Leah Garchik

"Worried about Golden Gate Bridge traffic, we took the ferry from San Francisco to the wedding of Lanie Tatoy and Eugene "Dr. Hip" Schoenfeld at the Spinnaker in Sausalito on Friday night. The blissful, sunny glide across the bay was a fitting introduction to the Summer of Love weekend.

Guests gathered on the restaurant's deck, greeting one another like veterans at an American Legion convention. Former San Francisco D.A. Terence Hallinan looked particularly revved up, fresh from a Summer of Love kerfuffle with San Francisco cops. Earlier that afternoon, concert producer Boots Hughston got a call from a friend who works at Kinko's. A customer had ordered a bunch of backstage passes reproduced, and it seemed obvious to the friend that the passes were counterfeit. Hughston was in the middle of building the stage, but he rushed over to Kinko's, grabbed all the fakes and loaded them into his car. When the customer tried to pick them up at Kinko's, he was told Hughston had taken them. The customer called the cops and reported this as theft.

A short time later, officers from the Richmond District station came to the concert site, arrested Hughston and impounded his car. A few phone calls later, Hallinan was called to the rescue. "It was like old times," he said. Forty years after the Summer of Love, the radical lawyer was prying a rocker 'n' roller out of jail so that the music could go on. (Bail bondsman Jerry Barrish, also filled with nostalgia, e-mailed over the weekend that 40 years ago he had to leave the Summer of Love concert to bail out Jerry Rubin, who was scheduled to speak but had been arrested for unpaid traffic tickets. Barrish put up the cash and Rubin made the speech, but Rubin never paid him back.)

Anyway, back to love and the law: Tony Serra, a Universal Life Church minister who recently served a sentence for tax evasion, presided over the vows, which involved a minimal amount of promising. White-haired and wearing a flowing shirt, Serra was nonetheless properly impassioned about a ritual that "commences an endless summer of love for the two of you." The 72-year-old groom was married once, briefly, in his 20s; it was the first wedding for the 25-year-old bride, born in the Philippines and starting a new American life with her new husband. The guests included Warren Hinckle, Herb Gold, Bruce Brugmann, Wavy Gravy (the first time I'd ever seen him without clown shoes), Michael Krasny, writer Robert Altman, Dr. Rock, Lee Houskeeper, Nedra Ruiz, Hallinan, Brendan Hallinan and the septuagenarian groom's 41/2-year-old brother-in-law. At 8:05 p.m., Eric Christensen announced, "The Bay Bridge is closed!" with a fervor that made the message seem equivalent to the mazel tov that follows glass stomping at Jewish weddings.

Considering all these counterculture heroes, the party seemed quite traditional, with a cake on one table, a pile of prettily wrapped gifts nearby and dinner followed by dancing. If "Mellow Yellow" or "Incense and Peppermint" or any of the Summer of Love-ish favorites were played, that was after we left. On Friday night, the decorated heroes of the era sat at tables with pink rose centerpieces and ate a wheat-berry-free dinner while the DJ played "Wind Beneath My Wings."