A Wedding at the Zoo With NYC Politicians, Holiday Lights, and New Traditions

Where else would Megan Pfeiffer and Myles Miller have their wedding other than New York? It’s where they live and met, and where Miller, who works as an on-air reporter for WNBC-TV locally, was raised. “It holds a lot of importance to me and Myles—being in the city we met in, that we found love in, that we live in, that we call our home and our community,” Pfeiffer says.

The couple considered many venues, but somehow kept coming back to the Bronx Zoo. Miller had visited there regularly with his grandmother when he was growing up in the area and, shortly before their engagement, the couple took Miller’s niece to see the holiday lights there. “It was just the most magical, spectacular thing I’d ever seen,” recalls Pfeiffer, a senior policy analyst at a national criminal justice nonprofit.

The zoo also served as a source of calm for Miller during the pandemic, when he was working long hours covering the crisis unfolding in New York. “During COVID, it was tough. We were out on the streets working every day, and I would come back home and watch The Zoo on Animal Planet.”

Miller loved being able to introduce Pfeiffer’s family to the Bronx. “They got to breathe some of that Bronx air that I’ve breathed my whole life. Megan’s mom and I have a rivalry because she lives in San Diego, and she thinks the San Diego Zoo is the best zoo on earth,” he says. “But I’m from the Bronx, and we have one of the first and best zoos that ever existed. On our wedding night, she got to see how truly amazing the Bronx is.”

Incorporating Jewish traditions into the event was important to Pfeiffer, who is Jewish, and Miller as well. “Probably the most special thing that we did, that we actually learned from friends of ours at their wedding, was taking the seven blessings, which are traditionally recited by a rabbi, and putting our own interpretation on them,” she says. New York Attorney General Letitia James, who officiated the ceremony, took a true interest in understanding the Jewish rituals, which Pfeiffer appreciated. “She was like, ‘I really want to learn more about the breaking of the glass. I think that’s such a beautiful, cool tradition. I just want to learn more about it,’” she recalls.

Miller’s career in journalism began when he was a child. Before graduating high school, he’d reported on politics for the New York Daily News and served as the youngest ever White House correspondent while working for the News Corp. publication The Daily. Through his work, he frequently runs into government officials who remember him from when he was a kid—including James. “We had just gotten engaged maybe a couple of months before, and I just ran into Tish. I’ve known her since I was maybe 12 years old. I got to know all these politicians because they were like, ‘Oh, look, it’s a kid at the press conference. He’s asking all these questions. Who is this guy?’” he says. “I was like, ‘Tish, did you hear? I’m getting married.’ She’s like, ‘Oh my God, do you want an officiate? I can officiate. I love love.’”

Meeting the Parents

The couple wanted to make sure all the members of their families had met prior to the Friday welcome dinner, so on Thursday night, they invited their immediate families to their apartment. “My mom made a ton of food. My dad pitched in with a couple of Jamaican recipes. It’s just weird for the families to meet for the first time at the Friday welcome party,” Miller says. “People walked away thinking, we want to come back to New York and get more of that cooking. My mom threw down.”

The Welcome

The wedding weekend started on Friday, when the couple took guests on a walking tour of downtown Brooklyn that passed by the spot where Miller proposed to Pfeiffer. That night, they threw a party at Brooklyn Crab in Red Hook. Dessert was banana pudding from Magnolia Bakery, which Miller frequently brings home from the Rockefeller Center location when he works out of NBC’s headquarters.

Groom Traditions

Before getting ready, Miller went with two close friends and his soon to be father-in-law, brother-in-law, and stepbrother-in-law to the Brooklyn spot Russo’s, where they had gathered only a few months earlier when Pfeiffer’s brother got married. “Megan’s dad is down-to-earth, and he just views me as another one of his sons. We got the exact same sandwiches we ordered last time; we did whiskey toasts. It was funny. The exact same treatment that her brother had, I had, and we had a ball,” Miller says.

The Dress Quest

Pfeiffer was sure she wanted a lace dress, and during a visit to a bridal salon with her mother and sister, she thought she’d found one. But when she heard Miller mention off-hand that he didn’t love a lace dress they’d seen on TV, she decided to look for something different.

The next day, she went to Carol Hannah’s bridal showroom. Her sister showed her a dress and said, ‘You should try this on. This is the dress I would try on if I was getting married, and I think it would look really pretty on you.’” Pfeiffer loved how simple and elegant the gown was. “When I put the veil on, my mom started crying. She just felt really emotional. It felt really good. It was a little bit different than what I had thought, but it ended up being perfect,” she says.

The Ketubah

Pfeiffer and Miller wanted their ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, to be “an opportunity for us to make commitments to each other about how we’ll show up for each other in marriage and what’s important for us,” Pfeiffer says. They worked to find language that felt egalitarian to them. “We read it before in front of our nearest and dearest, and then signed it. That was really the start of the wedding for us.”

It’s a Zoo

During the vows, guests, among them people Miller had met through work like New York City Council Member Gale A. Brewer and New York City Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, saw peacocks and heard roaring lions. Because the wedding was held a week before the zoo’s holiday display opened, all of the lights were up.

Party Time

“I’ll never forget when we met with our DJ, DJ Khaleel of Dapper DJ Productions, he was like, ‘You guys have a lot of disco on your playlist. Do you guys listen to a lot of disco?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that music gets you on the floor. It was disco at the Bronx Zoo,” Miller says.

The hora combined the two families’ traditions in a special way. The hip-hop dancing that Miller’s family does even has ties to Israeli folk dance. “The hora is this very traditional Jewish dance, and yet it was so beautiful to see all of our loved ones getting down to it,” Pfeiffer says.

Cake Wars

The zoo’s preferred bakery is Conti’s Pastry Shoppe in the Bronx, which happened to be right near Miller’s childhood neighborhood. “It was just so funny, like, oh my God, all these things keep coming together,” he says.

The couple was split over whether to have carrot cake or red velvet cake. “We were like, okay, let’s just flip a coin over it. Then at one point, I was talking with our planner about it, and she was like, well, why don’t you just ask if they can do both? And I was like, oh, that’s a really good point,” Pfeiffer recalls. Spoiler alert: They were able to have both. “It was almost a lesson that sometimes you don’t have to pick one thing over the other—you can have both. I just love that.”