| Dechen
Wangdu
If you have ever threatened your
significant other with the notion of having the Beastie
Boys perform at your wedding reception, you will be interested
to know that in 1998 Lars Frederiksen (of the band Rancid)
asked Adam Yauch to play at
his. Had it not been for the fact that the Beastie Boys
were still in the studio putting the finishing touches on
Hello
Nasty, they probably would have. After all, Rancid
played at the Dechen Wangdu-Adam Yauch wedding which took
place on May 31st, 1998. In the August 6th,
1998 issue of Rolling Stone Yauch is quoted as having
said, "What the Clash are to me, Rancid are to Dechen."
So in addition to the traditional bride's gift, Adam gave
the gift of music in a major way, convincing two of the
guys in Rancid to put on a special nuptial performance.
It should be mentioned though that pre-wedding traditions
which were performed prior to the big occasion where also
very special.
Rolling Stone writer Joe Levy
described it in detail in his multi-page feature on the
Beastie Boys. "In a traditional Tibetan wedding ceremony,
representatives of the groom travel to the bride's family's
house with a symbol of the groom's protection, an arrow
called a da dar. After a ceremony at the bride's
family's house, they escort her back to the groom's parent's
house for a service welcoming her to the new family. In
Tibet, such trips from village to village can take up to
three weeks on horseback-there are mountains to cross -
and are followed by parties that can last three days. In
Yauch and Wangdu's case, two childhood friends of Yauch's,
Matthew and Anabella, went by car with the da dar
from his parent's house in Brooklyn Heights to her parent's
house on the Upper East Side. After making offerings to
her parents, they drove back to Brooklyn, where Yauch's
father made a speech welcoming her to the family. They crossed
no mountains, but they did cross the Brooklyn Bridge."
It was back in 1995 that Adam and
Dechen first met in Boston, MA; both were attending a speech
by the Dalai Lama on the campus
of Harvard University. Yauch was there to present Milarepa's
initial donation to the Harvard chapter of Students for
a Free Tibet. As fate would have it, Wangdu was the representative
for Students for a Free Tibet. Then a while later the two
bumped into each other again in Chicago, IL at a Students
for a Free Tibet conference. It was during this time that
Yauch was contemplating becoming a monk, as was quoted in
that same issue of Rolling Stone. "I was debating
between the idea of being a celibate and becoming a monk
or actually having family...So, during that time, I was
deciding whether or not I wanted to try being in a serious
relationship or just stay on my own. And at that point Dechen
and I started spending some time together and hanging out,
it just felt like it would be great to have a family. That
would be the right thing to do."
By profession Dechen works in the
publishing industry; in the past she has been involved with
Glamour magazine and also has been credited for her
work on the Tibetan Freedom Concert magazines. Currently
one can assume that Dechen and Adam are keeping busy as
parents raising their daughter Tenzin
Yosel Yauch. It is probably also safe to assume that
they are giving parenting advice and tips to fellow Beastie
Boys band member Michael Diamond
and his wife Tamra Davis,
who recently had a child of their own.
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