Welcome!
Hi to all of our family, friends and loved ones, and welcome to our wedding website! As we approach the big day, we thought that the best way to provide all of you with the information you need is to provide it in an easy, single location like this.
On this site, you’ll find all the essential basics about our wedding venue, The Montauk Club, how to get there and more, alongside fun info about both of us, the style of the event, who’s in our wedding party, where we’re registered, and much more. Enjoy, and we’re looking forward to seeing all of you in January!
The Countdown Is On!
Holy smokes! We’re getting married in five days! 
How did that come up so quickly?!
I think everyone who’s ever gotten married has probably said the same thing to themselves. Luckily, thanks to lots of good planning and the expert help of friends and family, everything is ready to go, and the evening should prove to be lots of fun for everyone.
If you have any last-minute questions or need any additional specifics, feel free to contact us or any of our family members, and we’ll make sure you have what you need. See you Saturday!
The Style of the Big Day
Surely many of you have noticed by now that there’s a rather specific feel to everything involving our wedding. When we got engaged last February (has it been that long?!) and started to think about what kind of wedding we wanted, 
the only thing we knew for sure was that we wanted something timeless and romantic. We both love the classic far more than the modern in just about everything in life. And as music people, we love the music of bygone eras; specifically, the standards and sweetheart love songs that filled the radio airwaves before rock ‘n’ roll. In fact, if you were to boil it down to one composer, it would be this guy, George Gershwin. The guy spun pure gold.
We’re also big fans of the visual elements of pre-war New York, and the gorgeous lines of design and architecture in the Art Deco era. Not coincidentally, that pairs up nicely with our pal George and his contemporaries, and a wedding concept was born. We hope that on January 31, all of you will feel the spirit of that time through our references to the lush beauty of the music and fashion of the day, and our choice of the Montauk Club, a vintage social club par excellence.
Registries!
As promised, the holiday shopping season is over, and we’ve ventured out into the retail world to determine what items we might be missing from our lovely home. In truth, as with most thirty-something couples, this wasn’t particularly easy. We’re not exactly just starting out in life. But when we took a moment and gave our housewares a hard look, we started to see some gaps. Like, that cookie sheet is from 1993, or we only have one good cooking knife, or the blender is acting like a cranky, arthritic mule lately.
So to that end, we got ourselves over to Crate and Barrel with a wish list, and registered up a storm. You can look it up here.
But you know what else we really need? Dishes. It’s a pretty standard registry item, but of course the brand of tableware that we really love, Fish’s Eddy, only has a paper registry in its one Manhattan store. I guess they take that “vintage” look and feel of their products right to the customer service as well!
The story of Fish’s Eddy is that while antique shopping in Pennsylvania, the owners came upon a huge storage of “dead stock” hotel and diner dishware for sale. (Dead stock is vintage product that was simply never sold, and sits in its original packaging.) Inspired by the find, they created a full line of look-alike crockery, which means it’s solid, heavy, and very classic. I mean, you could do bicep curls with the cereal bowls. You could knock out a burglar with one clunk on the back of the noggin with a dinner plate. Not to mention some of the great, New York-inspired special designs they’ve come up with since starting with the classic whites.
In order to allow folks to help in our purchase of this lifetime-ready stuff, we’ve set up a special fund: The Fish’s Eddy Fund. If you’re so inclined and very digital, you can make a donation directly to the fund by using PayPal and sending to fishseddyfund@gmail.com. Or you can earmark your gift for the fund, or even pick up a gift card at the store itself on 19th and Broadway in Manhattan. It’s great stuff, and if you like contributing to gravy boats and sugar bowls in your wedding gift shopping, that’s how we’re going about it.
Thanks for your interest, and for anything you choose to give us to celebrate the event. We thoroughly appreciate it!
