Some might say Sarah Lefton and Bill Selig met by accident.
Others might call it fate.
For years, Sarah had looked for her beshert at parties, classes, mixers and synagogue programs. She also tried JDate. But no one she met was quite right.
Then, one Friday in March 2006, after going to the Mission Minyan and a Shabbat dinner, on a whim she decided to stop at a friend’s house for dessert. And that’s where she met Bill.
They clicked immediately. They went out to a sushi restaurant on their first date. Bill casually mentioned to Sarah he had tickets that night to an acoustic show by Frank Black (of the Pixies) at Café du Nord — if she wanted to go.
“When I squealed and said, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ he knew it was going be a good date,” Sarah said.
Sixteen months later, Sarah was in Israel for a conference. Bill surprised her there, and proposed while they were on a sailboat in the Red Sea off the coast of Eilat.
In February 2008, they wed in an egalitarian Jewish ceremony at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco.
“Part of the appeal of getting married where we did is of course that it’s upstairs from Café du Nord,” Sarah said.
Bill is a stage director and actor. Sarah created the Jewish Fashion Conspiracy T-shirt line and currently produces
G-dcast, an Internet cartoon series based on the parsha of the week.
The couple lives in San Francisco.
Something old: Instead of tossing the bouquet at the end of the night to a gaggle of embarrassed single women, Sarah presented it to the couple with the longest marriage — her great aunt and uncle Sophie and Ralph, who have been married for more than 60 years.
Something new: In recognition of the couple’s many LGBT friends at the wedding who could not legally marry, “We interrupted the traditional chuppah ceremony to pour out a glass of wine onto the floor to ‘lessen our joy’ — Pesach style,” Sarah said.
The gesture was “received with tears and appreciation, and was extremely important to us.”
Bill and Sarah encourage other marrying couples to consider adding such a gesture as a public recognition of legal injustice.
Something borrowed: The couple decided to save money by not hiring a band, and instead borrowed music from friends and relatives.
“Our friend Jim, an ethnomusicologist, provided an amazing sampling of simcha dancing music,” Sarah said. Another friend, Evan, taught the guests to sing “our favorite niggun” as Bill and Sarah walked down the aisle.
Something Jew(ish): Both Bill and Sarah wanted to immerse in a mikvah before their wedding day, but neither felt that a traditional mikvah was the answer.
So they decided to visit the waters of the “wild and freezing” Pacific Ocean at Baker Beach. Sarah went under starlight the night before the wedding and Bill went early in the morning on their wedding day.
Both brought their best friends to supervise.
“It was both meaningful and exhilarating,” Sarah said.