Reasons To Change Your Wedding Date

Save The Date

"I have my Save The Date for you!" I told Kelly Hutchinson excitedly during a break at our Paradise Lost rehearsal two weeks ago.

"I need to talk to you about that," she responded.

These were not welcomed words.

The long-of-the-short of it:  Kelly had been cast in The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen at BAM starring John Turturro.  It's the kind of job I might've missed my wedding for.

BAM, best friend stealer.

On Saturday, May 25th, the day I was supposed to get married, she had a matinee and evening show.  The next day, May 26th, she had a matinee show.  So even if I moved the wedding one day, the most of Kelly I'd have is showing up at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, in Waterford, CT, our venue, at 8PM.

I can't change my wedding so that one person could make it for the last few drunken hours.  That's crazy.  I didn't even know if the venue was available, let alone The Old Lyme Inn, that cute WASPy establishment we had booked for two nights for the families to stay in.  And what about the caterer, Scoozi Events?  They were putting together this ridiculous seven-course meal that my heart was set on as a favor for Rafael, who'd used them for some of his big fancy functions in the past.  

So, Kelly wouldn't be able to make it to my wedding.  With sadness in my heart, I mailed out the beautiful Save The Dates that +Eric Sutton had designed.

Emotional S&M

Kelly as Olga, the eldest Romanov Duchess in OTMA, by Kate Moira Ryan.

A little cloud hung over me as I deliberated what to do.  Decisions are usually easy for me to make, so the emotionally S&M part of my personality relishes a conundrum, and this was certainly that.  I figured at some point I would get used to the idea that Kelly, to whom I introduced myself during the intermission of her middle school performance of ANNIE (she was in 8th grade, playing Mrs. Hannigan; I was a freshman in high school, scouting the talent at the other middle school in town, the one I hadn't attended) wouldn't be there when I tied the knot.

There are certainly greater tragedies in the world, like having your brand new bicycle stolen ten days after  your fiance gave it to you even though you locked it up nice and tight with the allegedly unbreakable, unpickable lock you spent a fortune on. (I try to find generosity in my heart for the bicycle thief.  I do.  I imagine some poor, destitute, brilliant young person who stole to pay for their education or food.  But it doesn't work.   I hope something terrible happens to that person, like having to live in an alternate universe where Romney won).

A few days went by, and I talked myself into believe that even to have contemplated moving the wedding date was crazy.  I was explaining this to a friend (okay - it was in therapy, but I've learned it's better to say "to a friend" because it makes people less uncomfortable), when I realized it wouldn't be so hard at all.

Kelly as Masha in my production of THE SEAGULL

I Am A Theater Person

I am a theater person, after all.  I'm adapting Paradise Lost for the stage with twenty actors.  I've cooked dinner every night for a week for a colony of seventy-five people at glorious Lake Lucille while they were rehearsing a mult-media, site-specific, deconstructed version of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull.  I have supported myself in New York City for 15 years.  How hard could moving a wedding be? 

I called the O'Neill.  They could do the new date.
I called the Inn.  They could do the new date.
I called the caterer.  They could do the new date.

I called my mom.  She told me that I shouldn't do it, because "something told her" I shouldn't.  And to cite evidence of the truth of her feelings, she offered the example of my sister's wedding.  My sister decided to get married on a Saturday, and my mother intuited that Sunday would've been better for her.  My sister did not change her wedding day based on my mother's hunch.  That Saturday when my sister got married was overcast.  The Sunday was beautiful.  Did I need more proof?

I wrote the email.  I compiled my guests' email addresses.  I remembered to ask Rafael what he thought.  He gave me permission, in the even and calm way he does most things, bless his beautiful heart.  Then I called Kelly to make sure she was free the evening of Sunday, May 26th.  And then I sent out the email.

It Takes 45 Minutes To Change Your Wedding Day.

Of course, the venue of the inn or the caterer might not have been available on the new day, and then, honestly, I don't know what I would've done.  But as much as the wedding machine wants to make you feel like the only way to have a good wedding is to spend more money than you have, or that you need to book everything at least in a year in advance, all of that is poppycock.  Poppycock, I say!  You get to make the wedding you want for yourself.  Rafael and I decided to have the dancing between the ceremony and the reception because the O'Neill has a little pub with a piano where we wanted to go after the reception and sing show tunes.

