tiny bags of lavender on the benches where the guests are seated, and they lightly scent the air.

Behind the two trees, there are hills full of grape arbors. Behind that, there’s a mountain or two. Just to the left, there’s an old seesaw.

(Also, there’s Andrew, who is my partner and Dave’s brother and best man. If you’re me, you keep stealing glances at him throughout the wedding. He’s handsome in his suit, and the look on his face reminds you how lucky you are that you’re sharing your life with a man who really feels things.)

Experiencing all this, I was emotional right away. Who wouldn’t be?

Then, at the very end of the ceremony, the new thing happened.

After inviting Dave and Sylvia to take a deep breath and really be aware of the vineyard and the people who loved them, Reverend Bonnie (also Dave’s aunt) asked the entire wedding party to face the crowd. An unseen guitarist started playing. And then, Bonnie asked everyone to sing the following:

I am so blessed, I am so blessed,
I am so grateful for all that I have.
I am so blessed, I am so blessed,
I am so grateful, I am so blessed.

That was it, those four lines over and over, several times. I knew the tune because Bonnie had taught it to us at an event earlier in the week, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t make a sound. I was transported by the fact that for a moment, just a moment, the entire vineyard was becoming something bigger than itself.

When the wedding party turned to face the crowd, they made a theatrical gesture of “seeing” us. They invited all of us into the ceremony in a newly intimate way.  Suddenly, I felt the community the wedding had created. I could feel myself pulled into the circle because I wasn’t just singing at the bride and groom, but singing with them.

This strikes me as an incredibly generous gesture: I’ve never seen a wedding party do that before… move so consciously to welcome all the guests into the the couple’s new life together. By looking at us as we looked at them, Dave and Sylvia made it clear that as much as we were supporting them, they were supporting us.

The song made the message even clearer. We weren’t looking at Dave and Sylvia and singing, “You are so blessed.” We were looking at this community and singing, “I am so blessed.”

How blessed indeed. For the length of that song, everyone in that vineyard became part of a living organ that was bigger than all of us.

After the song was finished, the ceremony moved back to the bride and groom. Bonnie pronounced them husband and wife, and we moved down the hill. But because of the song, I saw the couple in a way that I’d never seen a married couple before: I saw that there were pieces of me in them, and I saw, I felt, that there were pieces of them in me.

So now I know: I am blessed to be a part of the community that supports Dave and Sylvia’s marriage, and I am blessed to be one of the people who is supported by it. The Marriage is an entity that was created in that vineyard. It’s a being made of love, and I am both its parent and its child.

If I didn’t have a theatre background, and if I hadn’t recently had a conversation about weddings with the playwright Taylor Mac, I don’t know if this wedding would have reached me this way. I’m grateful my life prepared me for what happened.