In New Orleans this weekend I had the honor to "give away the bride" at the wedding of Dawn de Deaux and Robert Yarber. They were girlfriend-boyfriend fifty-two years ago, but they broke up. Now at last they have come to their senses.

Dawn's art comes to senses, and sense, like a house afire. She’s responded to the hurricane Katrina, the BP Deepwater oil spill, and the general apocalyptical reality of people and the Earth breaking up and maybe making up. You behold an installation by Dawn and you go . . . damn. The intact front porches of houses otherwise destroyed by flood and fire. A ball and chain -- a wrecking ball and a towchain -- suspended from the ceiling, surrounded by precariously tipping columns. Charred sticks and rusted metal hanging like fruit. And a found postcard from the Louvre bearing a waterlogged reproduction of (hello Leonardo) Mona Lisa. Dawn has done digital drawings on brass, and she has projected movies onto exterior walls of big buildings, and she has set a table with dinner-bowls of dirt from all over the world, and she has installed CB radios in former phone booths in very different neighborhoods so random people could gab with one another all over the so-called Big Easy. And a video project titled “The Face of God, in Search of.”

Furthermore she was the only woman driver in the 1975 Demolition Derby, in the SuperDome. And she won!

The bride was radiant, in cowboy hat and veil, and the groom (from Texas) wasn’t bad himself. I like to think the wedding present from my wife Joan and me was appropriate: a big chunk of asphalt with the remains of a stripe on it from what little is left of a highway in disappearing Lower Louisiana.

Only two regrets: the preacher didn't ask me "Who gives this woman . . . ?” So I didn't get to say, "the Earth." (“Mother Earth and I” would have been presumptuous.) And I didn't get to read this poem I wrote for the occasion, called "Aubade". So here it is:

Here's to Dawn!

No more multifold artist has ever been bawn!

"But how about, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci," you say —

"The Last Supper! Plus the parachute!" Yeah, okay,

But Dawn is more than an artist, she's also a mensch--

Who knows if the same can be said for Leo da Vinch.

Did he ever win a Demolition Derby? (a.k.a. Darby)

And then whip off his hat to reveal: Demolition Barbie!?

Yes, he got Mona Lisa's smile just right -- duly noted.

But who spit in the eye of a hurricane? Dawn de Deaux did.

In her Mona Lisa and the parachute are one.

And here’s something else she did Leonardo never done:

Married, retrospectively, her true heart throb.

Here's to Bob!