The wedding is three days away, and for at least a month we haven't heard from the guys who are baking the cake. They do know we have to have it on Saturday, don' t they? And we have to book a limousine for the tenor who's going to sing during the service. Now he tells me. We're not even married, and already we're on the verge of bankruptcy.
Last April in the University Chapel, I managed to get "weddinged" without having a nervous breakdown or a table-pounding, plate-throwing argument with my wife-to-be, my in-laws-to-be, the chef, the liquor store, the bandleader, or anybody else.
Getting "weddinged" is different from getting married. Getting weddinged refers to putting on a spectacle-"the pageant," I came to call it. We even had what I referred to as the "shooting script," which I typed up so everyone would know what they were supposed to say or do during the service. After all, this pageant had a cast of, well, not thousands, merely five ushers (including Al Hurley '76, José Pincay-Delgado '77 and Eben Price '76), three bridesmaids, a best man (Tom Baker '76), a maid of honor, a flower bearer, a minister (the Reverend Sue Anne Steffey Morrow, who is also an associate dean of religious life), a rabbi (Rabbi Shimon Berris), two Old Testament readers, two New Testament readers (who doubled as ushers), nine singers (one of whom was also an usher and a New Testament reader), a pianist, an organist, a cellist, a violinist, and two photographers. Plus a bride (Jane, a cardiologist) and a groom (me).
The shooting script contained the Bible readings, the exact wording of vows we were to recite, and the verses of the hymn the congregation was to sing. It was 12 pages long. Morrow said maybe we should make some cuts.
The shop that's making the bridesmaids' dresses says they won't be ready until 48 hours after the wedding unless we pay a "rush fee"-$20 a dress. The piano in the Chapel needs to be tuned. We need somebody to run the sound system so the congregation can hear the minister and the rabbi.
She wanted every last detail to be just so. I wanted every last detail to be just so. We even agreed on what "just so" should be. So?
Now I know what goes through a Hollywood director's mind when he sees the rushes and realizes that no one understands what he had in mind. He can yell at the set designer or the costume designer or the cinematographer, then turn on the cameras and yell 'Action!' one more time.
But a wedding is a one-performance-only show, with a budget a fraction of a Hollywood extravaganza's and a supporting cast too numerous to name (but in the great Academy Awards tradition, here goes): chef Gary Flora and the staff at Prospect House, led by Linda Geren (who tantalized us with a three-star tasting three weeks in advance and, on the big day, did even better), the seamstress (who finished early whatever it was that she did to the dress-I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was not to know), the musicians, the limousine service (which took us to the airport after the pageant), the Nassau Inn (where the out-of-town guests stayed), etc., etc. And Kenneth Grayson, the university's veteran sound engineer, produced a first-class audio recording that captured everything, including some amusing moments that we didn't discover until after the honeymoon, when we played back the tape.
Morrow uses a football-referee microphone-it lets her be heard away from the pulpit, but she had warned us that she sometimes forgets to turn it off. Which is exactly what happened when one of the bridesmaids arrived at the altar in tears. I swear I didn't hear this-all I remember is the ushers and I fumbling in our pockets for a handkerchief-but on the tape, Morrow is loud and clear: "Wiggle your toes! Wiggle your toes! That will stop it!"
But back to the planning phase. I started keeping notes on legal pads in manila folders headed "wedding." First there was one folder, then two, then three. Before we knew it, we were drowning in details. Morrow had warned us not to let that happen. We could have handed them off to a wedding consultant, but that would have been the easy way out. It was important that we handled a lot of the details ourselves; pageant planning is a survival test not unlike the refrain from "New York, New York": if we could make it through this, we could make it through anything.
Somehow, we did adopt a more laid-back management style. You can go over the seating chart for the reception only so many times before your eyes glaze over. If people don't sit in their assigned seats, we thought, we can't stop them from cruising the room and sitting at what they think is a more interesting table. (One of Jane's cousins from Paris actually did this. Someone from his assigned table tracked him down. Jane and I take absolutely no responsibility for the trans-Atlantic romance that followed.)
I reverted to Type-A control freak only once. About 10 minutes before the ceremony began, the organist, Jeffrey Workman, started playing "Air on the G String," by Bach. I don't like that piece even when it's played on a violin, which is what I assume Bach wrote it for. If he had meant it to be played on the organ, it would be known as "Air for the G Pipe," wouldn't it?