Some vendors have visibly blanched, like almonds, when I tell them the dancing is going to happen before the reception.  Gays getting married is fine, apparently, but violating the sequence of events is heresy.

Kelly as Prodigy in SAVE THE WORLD, a superhero adventure play I directed, by Chris Kipiniak.

The only wedding book I purchased, A Practical Wedding by Meg Keene (check out her great wedding blog here), is wonderful at debunking all of these myths.  In many intelligent, researched, wonderful ways, each section has the same message: just because something is often done doesn't mean you have to do it. 

Kelly Hutchinson was the first person I came out to.  I was the best person at her wedding.  I think the longest we have gone without speaking is a few weeks when she was studying at BADA in the summer of 1997.  When she was just an actress and I was just a director we worked together all the time.  Now that we're both writers, we read, critique and re-read each other's stuff.  She knew me when I was in high school, and I have never regretted following her advice.

 Moving my wedding so that Kelly Hutchinson could make it by the fifth course, then join us for show tunes at Blue Gene's pub and brunch the next morning was worth it to me.  And if the weather's terrible, my mother will get to say, "I told you so."

Eric Sutton was kind enough to whip 2.0 version up, so that I could attach it to the CHANGE THE DATE email I sent out.

7 Years of Missing Wendy

"I like him.  He knows when to laugh."

These were the first words Wendy Wasserstein ever spoke to me.  Or rather, about me, I should say.  We had just finished the first day of a week-long workshop of her play Old Money at Lincoln Center in May of 2000, in preparation for the upcoming production that would go into rehearsals in October of the same year.  The ever-kind Mark Brokaw had asked me to assist him on the production, and invited me to sit in on the workshop, and at the end of the first day, after the actors left and I lingered, hoping I'd be allowed to stay and hear how Wendy and Mark talked about what they'd learn from having heard the play, Wendy gestured to me and said those words.  "I like him," she giggled, in that endearing way that made you feel included.  "He knows when to laugh."

The First Laugh

Knowing when to laugh was a matter of great import to Wendy.  When I worked for her over the course of the next few years, the first first laugh was something she'd talk about.  For her, the first laugh was to a comedy what the first song was to a musical - if it didn't come early enough and wasn't pitch-perfect, you'd lose the chance to introduce your audience to the piece.

After Old Money opened, Wendy asked me to type for her.  I was her amanuensis, I guess, although I only learned that word recently, in the context of Milton, who was blind when he "wrote" Paradise Lost.  The poem was transcribed by his daughters, to whom he recited it in its entirety.  I imagine them furiously scribbling down his lines of perfect iambic pentameter, secretly bemoaning their cruel lot in life to each other later.  "If only we weren't the daughters of a brilliant blind poet," Anne Milton, the elder, would complain to Mary, the younger.  "We could go out on Saturday nights like the rest of the Puritan girls.  But instead we're stuck home scribbling away.  And don't even get me started on my ink-stained fingers.  Who's ever going to want to slip a ring on one of these?"

The one on the left looks especially bored to me - she's totally thinking "Dad's blind, so he can't see me rolling my eyes at him." Milton also had a third daughter, standing in the back, but she's rarely mentioned so she must've been boring.

A Life In The Theater

I'm not sure exactly what I'd be doing today if I hadn't met Wendy.  Unlike many of my peers, I live on the money I make directing and writing.  In my twenties, when the income I made from directing was the meagerest of trickles, working for Wendy was the only way I could afford to pay my rent and buy my groceries and go out dancing.  In addition, my first professional directing job was at Theater J in Washington, D.C. - two one-acts Wendy had written and given to the little theater to produce if and only if I got to direct them.  The first was called Welcome To My Rash, a piece that's almost unbearably painful for me to look at now, about a sick, middle-aged writer struggling with her illness and loneliness.  The second was a one-act version of Third, which would grow up and become Wendy's last full-length play.

