In our fourth installment of this series, love conquers all, even the obstacles presented by COVID-19.

Part 1: Having planned to tie the knot in April 2020, Jared Waters finds himself separated from his fiancée by COVID lockdown instead.

Jared Waters is Stand-up Comedian residing in New York City. He hails from Brunssum, The Netherlands. Jared gained his stand up legs in Tampa, Florida. His hard work and consistency with the ability to work clean and edgy has led him to be one of the most impressive Up and Coming comedians in the New York. When Jared is in between jokes, the future of this great nation is residing on his shoulders as Kindergarten teacher and host of the Podcast “One Man, One Tree, and a Hill”

Part 2: The pandemic prompts Jamie Brickhouse and his partner of thirty years to consider getting married for the first time.

Called “a natural raconteur” by the Washington Post, Jamie Brickhouse is the New York Times published author of Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother, and he’s appeared on PBS-TV’s Stories from the Stage, The Moth Podcast, Risk! Podcast, Story Collider Podcast, and recorded voice-overs for the legendary cartoon Beavis and Butthead. He is a four-time Moth StorySLAM champion, National Storytelling Network Grand Slam winner, and his daily #storiesinheels TikTok videos have over two million views. Jamie tours two award-winning solo shows, Dangerous When Wet, and I Favor My Daddy. His new show, Stories in Heels: Tall Tales of the Women Who Changed My Life debuts at the Gotham Storytelling Festival in New York City, November, 2021.

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Jared Waters

So we met. We met at Disney World. Disney World is a place where we were working. We're both doing our internships there. And I got in Disney jail. Disney jail is a place where they ask you on your application what do you least likely want to do and what would you really like to do. What I least likely wanted to do was food services and that's where they put me. They put me in this jail, this prison that I was in. Technically, I could leave the jail but it's a jail designed for you to quit. That's the reason why they call it Disney jail, because they don't want to fire anybody on the property.

The proposal. We went together seven years before we got engaged. The one thing you don't want to do, especially with a Spanish-Caribbean woman, is to have her waiting for seven years, so I propose the day before our seven-year anniversary. At the time, she was working in London.

Now, think about our relationship. We were always bouncing around. She's in conservatory work so she has different assignments all over different places. And at times I'll be on the road doing different things. So at the time, she was doing this conservatory project getting her master's in London and I was in New York. I was officially moved to New York.

So we would go out to see each other, what we do in our relationship is the summers I will go to London. So I'll do stand up in London. Or when I had a break when I was working, we would go to different countries. That was a time where we would just take the time to block out whatever we were doing and spend time together.

Now, she's in London. I visit at Christmas, I visit in the summer, but April I had a break and I asked her, I was like, “Hey, you want to go to… I got a break coming up. You want to go to France?” France isn't that far from London.

And she goes, “Yeah, I'll go to France. I've never been to France before.”

What I did was I gave her different options of different places to go, but I knew she would choose France, because in the back of her head she's like when will he propose, and our anniversary was April 23rd.

So I proposed April 22nd, one day before our seven-year anniversary. So I told her, I was like, “We've been together six years, 364 days,” so technically she didn't have to wait seven years to be engaged. So we got engaged in Paris, France.

And we went back right to the place where it all started. We went right back to Disney World. We were walking around. I introduced her to this guy that I met and he pretty much took us back there to private services. In the same way I proposed on our first date, I proposed again.

We went to see Mickey Mouse. Mickey mouse gave her a letter. And in that letter, she read it and when she finished reading I got down on one knee and I gave her the infinity stone, 3.55 diamond carat rings.

Big balla, shot caller, twenty inch blades on the Chevy Impala. We freakin did that right. And she said yes. Now, she didn't really get to see the ring because she was more emotional about getting engaged. She was happy. Mickey was hugging both of us. Then we get outside and that stone started shining. And she looked at it and goes, “Jesus Christ,” and I said, “Yeah, that ring go bling-bling, mine goes bling-blam.” You know what I mean?

So we talk after and she goes, “When are we going to get married?”

I was like, “4/23.” All of our numbers are 4-23. Our anniversary's 4-23. Let's get engaged, let's get married 4/23.”

So she said, “Sure. No problem.”