The Day’s Schedule
We realize that many of you may need to determine how much time you need to allow for arrival, or to book babysitters, or to ponder how much recovery time you’ll have 
before your SuperBowl party the next day, so as to the matter of schedule…
You may have noticed that our invite noted the ceremony will begin at 4:30 sharp. We’re delighted that The Club offers a full coat check (let’s hope we only need our regular winter coats, and not a bunch of parkas and snow boots and sled dogs and the like!), and a few of our friends will be acting as your charming ushers to help you in from the cold and to your seat, so you’ll want to give yourself enough time to get into the club and get settled before 4:30.
As for the schedule of events, well, we don’t want to ruin all the fun and surprises, but suffice to say we’ll be closing the night with a last dance at 9:30. The speed with which you can get yourself home after that is a measure of both the distance from which you’re coming, and how much fun you’ve had. We’ll leave that calculation up to you!
Getting There
We’re very happy to have found a way to get married right in Brooklyn, so close to home for us and for so many of our guests. Even those of you outside of the city limits will find The Montauk Club easy to get to, with plenty of parking nearby.
The Club is at 25 Eighth Avenue, which is at the northeast corner of Park Slope, next to Grand Army Plaza. For reference (and for creating your own driving directions), use this Google Maps link. Drivers will find most instructions bringing you to the Manhattan Bridge, which spills out onto Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Continue down Flatbush about a mile and a half until you come to the large, one-way traffic circle of Grand Army Plaza and Plaza Street. If you take the first right out of the circle onto Lincoln Place, that grand old building on your right is The Montauk Club.
PARKING: There are several garages surrounding The Montauk Club, and the most convenient is at 906 Union Street (Google Maps link), which is two blocks south of Lincoln Place. The garage is between Plaza Street and Eighth Avenue, on the north side of the street. There’s another parking garage farther down Union, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. You might also notice a garage on Flatbush Avenue as well, shortly before the Plaza, but it’s a bit of a nightmare to get in and out of, due to traffic and one-way streets. (You can also try and park on the street, but in Park Slope, that can be more frustrating than it’s worth!)
SUBWAYS: We’re especially pleased that The Montauk Club is right outside of the working man’s limousine — the subway. Take the 2/3 to Grand Army Plaza and come out of one of the station’s “SE of Flatbush Ave” exits, and you can see the back of The Montauk Club from the top of the stairs. There’s also a B/D station a few blocks farther up Flatbush Avenue, if that’s a better train for you to take.
CAR SERVICES: For those of you disinterested in hoofing it through the subway at evening’s end, we’ll have a set of car service phone numbers for your use near the Club’s coat check. There are also generally plenty of empty cabs speeding up Eighth Avenue to head back into the city at all hours of the day, so you can just go outside and stick out an arm if you’d like!
If you have any questions or specific needs regarding getting to and from the big event, send us a note at botchick@gmail.com, and we’ll do everything we can to make sure you have all the information and tips you need.
The Bride
Your bride, Cheryl, is of Midwestern stock, born in September of 1972 in Cleveland, Ohio. As proof of pedigree, Cheryl’s mother went into labor at the bowling alley while attending the league’s couples night — beat that for Midwestern-ality.
Taken at a glance, Cheryl’s childhood was comprised primarily of kickball, “Laverne & Shirley,” graham crackers with cream cheese and jelly, and an uncanny knack for rolling out of bed and landing on the floor with a leaden thud in the middle of the night. But at roughly the age of 12, she discovered the rock ‘n’ roll branch of pop music, and a very, very big “hobby”
was born.
Years of nerdy, immersive study followed, including a beloved record store job and a stint in college radio, finally leading to a job as a rock critic at an alternative music magazine in New York. In fact, she was headed to the big city not a week after her college commencement in 1994, while Alex was unwittingly finishing his freshman spring semester finals at Columbia University.
Today, Cheryl considers herself to be “in recovery” from the music industry, and has parlayed her skills into a job for Swedish telecom Ericsson in content and multimedia for mobile phones. She also remains committed to all the pre-rock ‘n’ roll childhood interests above, minus the one about falling out of bed while sleeping. And thank goodness for that.
