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Thursday March 13, 2008

When Tracy met Melissa

by stacey palevsky
staff writer

The fairy tale goes something like this: Melissa Boxer and Tracy Zill were at a Safeway in San Francisco. They both needed a mango, but alas, only one remained on the produce shelf.

They reached for the sweet fruit at the same time. Zill looked over at his nemesis only to realize she was actually a beautiful woman. He said she could have the mango if he could have her phone number.

“That’s the story we told for years. The truth is we met on JDate,” Zill said, chuckling.

Melissa Boxer, from Vancouver, and Tracy Zill, from San Francisco, met in October 2005. They took each other’s names when they married Sept. 18 in Jerusalem. We asked the groom to share a bit about his wedding.

Something old: The couple married at the historic King David Hotel. About 50 friends and relatives were present for the ceremony. Because the wedding fell between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Tracy said, “we had to negotiate with the hotel not to put up the sukkah until after our wedding. But it was really gorgeous. You could see the Old City in the background.”

Something new: “I also had my bar mitzvah at the Mt. Zion Hotel the day before we got married … Cantor Rita Glassman at Sherith Israel made a recording for me, and since we arrived a week before the wedding, I stayed up late every night with my little iPod, listening and chanting my Torah portion.”

Something borrowed: “When I got to Israel, I realized I had forgotten my cufflinks, and because we were there during the Days of Awe, everything was shut down, so I couldn’t buy any. I borrowed my brother-in-law Brian’s cufflinks, which he let me keep.”

Something Jew(ish): “The rabbi who performed our ceremony was the same rabbi who performed Melissa and her sister’s bat mitzvahs, and her brother’s. He flew from Vancouver, and conducted my bar mitzvah ceremony and our wedding … We also got married under my prayer shawl. In some congregations you don’t wear a tallis until you’re bar or bat mitzvahed, so since I had just been bar mitzvahed, we got married under it.”

— stacey palevsky

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