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Douglas Wolk

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Posted Friday, Aug. 3, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET

In classical tradition, comedies frequently end with a wedding. Lisa and I are trying very hard to keep that in mind. At T minus 61 hours and counting, the reality of what we're getting into here has descended like ... a horde of out-of-town relatives. All of whom we love dearly, of course, and all of whom need to be greeted, chatted with, reassured of their places at the rehearsal dinner and/or the reception seating, and pointed in the direction of family-friendly fun in New York Freaking City until the big event. Now I understand why men are told to go boil some water when women go into labor. If the straight-arrow judge from Missouri and his wife ask us to track down tickets for The Full Monty, who are we to second-guess them?

I blew a gasket today, finally. It was in the middle of the afternoon: All three of our phone lines were in use simultaneously (with an extra dose or two of call-waiting thrown in), I was attempting to squeak one last assignment in under its deadline, the "plain" guest book we'd mail-ordered looked like an explosion in a Precious Moments factory, the living room had become a slalom course of boxes from Federated Logistics (Macy's gift-shipping company, but that name has always sounded like a money-laundering operation to me—every corkscrew seems to get its own 2-foot cube of packing peanuts), and the tailor had just inched glacially back to his phone to inform me that no, they didn't seem to have my suit around, and actually they weren't sure where it was, and what did I say my name was again? I said I'd call back in half an hour, hung up, and made a noise at the phone that I don't think I could replicate. Our cat bolted; Lisa looked over at me, wondering what alien creature her fiance had turned into. After that, I felt better. Right, I thought; this is a comedy. I'd forgotten that.

Really, though, at this point all we have to do is lock ourselves into the Wedding Machine and press the start button. Everything has been set in motion; we just have to go limp and let it carry us along. (Well, we have to pack, too, but tonight we're pretending we don't.) Tomorrow, we've got the bachelor and bachelorette parties—Lisa's is about half men, mine's about three-quarters women, and we're not too sure what's planned for us, but suffice it to say that we don't think anything's going to be jumping out of any cakes. Saturday is the rehearsal dinner, and the first time our respective families will meet. Sunday morning, our attendants tell us, they'll pack us off to the hall and systematically deprive us of our powers of choice for a few hours: Our job is to get hitched, not to oversee everything, try as we will. Things will go wrong. So be it. Before we know it, it'll be Monday, and we'll be honeymooning.

And then, of course, come the challenges of marriage, and the ongoing work of living up to the dedication of the rest of our lives that we're making in front of the 200 people whose opinions we care about most. It's not easy work, we know; people keep telling us that, and also that it's worth it anyway, without especially elaborating on what the work involves. (Not that we don't have a reasonable idea.)

But what this whole enterprise has pounded into us is that the challenges and the rewards aren't necessarily separate things. A few months after we met, we went camping together in the Southwestern desert. The first night we were there, there was a huge dust storm while we were setting up—we staggered to our car through the white-out, and sat inside it, exhausted, damp, dehydrated, and covered in grit, with nothing to do but listen to the damaged tape of The Best of "Louie, Louie" stuck inside the tape deck, over and over. There are infinitely worse things that could happen to us, we decided, but this is the acid test: If we can get through this, we can get through anything. It's a happy memory.

We're entering the climactic scene of our comedy. Whether you've been laughing with us or at us, I thank you for your laughter.

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Posted Friday, Aug. 3, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET
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Douglas Wolk is getting married on Aug. 5.
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