The Groom
Born in the Bronx in November of 1975, Alex is one of those increasingly rare things: A born-and-bred New Yorker. Even better, the Riverdale neighborhood of his youth was a relative stone’s throw from the birth of hip-hop and the 1977-1978 world championship Yankees, though Alex wouldn’t attend any games until the Mattingly era of the early ’80s began.
I like to imagine that in this photo of Alex in his prized Superman t-shirt, he’s dreaming of a day far off in his future when he’d meet a blonde Midwestern girl who would become his blushing bride. But the reality is that he’s probably crafting a new Donkey Kong strategy, or pondering how he would have differently interpreted the movie “E.T.” into a genre-changing Atari game. (The actual game was admittedly really terrible.)
Alex spent a year of high school at Bronx Science before moving to Rockland County with his mom and her then-new husband, Stan. He attended Columbia University for several semesters where he was a member of the vocal group The Kingsmen and a disgruntled chemical engineering major before transferring to Bard College. There he studied music composition and voice — a sample of one or both we may be lucky enough to enjoy at the wedding!
Today, Alex co-owns a mobile media production company, enjoys Call of Duty and Gears of War, skateboards carefully (waiting on the spousal health insurance benefits to kick in!), and puns freely. So for the most part, he’s still the lovable guy in the Superman t-shirt.
Registries: A Complication
When we decided to have our wedding in January, we thought it would be a great change of pace. We could make it wintery and cozy, we’d have 
an easy time getting our pick of vendors, it would give everyone a fun pick-me-up after the holidays. But there was one thing we did not think of: That we’d have to create our gift registries in the midst of the holiday shopping rush. Just try and imagine calmly thinking about good choices and what you really need in the midst of the photo at right. It’s ugly.
But we shall perservere. Return in a week or two, and we promise we’ll have our registry links here if you’d like to refer to them. And hopefully, we’ll come out of it with all of our limbs and our eyeballs and our sanity fully intact.
An Honored Guest
There are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to baby pictures. There are the people who look absolutely nothing like they did as a child (c.f. Alex and Cheryl), and there are people who are basically just stretched out, bigger versions of their toddler selves. Cheryl’s sister, Dorene, is in the latter category.
Dorene gets a very, very special dispensation at our wedding in January, and not just because she created our invitations and this blog and other things, saving us tons of worry and giving us gorgeous materials, but because January 31, 2009, is her 40th birthday. Certainly, this has practical uses: We’ll never forget her birthday, she’ll never forget our anniversary, our parents can kill two birds with one stone each year, etc. But mostly, it’s just a sweet gesture for her to celebrate the day with us in New York. We hope we can make it as fun for her as it is for us.
We’ll let everyone try and pick her out of the guests at The Montauk Club on their own. Bet you can do it, even without asking people to make fish lips.
The Best Man
The Best Man: It’s one of the biggest roles in the wedding. You have to look to your first string. Your solid players. Your go-to’s.
Meet Gregg DeMammos, Alex’s older brother, pictured here with Ring Bearer and son Demetrius. (And a bird, yes, but the bird does not plan to attend the wedding — as far as we know.)
Both born and raised in Riverdale in The Bronx, Alex and Gregg are probably about as different as you can imagine brothers being, but they’ve walked most of their individual paths side-by-side. First, there were video games and hot dogs at Nathan’s in Yonkers (though Alex would also like to give an honorable mention to the pinball machines at The Ground Round). Then Bard College, where Alex studied composition and voice, and Gregg came away with a poly-sci degree and a future wife. And finally, landing where all brothers from The Bronx must eventually meet again: the seats of Yankee Stadium.
This is Gregg’s debut as a Best Man, returning the favor of Alex’s turn as Best Man at his own 2001 wedding to Rosanna (she’s the very pregnant lady you’ll see in January!). We think we’ve got the right guy.
