• I got married to the perfect Anna E. Paone this past weekend. Pretty sweet. It took a long time to get there. I proposed back in February 2017 at the Baseball Hall of Fame and here we are more than two years later. The whole event was better than I could have ever imagined (that’s mostly thanks to the hundreds- maybe thousands of emails Anna sent; I say she did 94% of the work and was tireless in her efforts to make everything happen; I did the other 6% tirelessly) and getting to spend my life with Anna is the greatest reward of all. However, I did want to share a few thoughts on my experience for those in the process of getting married, the wise folks who have gotten married and those who have never considered it who are morbidly curious. Here goes.
• First off, wanted to point out that when getting prepared for your wedding, I recommend learning how to dance. You will have to do a first dance (unless you really don’t want to do it) and it’s uncomfortable to watch two amateur dancers for at least 90 seconds. In our case, Anna’s Dad (not on Facebook) and Mom and Catherine LaMoreaux, had us take dance lessons and we learned some very cool moves. I still have flat feet but it was very cool that we didn’t just do a slow dance. We had some style.
• Another thing I recommend to all is having a talking point when visiting your guests at each wedding table while they’re eating. It’s hard to make the same small talk over and over. In our case, Anna and I came up with giving everyone Topps Baseball cards of ourselves to every guest and when we made the rounds at the tables we acted like we were professional baseball players (a narcissistic fantasy of mine) and we signed them for all the guests. It made for a fun bit and we didn’t have one, “So, ya having fun?” conversation.
• It’s always pretty incredible when people make their way out for a destination wedding. Being from Phoenix, it was pretty amazing that so many people from my past who live far from New York came from my groomsmen like Clayton Russell Porter, Jesse Swatling-Holcomb, Nate Abdo and Danee Garone (not on Facebook) to my High School Teacher Shigeko Toyota but the craziest guest to show was my friend from high school Pratap Chumble who was an exchange student from India. On Friday (the day before!), he called in and asked if he should still come to the wedding. I said, “We’d love to have you, but no pressure.” Pratap took an 18-hour flight. He made it to the reception after his flight, going through immigration and booking a hotel. That’s an A+ guest.
• You gotta love all the speeches you get at weddings. Anna’s parents and sister Laura Paone were all hilarious, my Mom (not on Facebook) and brothers Ben Levy and Sam Levy were all heartwarming (it was also hilarious when they all walked down the aisle together barely about to fit) but my Dad Andy Levy went for the most unusual. He started his speech by having the DJ play the “Hawaii Five-0” theme song and he and I proceeded to do 22 pushups. It was a Pavlovian response. If he hears THAT song, he has to do pushups. Then he followed it with a speech. That was sick.
• Our wedding was held in a beautiful Catholic church BUT was an interfaith wedding with a Priest and a Rabbi. It went very smoothly even if the Rabbi didn’t attend the rehearsal (rehearsal was rough; I think a dozen people told me, “Bad rehearsal means a good show!”) but was interesting in that it felt like the Jews (my people) were playing an away game and the yarmulkes were our uniforms. The most interesting aspect of the interfaith wedding was certain parts of the Jewish side were held under a chuppah off to the side since it wouldn’t fit on the stage. At one point, a few, select married women from both sides of our family circled me as is part of Orthodox Jewish tradition. Everytime, my Grandma Arlene Friedman circled me, she pinched my butt.
• Yeah, I closed my speech with, “I’d like to thank the cast, crew and most of all, Lorne.” Lorne, I hope you’re reading this. Really, I hope you’re reading everything I write, dude. Speaking of sketch, I dreamt of shooting a sketch for months at the wedding. My logic was when else would I get so many extras, props, location, production value, costumes, my favorite cinematographer Joseph Lao etc. Well, it didn’t work out. You can’t really ruin a wedding with that. Also, speaking of sketch again, it was amazing that our wedding fell on the night of SNL’s season premiere (you better believe we watched it in the hotel room; that’s as romantic as it gets for me; also, not a bad episode, I thought!) and the final regular season game for the Mets. Kind of poetic.
• Wanted to shout out Anna’s uncle and aunt James Lamoreaux and Bridget Lamoreaux (both not on Facebook) for leaving a dog biscuit at our head table. It’s a sort of long story but when Anna was young, like 13 I think, she ate a dog biscuit because James said he would propose to Bridget if Anna did it. That’s a top-notch callback if I’d ever heard of one.
• One of the coolest aspects of the wedding, is you finally get to enjoy the fruits of your (or in my case, Anna’s) labor. When we were at the reception venue, servers treated us like royalty, bringing us food, whatever drinks we wanted etc. For just a few short hours, I knew what it felt like to be a one percent-er. It’s good.
• When I returned my suit to Men’s Wearhouse (yes, that’s where I rented from), they didn’t even check to see if I brought everything back. Could have kept my cuff links. Smdh.
• As for the postscript, the past few days, we have been in a bit of a wedding hangover. Anna and I are tallying gifts, writing thank you cards and reliving the event as much as we can. It really was very incredible. Kind of like your bar mitzvah but you get to share it with someone and you’re actually celebrating really becoming an adult. I did NOT become a man on August 25, 2001 for my bar mitzvah. This was much closer to it.
• Finally, gotta get my ring resized. I find when I don’t eat for a bit, it gets loose. If I do eat or down sodium (after a night of ramen especially), it gets tight.
• As for this week in comedy for me, I’m back. Doing a trivia show at the Creek tonight and getting back into the mic game too.
If you read this far, you’ll get married someday. Congrats!