I am not resilient the way many of my friends are, and I think working a day-job would've broken me.  But I didn't need a day-job, because I had Wendy.  When I would kvetch to her about how unfair it was that young directors with trust funds could stay in New York and assist for free while I had to go gallivanting around the country directing at colleges, she would tell me that she was my trust fund, and I would remember how lucky I was to be able to support myself in a job that paid well, didn't require early mornings, and allowed me to learn about my field.

Writing

Up until and including the time that I worked for Wendy, I never wanted to write.  I know this, because I didn't write anything, and I'm someone who believes that people do what they want to do.  I haven't actually parsed through the cause-and-effect of losing Wendy and starting to write.  Was it something that would've happened if she hadn't passed away, because my proximity to her inspired it, like the Fantastic Four, who developed their superpowers after being exposed to cosmic rays (not to be confused, of course, with the gamma rays that turned Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk)?

One of the first things I ever wrote was a play about a young director and the established writer he works for, titled WORK.  I've been hacking away at it for years (click here to go to my website and download the sample).  I have no idea if the play will ever have any life, but I know that writing it helped me tremendously as I struggled with Wendy's loss the ache of missing her.  So maybe losing Wendy was the cause, and writing the effect.  I am positive that I'd never have had the fortitude to write my young adult novel, ONE MAN GUY, if it hadn't been for the years I spent at Wendy's side.

Or sometimes I think, Wendy died so young, and with so many things she still wanted to write, that I started writing to try to fill the void her absence created.  Chekhov, after all, wrote hundreds of short stories and 5 brilliant plays before he died at the age of 44.  Sometimes, when I want to depress myself, I think about all the work he would've made if he had lived to be 50, or 60 or 70.  It's enough reason for everyone to pick up a pen and start writing their version of funny, sad, heart-breaking characters on a Russian estate.

Closer Than Ever

Writing makes me feel close to Wendy.  Unlike directing, with which I've had mentors galore, Wendy is the only one of two writers I've ever really been close to in that way, and so the act of it reminds me of her.  Writing my play about her, this blog, my young adult novel - every time I sit down at the keyboard, I hear her voice, and most of the time, it's making me laugh.  The rest of the time, it's giving me advice, which is inevitably practical.  When she came to see my production of The Seagull, she told me how much the character of Trigorin spoke to her, in his obsession with his writing, and how he (and Chekhov) were clearly so interested in the craft of the art.  Wendy took great pride in that, in her own work.  And I know that some people feel her plays are a little old-fashioned, and not edgy enough, or too nice, and until I get to direct one again and prove those people wrong, I hope we can all agree that they are, at least, written by someone who brings great craft to her field.



Pastrami and Cheesecake








October 18th was Wendy's birthday.  We had plans to lunch together on the day that neither one of us knew would be her last birthday, in 2005.  We were supposed to meet at the little writing studio she kept on 60th St (in the same building where Rafael was living when I met him, and if you think that wasn't Wendy nudging me along from beyond, you gravely underestimate her).  Wendy wasn't feeling well enough, however, to leave her apartment, so I went to the Carnegie Deli and picked up pastrami sandwiches and cheesecake, one of our perennial favorites.

She was in bed, where I served her the delicious fare.  She picked at her sandwich and didn't even touch the cheesecake.  If I weren't in such deep denial about her medical state, this would've been a clear sign that something was wrong.  I ate my portion with gusto, blabbering on about boys and work.

I try to do something that would honor Wendy ever January 30th.  Before her niece Samantha moved out West, we'd sometimes meet for a cocktail at Cafe des Artistes, which like Wendy, is no longer with us.  The first anniversary of Wendy's death, I went to see Sarah Ruhl's stunningly beautiful play The Clean House at Lincoln Center, in the same theater where Old Money had happened years before.  I wept through most of The Clean House and left the theater knowing that I would direct the play one day (which I got to do at Syracuse Stage two years ago, one of my finest productions).

But the one thing I always do January 30th is go to the Carnegie and order a pastrami sandwich and a slice of cheesecake.  I am passed the age where I can finish both those magnificent servings by myself, but I still do it, knowing I'll have leftovers for another meal.  And so I invite you to partake of this tradition, wherever you are today.  Order some pastrami or a slice of cheesecake, and spend a moment thinking about Wendy, and how lucky those of us who knew her were to have known her, and how lucky all of us are to have her work.