Alice Lang Rosen - August 5, 1991
Getting Married
And my, you know, I got married and my sis...oh, when I got married my sisters insisted that I had to have a, a wedding. Well, they weren't going to lift a finger for me. So I had a girlfriend, a very good friend of mine at the time who got married about six months before I did, so she says, "Well you can have my dress and everything." And it was my friend's mother who sewed the dress for me because it was too big for me so she fixed it so I had my friends dress and everything. And it was Bill's father who got us the rabbi. Bill's parents were, were Orthodox. They were very religious. you wouldn't know it by Bill...
Husband: Conservative, honey, conservative.
Not really, honey.
Who was the rabbi?
Um, ???
Husband: Yeah.
Yeah. Rabbi ??? the--from--they were Bill--his whole family was ???
What congregation was he?
Husband: Oh, I don't remember that.
That was on Dexter, yet...
Husband: Yeah, that was on Dexter.
...on Dexter, you know. And we got married somewhere, in a hall, you know, on Dexter and, uh...
Husband: Did we go to the Mayflower way, way back here?
Was that the Mayflower?
Husband: No, it was not the May...it was down further it was near Chicago Boulevard.
It was on Dexter, near Chicago Boulevard, right. And um, Bill's father had got the rabbi and he was good friends with Cantor ??? at the time, Bill's father, so Cantor ??? sang, you know, at the wedding. Was all--his parents took care of everything. But it was a very small wedding with about fifty-five people and Bill's parents needed to have more people and they offered to pay. They said, "Well let--we'll pay for our friends and family." And my father wouldn't hear of it, he said "What I can't afford, I won't have, you know. This is what I'm making and this is where it stays." So, um, but, so I invited--I had--we had about six people standing up for us, otherwise my friends couldn't have been at the wedding, you know. We did things like that. But...
Did you tell Bill about everything?
Oh yes.
You knew.
Husband: Oh I knew.
About...
Bill knew everything, yeah.
...your experiences here.
By the time we knew we were going to get married, I told him, you know, everything.
Husband: Oh yeah, I knew.
In fact, I told him that uh, it wasn't my birth mother, you know, and when she found out that I had told Bill, all hell broke loose. She didn't want me to tell--see that's one thing, she did never want anyone to know we weren't a family, quote. In other words, stepmother did not enter our vocabulary--or stepfather. In other words, "Three girls, we have three daughters, three girls." And when someone would stop them and say, "Oh, tell me Paula, Fritz, which one is yours and which are yours?" you know. And they would say, "We have three daughters." Period. You know, that, that was never, you know...
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