We were hitched in a cheap, fast civil ceremony in New York’s City Hall in June 1973. My sparkling engagement ring was cubic zirconia.

His lovely mother came from Athens. The following December we were married in a more elaborate, traditional Greek Orthodox ceremony in an Athens cathedral. According to custom, both of us wore flowered crowns, as we were led in a circle on a raised platform in the center of the church, while the priest mumbled in Greek.

“The man is the sun; the woman is the moon who circles around him.”

[music: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”]

It only goes downhill from there. Trust me.

My wedding gown cost fifty dollars. I bought white lace and satin on Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and hired an elderly woman living in the West 90s to turn the materials into a very simple floor-length dress with long sleeves and a V-neck.