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looked almost like a cathedral. Sixteen Egyptian palm trees were lined up on either side of the enormous glass cavern; the trees rose up so high that the tops of their forty-foot fronds touched the glass ceiling, and on a good day the sunlight came streaming through a thousand windows like the Second Coming of Jesus.
    In the Viola-DellaCruz video, twenty-five or thirty people are milling around in the open area at the foot of the marble stairway. Most of the guests are either holding plastic champagne flutes or chowing down on mini-quiches. Because it is a Saturday morning and this is more or less a public space, there are a few businessmen and weekend shoppers who are passing through the scene. A jogger comes and goes on his way to Battery Park. A few stray Japanese tourists in candy-colored clothes and sensible sport shoes wander into the scene; they stand there wearing expressions that seem to say,
Hello. We are aliens. We have just arrived from outer space. What is this place?
    At a certain point, the camera pans upward to find Sandy, the future Mrs. DellaCruz, standing at the top of the marble staircase. She looks like a plastic figurine on top of a wedding cake, but instead of a groom beside her, it’s her father, Mr. Viola, and instead of a big white, puffy wedding gown, she’s wearing an off-white dress with matching shoes. Even from a distance, you can see the flash of her smile. Mr. Viola is also giving off a lot of shine, because the slick of his hair is catching the light. I bet Doug had to adjust the settings to cut the flare. You can tell just by looking at Mr. Viola that the guy is totally in the moment. He’s beaming up there at the top of the stairs, just plain happy to have lived long enough to see this day, glad to be able to give his daughter away to the man she loves.
    Down below, there’s some confusion as to whether the maid of honor, a middle-aged woman in a floral-print dress,is supposed to accompany the bride and Mr. Viola down the steps. The maid of honor runs halfway up the marble stairs and asks the bride for instruction, but she’s told to go back down. It’s pretty clear that none of them knows what the hell they’re doing.
    A recording of classical music is broadcast over the PA system, and that’s the signal for Sandy to take hold of her father’s arm and begin their descent. But suddenly, instead of following them down the stairs, the camera moves slightly upward and to the right, where a woman is walking the perimeter of the terrace. She has long dark hair, which she quickly arranges, only to have it resettle into a mess. She’s wearing a pair of loose-fitting eggplant-colored pants, a matching parka, and a flowing blue silk scarf. Even though the camera zooms in, she’s a little too far away to make out the features of her face. She is leading a five-year-old boy by the hand; she’s practically dragging him along as though they’re late for something. But the boy is not in a hurry; all he cares about is the small, red collapsible umbrella he’s twirling with his other hand.
    The woman stops and looks at the wedding party down below. She’s seen it a million times before. Looking around the cavernous glass palace, she spots the camera, smiles brightly, fusses with her hair again, waves. Then she tries to interest the little boy.
Look, look
, she seems to be saying. She points toward the camera and coaxes him to wave his non-umbrella-holding hand. But he’s committed to his project, mesmerized by thetwirl of collapsible red. The woman shrugs and smiles at the camera, waves once more.
    When we find Sandy and her dad again, they’re almost down at the bottom of the stairs. You can tell that Sandy’s brimming with emotion. She has no idea that the biggest moment of her life has just been upstaged. Later, when Doug presents Sandy DellaCruz (formerly Viola) with the final edit of her wedding day, there’ll be no trace of the woman and the boy. The moment will have been edited out