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I Officiated a Titanic-Themed Wedding as a Doomed Maritime Captain in Alphabet City Because Of Course I Did.On marrying my friends on the door of a doomed ocean liner on Avenue B.
Good morning, friend. I’ve written and rewritten this post so many times I don’t even know what my name is anymore. I’m just hitting publish. Wednesday, July 8th, 2026 The first captain’s hat I picked up had a swastika on it. I’d like to say I noticed immediately, with the fastidious eye of a professional. I did not. I noticed at checkout, the way you notice spinach in your teeth only after the meeting. I was standing in the costume bank where they keep the wardrobe for half the film, television and Broadway productions in New York, holding a Nazi naval officer’s hat at arm’s length like a dead rat, while the attendant watched me reassess every decision that had brought me to this moment.
I was there because I’d told a small lie. I’d claimed, via a director friend who vouched for me with a straight face, to be a Broadway costume designer, which is how you get access to a warehouse of screen-worn history when what you actually are is a cartoonist who needs to dress as Captain Edward Smith of the RMS Titanic by Saturday afternoon. I swapped the hat for the correct(-ish) one. White Star Line, not Kriegsmarine. A small but, I’d argue, important distinction for a wedding. But look, I should back up.
Deanna directs. Billy builds.I couldn’t tell you where I first met Deanna. Somewhere in the Venn diagram between pop-up comedy shows on Brooklyn rooftops and filming Apple commercials with David Ma in Michelin-starred restaurants in Koreatown. New York does this: it keeps handing you the same people in different contexts until you inevitably become friends. Or neighbours. (Or, as it happens, both.) Deanna and Billy are the rare New York couple whose whole thing is not just sitting around talking about ideas but actually being crazy enough to make them. Their handles say it plainly: Deanna directs, Billy builds. Between them they’ve constructed everything from a massive working Talkboy from Home Alone 2 to the backside of the animatronic rhinoceros from Ace Ventura 2, the one Jim Carrey is messily born out of. Most couples have a shared Netflix account. These two have a shared fabrication kitchen workshop. It should be said that they are not merely nicknames. Deanna is a creative director whose surname is, and I want to be clear that I am not doing a bit here, Director. Billy is a crane engineer. He builds things that lift other, heavier things, for money, in a hard hat, in the actual world. When New York hands you people, it occasionally hands you people who are also their own job titles. They got engaged on a ferry, mid-shoot for their Instagram. Billy staged a Titanic bit specifically because it required Deanna to turn around and look away from him, which meant she was performing in her own proposal without knowing it. So when they asked me to officiate their wedding, something I can legally do because I am, and I need you to sit with this, an ordained non-denominational minister in the State of New York, I immediately said yes with an alacrity that should have worried me. The original plan was a Jim Carrey-themed wedding, with me officiating as Ace Ventura. Then they pivoted. Deanna has a deep, abiding, lifelong obsession with Titanic, the James Cameron one, the three-hour epic where a thousand-odd souls perish in the North Atlantic so that two very attractive people can experience a car with fogged-up windows. The brief became: immerse every guest in every ounce of that film. Which is a bold theme for a wedding, when you think about it. Most couples reach for imagery of endurance. These two chose the most famous sinking in human history and said: that one. That’s us. Billy, being an engineer, does not accept the premise of the question. He’ll tell you the ship was a marvel, that it changed everything, that it changed how we think about safety. This is a man looking at the single most cited failure in maritime history and seeing, with total sincerity, the engineering. I find this reassuring in a husband. Honestly? Correct. Love isn’t about promising calm seas. Nobody can promise that.
Saturday, July 11th, 2026- 2:00pm The Lower DeckA maritime-themed restaurant one block from the apartment where I lived for seven and a half years. Deanna and Billy arrived in the Ectomobile from Ghostbusters, because of course they did; you don’t build a giant Talkboy and then show up to your own wedding in an Uber XL. Outside, a man spun an advertising sign announcing the wedding with the preternatural grace of someone who has found his one true calling on a footpath in the East Village.
