Gondola Getaway Is Romantic, Authentic--and Freeway Close

The bride and bridegroom, game but giddy, are something less than steady on their feet.

The minister, sensing imminent debacle, instinctively hurries his words. He makes it by six yards.

” . . . Husband and wife,” the minister says with sufficient body English to throw an oncoming sail-surfer completely off kilter.

Goggle-eyed, the surfer goes down in a many-splendored tangle of striped sail and dotted swim trunks. His last known words are “ Mazel tov! “

Thus, Marjolign van der Veen of Holland and Edward Keyzer, by way of Indonesia, are united in holy matrimony:

--In the middle of Alamitos Bay, Calif.;

--In a ceremony performed by Paul Joseph Harries, an Australian with a $3 ordination in the American Fellowship Church;

--Aboard a Venetian gondola.

“Perfect,” says Pauline Hobiera, the bride’s sister, popping a Champagne cork high into the stiff breeze. “Now that’s the way to get married.”

“You name it, we’ll row it,” says Mike O’Toole, 27, founder and co-owner of the Gondola Getaway, operating in and around the canals of the cluster of Long Beach islands known as Naples.

“Weddings? Sure. And engagements, anniversaries, parties, proposals. . . . We’ll row it and you’ll love it.”

“ We love it, that’s for sure,” says co-owner David Black, also 27. “Sure, it’s a business, but for us it’s more a life style, a romance .”

From a one-boat putt-putt operation five years ago--formerly a crumbling garden planter, if the truth were known--Gondola Getaway has grown to a sleek and sassy fleet of five: four 25-foot Venetian gondolas and a 32-foot “caorlina.” Each of the smaller boats is powered by a home-grown, sun-streaked gondolier attired in traditional striped shirt, beribboned boater, red-and-gold sash, spontaneous smile. The boat is perfect for a couple, though up to four more interlopers can easily be accommodated.

The caorlina holds up to 16 and is rowed by two boatmen, fore and aft.

Bottom line is $17 per person per hour on the big boat; $40 per couple per hour on the gondolas--$10 extra per intruder.

The fleet operates from sunrise (“A beautiful time,” O’Toole says; “mist rising, birds calling . . . “) to midnight, every day of the year, and the price includes a basket of bread, cheese and salami. Potables and passion are supplied by the client, at his own risk. Gondola Getaway throws in an ice bucket but does not guarantee sentiment. It doesn’t have to.

“There’s just something about a gondola cruise,” Black says. “It’s a throwback to the days of chivalry, to the time when a man would throw his cape over a puddle for his lady to walk on.

“How many (marriage) proposals have we had? Actually, I lost count at 300. Maybe we ought to put up a sign: ‘2 Billion Served.’ We’ve had some wild ones, though.

“I remember this couple from Texas. He’d hired a biplane to fly over at 150 feet. Just when we’d rowed them to the middle of the bay, this banner pops out: ‘Will You Please Be Mine?’ She lets out a scream you could hear to Seal Beach.

“Hey, I choked up myself. We got phone calls all night: ‘Did she do it? Did she do it?’ She did.”

“Wild,” O’Toole says. “There aren’t too many jobs where you’re privy to a proposal. Sure, we know it’s coming: The guy’s a little nervous and he calls ahead to make certain everything’s going to be set up just right.

“Out in the canals, where it’s real quiet, the gondolier sees the guy all antsy and twitchy and he knows . He’s saying under his breath, ‘C’mon, man, you can do it!’ ”

The Rivo Alto Canal, which whispers around Little Naples Island for a mile or so, is the place to do it, especially after sunset.

The prow of the gondola slices noiselessly, hypnotically through water as smooth as polished black marble. The boat glides under bridges, past handsome houses and moored yachts and along lanes illuminated by the soft tangerine glow of Naples’ street lights.

As a rule, the gondoliers don’t sing (“For $5 an hour plus tips you want Pavarotti?” one unrepentant rower asks), but taped music is played on request. “Italian opera,” a gondolier promises, then pops in a Mozart concerto.

Va bene . The effect, echoing softly off the canal walls, is nothing short of enchanting, a palpably sensuous setting in which crotchety old married men have been known to hold hands--with their wives .

In such intimate interludes, the gondolier will keep his counsel. If asked, though, he’ll point out the old Hershey Hotel, the “haunted house,” the place where the old duck-hunting lodge used to be. (A good part of Naples once was bog land, underwater at high tide, before developers began to dredge at the turn of the century.)

Too soon, the gondola is back in the bay for the return trip, passing outward-bound sister ships. Most gondoliers and passengers exchange a simple “Hi,” though one young man, caught up in the spirit of the moment, shouts, “What news on the Rialto?”--a magic moment somewhat diminished by the reply: “Damned if I know.”

“It’s not difficult to row,” a gondolier says. “When you get into the bay, against the sea wind, it can be tricky, but all in all, it’s nice work. Beats the car wash.”

