Buster and Donna

Jeanne and I are the living embodiments of the old adage that “opposites attract.” Quickly. We knew within a week or so of meeting each other that something serious was up. We are so different in so many ways, beginning with her extreme extroversion and my extreme introversion, that it caused a few people to pause when the two of us first set up shop together. My minister father, who had known Jeanne for ten years before I met her, violated everything he had ever been taught in his own Baptist upbringing and advised me that the two of us should live together for a while before we commit to anything permanent. Which we did. I pulled up stakes and moved with Jeanne to Santa Fe while she completed the last semester of her master’s degree and while I prepared for heading God knew where for my PhD program.

As we got to know each other, Jeanne told me stories of her best friends in Brooklyn, people who sounded far more interesting and out-of-the-box than the relatively boring people in my background. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Buster, a long-time friend whose connection with Jeanne went back to when Jeanne was just out of high school. Buster’s mother, Rose, who had recently died had been an iconic figure in Jeanne’s life. Rosie’s favorite word was “fuck,” and her outrageously unique personality helped Jeanne break out of the restrictive Irish/Italian Catholic world she grew up in. In her life prior to meeting me Jeanne had been a singer, culminating in one-woman cabaret acts that Buster had managed and directed. An accomplished singer and actor, Buster sounded like exactly the sort of larger-than-life character that one never encountered in the northern Vermont of my upbringing.

One day shortly after I moved into Jeanne’s postage stamp size apartment, Buster called. After several minutes of conversation, Jeanne asked Buster if he wanted to say hi to me. Apparently he did, because she immediately handed the phone to me—an introvert’s worst nightmare. In a loud voice that perfectly matches the extraordinary tenor voice I would come to know and love, Buster asked “Do you know what the hell you have gotten yourself into?? The Bean [Buster’s nickname for Jeanne] is a pistol! You’d better be sure about what you’re doing!!” Nice to meet you too, Buster! I, of course, did not know what I was getting myself into—nor did Jeanne—but something about my first conversation with Buster strangely gave me confidence.

Buster came from Brooklyn to Santa Fe for Jeanne’s graduation a few months later. Since Jeanne’s parents also made the trip and she was tied up with entertaining them, it fell to me to pick Buster up at the Albuquerque airport sixty miles south of Santa Fe. I was not sure how I would recognize him, but Jeanne assured me that there would be no mistaking Buster—he tends to stand out in a crowd, she said. This was twenty-five years ago, so I don’t clearly remember what Buster was wearing as he stood by the curb waiting for some unknown person to pick him up, but he was clearly the only displaced New Yorker amongst the surrounding south-westerners. Buster was an introvert’s dream on the ride back, as I didn’t need to say more than a dozen words during the hour trip. As I pulled into our driveway, Jeanne ran out of the apartment yelling “BUSTERRRRRRRR!!!!!” as Buster leaped out of the car screaming “BEEEAAAANN!!!!!,” followed by a rib-cracking embrace, the same way they have greeted each other every time they have met in my presence over the past twenty-five years.

It was not until several months later that I met Donna for the first time. Buster and Donna have been a couple for over thirty years and are more living proof that opposites attract. While Buster’s career has been a matter of cobbling singing extravaganzas together with acting in travelling musical theatre companies that often take him away from home for months at a time, Donna has been the person with a sensible and successful career in the travel agency business. Buster is larger than life and a force of nature, while Donna is quieter, compassionate, patient, generous and welcoming. Buster doesn’t have an athletic bone in his body, while Donna loves volleyball, tennis and golf. Donna also is musically gifted—just a couple of months after 9/11, Donna and Jeanne did a cabaret show together (directed and produced by Buster, of course). Buster and Donna’s home in Brooklyn looks like Buster exploded in it, with stacks of sheet music and books, DVDs and CDs,  piled high on every square foot of available floor space; Donna incrementally and steadily gets things organized and in shape while Buster is on the road, in preparation for the next explosion when Buster’s gig is over.

I’ve often described Buster and Donna as “the most married couple I’ve ever met,” a wonderful embodiment of the strangeness, inexplicability and power of love. I have a hard time thinking of the one without thinking of the other. Unlike most of Jeanne’s New York friends and family, Buster and Donna visit us in Providence frequently, usually on the way back from spending a few days with friends on Cape Cod. Their visit is always an all-too-brief and welcome hurricane, as they blow through the house disordering our dogs’ routines and minds, teaching us to play card games that Buster and Donna both take very seriously, and leaving a Buster-and-Donna glow in their wake that takes several days to dissipate.

When word got out last year that, after more than three decades together, Buster and Donna were getting married it was fabulous news. For in a moment of clarity and wisdom that is all too infrequent in politics, the New York State Assembly passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage in the state of New York. Anthony (Buster) and Bob (Donna) would be able to establish their relationship—which had been established in the eyes of God and every else for over thirty years—legally for the first time. As Jeanne and I speculated, with my sons and my daughter-in-law, about what the wedding would be like, our imaginations ran wild. A ball room filled with a tableau of the most diverse and outrageous fashions this side of Provincetown, with the broad and beautiful panoply of human beings, from Catholic priests to drag queens, gathered to honor and express their love to Anthony and Bob. And the event did not disappoint. The food was great, the music was even better, and the people watching was spectacular.

The officiant at the ceremony was a gay minister who is a former Roman Catholic priest. Anthony and Bob exchanged rings that had belonged to their fathers. Although I expected this event  to be outrageously different than any other wedding I had attended—and it was—what struck me most powerfully both during and since the ceremony was how fundamentally normal it was. Two people who clearly are deeply in love, who are making a life together, invited several hundred of their best friends to celebrate that love with them, just as couples planning to be married always do. Bob and Anthony just had to wait for more than thirty years for their marriage to be recognized as legally valid. It’s about time.