Inside, the theming was total. The guestbook was Jack Dawson’s sketchbook, the one he draws Rose in (like one of his French girls). The place cards were tiny lifeboats. There was a full seating chart of the ship, an upper deck and a lower deck; even the ice water on the menu was listed as ICEBERG RIGHT AHEAD. A chaise longue posed beside a cardboard Jack for guests to be drawn on. A giant replica Heart of the Ocean. And the car. You know the car. It had the handprint on it.
Above all of it hung a Titanic they had built in their own kitchen, which is a sentence I’d like to lodge with the Landmarks Preservation Commission. A hundred and fifty guests had come dressed in 1912 period costume, a hundred and fifty creative souls who had all, without exception, understood the assignment. Here’s the thing about this crowd. Actors, comedians, writers, directors, producers, people from TikTok and Instagram whose follower counts have commas in places mine does not. If New York ever prints a brochure, it should just say this: we have the densest concentration of talented, interesting, unhinged-in-the-good-way people on Earth, and occasionally they all put on Edwardian dress and gather in a fake ship on Avenue B. This wedding was the brochure.
Oh, this wedding also had a brochure. Did I mention that?
I moved through the narrow front bar in character as Captain Smith, greeting passengers in the received pronunciation of 1912, a doomed man radiating calm. This, it turns out, would be the theme of my evening: serene on the surface, paddling furiously below. A duck in a dead man’s coat. Because downstairs, several problems were forming a queue. Problem one: my ceremony script, printed on official White Star Line letterhead for authenticity, was loose-leaf, and the stage had the air circulation of an actual ocean. One gust and I’d be improvising a wedding ceremony. I dispatched the endlessly patient Emily across the street to a bodega with instructions to beg, plead or barter for paper clips. She returned victorious. Somewhere on Avenue B there is a bodega owner who believes a woman in 1912 evening wear urgently needed office supplies, and he is right. Problem two: three sound checks, two microphones, and a wireless mic I was assured worked perfectly. Hold that thought.
Problem three was not a problem so much as a jump scare: I turned from rehearsing my lines to find, standing directly behind me, a drag queen in a magnificent gown. Saline Dijon. She was to perform “My Heart Will Go On” after the ceremony. I have rarely felt so underdressed while wearing a naval captain’s full ceremonial uniform.
The morning-of text.Now. I’d written the ceremony weeks in advance. But the morning of the wedding, after a pregame rewatch, I texted the couple an idea, which is exactly what every bride wants six hours before walking down the aisle. There’s a scene in the film where Billy Zane, having stitched up Jack for theft, watches him and Rose slip away after firing his gun at them, and starts laughing. His bodyguard asks what could possibly be funny. Billy Zane delivers, with the smugness of a man who owns several railroads: “I put the diamond in the coat. And I put the coat on her!” My pitch: at the ring exchange, I pat my pockets. Nothing. I go red. I start laughing. Billy, our Billy, asks what could possibly be funny. And I say: I put the rings in the coat. And I put the coat on her, gesturing to my own ‘Rose’ in the front row, wearing my suit jacket, rings in the pocket. They signed off mere hours before the aisle. Creative people. Rare instance of doing instead of saying.
The ceremony.The cue to begin was the head of the choir raising a pair of binoculars towards the staircase and bellowing “ICEBERG, RIGHT AHEAD!”, which I believe is how all weddings I officiate should begin, and I will not be taking any further questions. But first, Billy walked to the wall, gripped an ornamental door, and yanked it clean off its hinges. He laid it on the stage to rapturous applause. We would be conducting this ceremony standing on the door. The door. The floating debris upon which Rose survives and Jack, conspicuously, does not.
I should mention that Billy built the door. Cardboard, hot glue, duct tape, paint, contact paper. He built a door, hung it on a wall, and then, in front of a hundred and fifty people, tore it back off the wall. The man is a crane engineer. He constructs things designed to bear enormous load and then removes them from the structure at the appointed dramatic moment. This is either the most romantic thing I have ever witnessed or a workplace safety violation, and I’ve decided it’s both. Adeline, the flower girl, threw heart-shaped confetti. The Yacht Rock Choir sang a wordless, a cappella “My Heart Will Go On”, which is the version that gets you, because there’s no Celine to hide behind and it just comes at you like weather. Deanna descended the stairs. And I stood on that door in a dead captain’s coat and addressed the room: “Family, friends, women and children...”