“Sure, it takes a little work,” O’Toole says, “but it’s not hard .

“In the old days, it wasn’t hard at all. We had electric motors. What did we know?”

In the beginning, the whole concept was simply a paper project for a marketing class O’Toole was taking at USC. “As soon as I graduated, though, I said, ‘Why not?’

“There was this dilapidated replica of a gondola, easily 50 years old, in the Hershey Hotel garden. It was the last survivor from the days when prospective land buyers used to come down in the red cars and take a tour of home sites by gondola, a good PR idea.

“The boat, an 18-footer, was being used as a planter, a rose garden. I hauled it to my dad’s front yard (both O’Toole and Black are Naples natives) and went to work. We ended up having to cover it with structural adhesive just to get the thing to float.”

“I came on in 1983,” says Black, who dropped out of Cal State Long Beach to lend a hand. “Business was good, so we added an old lifeguard dory.”

“We didn’t really know what we were doing,” O’Toole says. “All we had was a cartoon picture of a gondola. We just built on a three-foot section, shaped like a gondola. We hoped. That was our fleet: a planter and a dory.

“We ran the boats off a 20-foot dock half under water. Here were these people all dressed up and we literally had to run down and push them into the boat between swells.”

Business was good, though, good enough to get a $10,000 loan to build a third boat, then a fourth. . . . By then, the partners were hooked, seduced by authenticity.

“The more we studied,” O’Toole says, “the more we regressed toward the original gondolas.” O’Toole traveled to Italy to bone up. “I went to the Venice shipyards and found how they were built, their history, why they stand up to row the way they do. We regressed 1,000 years and found that the boats never changed because they were perfect the way they were.”

The motors, of course, had to go. “We knew it was wrong, but on paper, you don’t believe you can take a 2,000-pound boat with six people in it and row the thing for hours and hours. Not unless you hire some gigantic apes for gondoliers.

“Still, we converted one boat to oars and stuck it in the water. We were scared to death. Turned out we had 100% more control. With the motors, the prop would break or the battery would run down and you’d start praying to God you’d make it to the dock. With people power, we know the boats are going to come back.”

“Besides,” Black says, “it’s a lot more romantic this way. And the Naples residents like it better too.”

“We never could have done this without the support and respect of the residents,” O’Toole says. “It’s their houses we’re going by, after all. But they’ve been great.

“Not too long ago, I’m rowing a wedding party in the caorlina and they ran out of wine. A guy watching us go by hollers, ‘Wait a minute!’ He runs to his house and returns with a couple of his best bottles. . . .

“It’s old money on the islands. Nobody’s terribly uptight.”

“We’re not competing,” says longtime canalside resident Omer Neilson, “we’re enjoying each other, and the outdoor life style, and sure, the gondolas too. It’s instant tradition.”

The homes lining the canal are expensive these days--not including the requisite yachts outside, some even smaller than the Queen Mary.

Houses are unique, distinctive--Moroccan, Tudor, Coast o’ Maine, glass-and-mahogany--with something special setting each one off: a wistful, fey, turn-of-the century mannequin in a picture window; a full-scale miniature railway, complete with working waterfall, on a patio; an old cannon on a front stoop (“to repel room-and-boarders,” says a landlord).

The front lawns are small enough to water from a chaise longue (one old-timer in a baseball cap is doing just that), but large enough to accommodate what seems to be a permanent round-robin cocktail party.

“The canal is our common front yard,” says resident Mike Schulman. “You don’t come here to be private, so naturally the gondolas don’t bother us. On the contrary.”

“I love the music,” Judy Bernstein says. “They have one gondolier (Brian Boos, a CSLB opera student) who sings, and even if I’m in the bathroom, I run out to listen.”

“We try to keep the noise down,” O’Toole says. “No hokey spiels, no megaphone. It’s not some Disney ride where the hippos are wiggling their ears. . . . “

“They don’t give you a spiel in Venice,” Black adds, “and we’re getting closer to the source every year--even to the point of competing in the annual gondola race in Venice.”

“That was something!” O’Toole says. “We trained here in our caorlina and took a six-man crew over last year. At first we were slipping and sliding all over the Grand Canal. On the day of the race, though, we really put our backs into it--and won our division!”

“Great training,” Black says. “Now we’re adept enough to choreograph a wedding involving the whole fleet: white boat for the bride, black for the bridegroom. . . .”

O’Toole in the stern and Ted Olmstead in the bow propel the caorlina through the canal single-handedly, the other hand wrapped around a glass of the Keyzers’ Champagne.

The former Marjolign van de Veen, a card-carrying Keyzer now, waves her bridal bouquet to the good burghers of Naples, who’ve come out to hail the wedding boat.

“Great idea!” Marjolign says. “Married in a California gondola!”

“A toast,” the bridegroom says: “For richer or for poorer; for wetter or for dryer.”

“Hey!” a blonde yells from a passing dinghy, conferring the ultimate California benediction: “Have a nice day!”