Wedding Story

Let’s take a trip in the Wayback Machine, shall we? It’s the summer of ’85. A young Donald Rumsfeld, as Ronald Reagan’s Special Envoy to the Middle East, has spent the past two years giving sensitive military, weapons and intelligence advice to America’s newest ally in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein; an unusually skinny ballplayer named Barry Bonds slugs a whopping 13 homers out of various single A minor league venues; and Coca-Cola releases an item they are supremely confident is going to be the most successful consumer product of all time, a little thing called New Coke.

Between the sun rising on August 31 and setting on September 1, the fearsome serial killer known as the Night Stalker is arrested in Los Angeles and the wreck of the Titanic is located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. At the same time that Madonna and Sean Penn were basking in the everlasting love marked by their marriage two weeks earlier, my future wife and I were looking forward to our own nuptials. Little did we know that another serial killer was poised to destroy all our plans. A serial killer named Elena.

My wife and I had met a little less than a year earlier when I was acting and she was assistant directing a play about serial killers called Veronica’s Room, written by Ira Levin. Our plan was to marry on the very stage in the theater where we had met. We had been planning the wedding for months and my fiancé was going to wear a gown that had been made by her own mother. Family and friends had come from hundreds of miles away to witness our ceremony despite the general unspoken consensus that our bliss would probably not outlast Madonna and Sean’s.

Following the reception, we would board a carriage and be drawn by horse to the honeymoon suite of the nearby Hilton Hotel. It promised to be a fairytale come true as we lived out every couple’s dream: being married on the stage of an old movie theater. Despite doubts that we had rushed headlong into this thing in too much of a headlong rush, we knew nobody could stop us. What we didn’t know was that Elena was headed our way.