It was my fault that Workman played it. We had been 20 minutes late to the rehearsal the night before, and I had told him to have some time killers standing by, just in case. So there he was, throwing in the musical equivalent of Hamburger Helper on orders from me. And there I was, on the opposite side of the Chapel, wanting to yell, "Cut!"
How do we tell the guests no rice or confetti? Some of them have been saving the stuff since the wedding of Princess Di. We're going to have to break the news that they're under Chapel orders not to throw it, not to hand it to us in a sealed envelope, not to bring it at all.
Months ago, when I booked the reception, Prospect told me the dining room could hold 140 people. This is written down in one of my manila folders. There were 170 names on our original guest list. This, too, is written down in a folder. We pruned the guest list and mailed invitations for 148.
I am a newspaper reporter, and the same week I made the Prospect reservations, I interviewed the son of the reputed mob leader Joe Bonanno, who said he had sent out about the same number of invitations to his father's 90th-birthday party. Salvatore (Bill) Bonanno was annoyed at the 97 percent acceptance rate-he had to move the party to a bigger room.
My wife-to-be and I figured that only 80 percent of our RSVPs would come back marked yes. We beat the Bonannos by one percentage point, maybe two. Then Prospect told me the dining room can hold up to 400. So we called the printer and ordered 30 more invitations.
The band I lined up has no record of the booking, and another party has reserved it for that day. The wedding is three weeks away, and we won't have anything to dance to. Saved: I call a friend, who calls a friend who lines up an even better band.
Jane dealt with the florist. The first time, she took along a friend who is an interior designer. The florist talked them into renting chairs for the reception, even though the room in Prospect had chairs that were perfectly comfortable the last time I sat in them 20 years ago as an undergraduate.
When it came to the arrangements for each table, the florist named a figure. My fiancée named a figure that was $1,500 less. They shook hands.
The morning of the wedding, the florist told her that the three extra tables-by now our guest list had swelled to 170-would cost $1,500.
Now it's two hours away and we can't even make the simplest decisions. Should we get dressed in the Nassau Inn and walk to the Chapel? Is there a room in the Chapel that we can use? (No, but there is in Prospect.) Did they tune the piano? (Yes.)
Tom Baker, my best man, said that in all his experience (including, I assume, the time that I was his best man), the hour before the ceremony was the most tension-free he had ever seen. What broke the tension in that final hour, as well as in the final few days before the wedding, was a song that we decided to throw into the middle of the service. It was "I Am the Rose of Sharon," by the Colonial-American composer William Billings, whose best-known work was "Chester," the "Over There" of the American Revolution. I remembered "I Am the Rose of Sharon" from a record album I bought at the U-Store and played on WPRB. I even used another Billings song from the album as a station break. But I did not realize until I was working on the shooting script that Billings had taken the words straight from the Bible. So into our service it went.
We rounded up eight or nine friends who are singers. I was the rehearsal pianist, which didn't do them much good but kept us from worrying about everything else. We had something bigger to worry about: they had never performed together, and one of the tenors kept telling me they could not possibly master "I Am the Rose of Sharon" in time for the wedding.
So now we're in separate rooms. I don't know what's going on in the bride's, but my cuff links, a present from her that I've never worn, are about a millimeter bigger than the hole in my shirtsleeve. This is why they have best men. But it's slowing down our real job. Can the ushers finish folding the programs before the guests arrive?
The last piece before the processionals was a chorale prelude by Bach, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" ("Awake, the voice commands"). We thought it appropriate because Workman, the organist, said the original chorale text has a line about not keeping the bridegroom waiting.
This bride didn't. In fact, she was at the back door of the Chapel, ready to march down the aisle, before the voice could command anything (Workman was still on the piece before "Wachet auf"). I was in a little room at the front of the Chapel, waiting for the processionals that were supposed to follow "Wachet auf.''
Morrow suggested cutting "Wachet auf" altogether. I said we had to leave it in. She raced down the side aisle to confer with the bride. Jane was worried that I had changed my tune to Fred and Ginger's "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." But no. Jane made a command decision: stick to the script, "Wachet auf" and all. Which is, of course, why I married her.
James Barron is a reporter for The New York Times and secretary of the Class of 1977. This article is adapted from one that originally appeared in the Times. Copyright © 1996 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.