Chris & Caroline’s Griffith Observatory Elopement
Chris and Caroline met in college at Claremont McKenna, though neither can pin the exact moment. What they can date is the first kiss: fifteen years ago, in a New York bar, with “Wonderwall” playing. They don’t keep an anniversary. They keep a make-out-aversary instead.
Eleven years of dating followed, and Chris turns out to have been right to be nervous about starting, since once they opened up to each other it was a one-way train. They grew up together, more or less: surfing and climbing across California and Joshua Tree, museums in Denmark, kitchen dance parties, air-mattress-on-the-couch pizza nights, and raising Rooster, their six-year-old King Charles Cavalier and certified grump. Fifteen years in, they came to the Griffith Observatory Trail to get married. As they asked us to say plainly, this wasn’t the beginning of anything. It was a confirmation of what was already there.
Up the hill, then into Hollywood.
They met their families at the overlook just below the Observatory, the city going gold behind them. Jules read Pat Parker’s “Sunshine,” Caroline’s dad handled the vows, and they’d written their own. Rooster came in a white bow about the size of his head. Sean Bartley shot it on film, documentary and loose, the way the night actually ran. And it did keep running, down into Hollywood: the Walk of Fame, the El Capitan lights, a dip in the middle of the crosswalk, a slice and a dark bar to close it out. Independent but united, the way Chris puts it. Fifteen years since the Wonderwall kiss, still no anniversary. Just this.