And then, because we were physically standing on it, I addressed the elephant in the room. Looking at the square footage of this door, Jack absolutely could have fit. There was room for four of us. We were proving it in real time. Which is why I told the congregation, Billy and Deanna were committing to sharing the door, rather than one of them selfishly hogging the mahogany while the other freezes in the Atlantic. That is true partnership. “A mathematical certainty”, if you will. Then the microphone began cutting out. The one we sound-checked. Thrice. Every few words: gone. Nada. I had inherited not just the coat of the captain of the Titanic but, apparently, his luck with equipment. And so, I did what he presumably did: projected calm, improvised, and privately composed my resignation. The duck paddled. Here is the part I still can’t explain: the mic died on me every time I spoke, yet when Billy and Deanna read their own heart-rending vows, every word came through the system flawlessly. The universe knows whose night it is. Deanna used her vows to enter a point of clarification into the record. This wedding, she wanted everyone to understand, was based on cassette one of the two-VHS set. The love story part. Because the bond they share is unsinkable. Which is, I want to note, a legal-grade piece of drafting. She didn’t ignore the iceberg. She defined the scope of the agreement. The ring gag, I am pleased to report, killed, with the assistance of a perfect performance by Emily, and I got to say the truest thing in the whole script: these rings represent a bond more valuable than the Heart of the Ocean. 
Billy and Deanna promised with each ring, “I marry you, and I promise to never let go.” By the power vested in me by the State of New York, and by everyone gathered on that deck, I pronounced them man and wife. “God himself could not sink this ship. You may kiss the bride.” Take her to sea, Mr Director!The rest of the night dissolved into exactly the kind of convivial chaos you’d hope. An iceberg cake. My old comedian pal Jeff Greenspan delivering a wildly funny speech while wearing arm floaties.
The after-party was next door at the steakhouse lounge bar that looked like it could have been on board the Titanic. We were treated to an epic Titanic-themed rap from comedian Katie Heller. A cast member from the Titanique Broadway musical turned up to sing a tune from the show for the newlyweds. Saline Dijon’s reprise of “My Heart Will Go On” was performed as Celine intended: at full volume, to a room of people in 1912 costume in a sweaty, crowded bar in Alphabet City.
We danced for hours, until finally the old Home Alone 2 New York taxi cab pulled up outside, the actual chequered relic, and swept the newlyweds off to Brooklyn. They arrived in the Ectomobile and left in the McCallister cab. Married by a fake dead sea captain in between. A complete filmography of a marriage. The CoverageamNY ran the story this week, which is how I learned what I’d missed while standing on a door being electrically silenced.
There is a particular indignity in reading a newspaper account of an event you personally presided over and discovering things you didn’t catch. But the piece got the one line I’d have led with, and it’s Deanna’s, and it’s about the ending. Asked about that nagging structural issue with Titanic, the part where the ship goes into the sea, she said it plainly. “This movie has a happy ending…”The Titanic they built in their kitchen is still hanging in the restaurant. The place is keeping it up. I walked out onto the steamy Avenue B some time after all that, throwing off the coat, now drenched in sweat. One block south was the building where I lived for seven and a half years, back when this neighbourhood was the entire ship as far as I was concerned. I stood there for a minute in a hat borrowed under false pretences, holding a folder of pages held together by emergency bodega paper clips, and thought about the vow I’d just administered forty times in my head.
I promise to never let go. I let go of that block years ago. Packed up, drifted west to Chelsea. Then Hell’s Kitchen, told myself neighbourhoods are just water, and you keep swimming. But New York keeps handing you the same people, the same corners, the same Venn diagrams, until one rainy Saturday you’re back on your old street marrying two friends on a door, and you realise you never really let go of any of it. It’s all still in the coat. You just put the coat on someone else for a while. ‘til next time!
PS. You can read AM/NY’s reporting of the event with more photos and details right here. PPS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
(Ok, it’s not Morris. It’s the happy couple’s adorable dog, Vince. In full wedding attire, because of course…)
Photo by Charlie Chalkin
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