Now, we go in January, so January 2020 she goes down to Florida. We're in Florida. She's picking out her wedding dress. We just buy the wedding dress. I don't get to see it but I purchased it and then she goes, “Well I want to set up for the wedding.”

So a month before the wedding, probably way before the month, so maybe this is two months before the wedding she has a house down in Belize so she goes to set up for the wedding. As we're about to go to the wedding, this is when corona starts kicking up where she goes, “Corona's looking crazy. Do you think we'll still have the wedding?”

And I'm the type of person in the relationship where I'm always I see the cup half full all the times. Even if I'm in trouble I see the cup half full, of about anything. I was like, “Hey, don't worry, man. Don't worry. I don't got corona. Don't worry. We'll still have the wedding. This thing will go away. No problem.”

Then it's four weeks before the wedding. She goes, “New York looks really bad.”

I say, “Hey, don't worry. I don't got corona. Don't worry about it. Everything's going to be good.”

And then she hits me and it's about three weeks before the wedding and New York shuts down. America shuts down. Then the country she's in, which is Belize where we're going to do the wedding in Belize. And the reason why we did it in Belize is because her family's Belizean. We wanted her grandparents, we wanted her people to come, and we wanted to get my southern people, some of them that don't have passports and can't leave legally or illegally, we wanted them to get out and have a vacation. We wanted everyone to have a vacation, experience the country of Belize.

So she gets down there and their country, they lock down away from America so we're just stuck away from each other. In the beginning, we FaceTime every day. Every night with FaceTime. We talk about our days and stuff like that. She goes, “Jared, we got to call off the wedding.”

And I was like, “No. Maybe it's not that bad.”

She goes, “The country’s shut down. Nobody can fly out until…” I think it was like she said August or something like that. She goes we got to postpone the wedding.

I don't know if anyone's postponed a wedding before but, for her, it was a home wedding but for us it's a destination, so everyone has to cancel their flights. Everyone has to fight with the hotel people to get their money back. And people who got suits and stuff like that, so it's a lot of pressure. It's just sad. Imagine the woman of your dreams having to postpone her special day.

And the thing about what's pissing her off is that people walking up telling her it's going to be okay. It's not going to be okay because you don't know what it's like to postpone your wedding in the pandemic. You don't know the aftermath of that. You don't know the next time you postpone the wedding it's just like if you want to do a wedding now they're going to say there can only be ten people at a wedding because of the socially distance, man.

So imagine going from 300 people now you got to get your wedding down to ten people. What ten people do you really like? I like my brother but I don't know if he's going to make my top ten. I'm going back to my space. I got to call Tom and say, “Tom, how do we do this?”

She's pissed, man. She's sad. She's crying. We're looking over FaceTime, tears coming down our eyes. I got to be strong for both of us, but at the same time I'm upset. Imagine me being a provider, being a man wanting to give her the special day of her life and I can't do that because of this dirty backwoods viruses here. I don't know if it's dirty, but it's an airborne virus so I don't know. I heard a lot of clean people getting it too but, you know, it happens.

So I hit her up and I'm like, “Don't worry about it. Just trust God. Anything can happen. The next one will be better.” And I told her, “Don't worry. If this wedding ain't the perfect one, I promise the next wedding I'll give you it's going to be a better one. I'll marry you 17 times. But we got to do it, we'll get it right.”

Then we postpone it. Just sadness, man. Sadness. Have you ever seen a woman heartbroken? Times that by ten.

And I'm away from her, you know. I can't physically comfort her right now because technically all of our countries are shut down. So I'm all alone, man. All alone. In my house all alone. The best sleep I got in my life, but all alone. It's just very comfortable, one person on this queen-sized bed. I don't got to worry about her legs sticking in my side. You know what I mean? But that's the only good part. It's very good resting.

But we're sitting there, man, and we're talking over FaceTime. I'm locked down. I can't do stand‑up comedy. I'm just alone at my house. Alone in a room. I can't even say me and you. It's just me. I was sitting in my home just like, man, this can't be happening. No way. No way, Jose. No way, translated to Spanish, no way, Jose.

Then comedy starts lifting up again. New York starts opening up. And for the first time in a long time, we start resting. For the first time I'm going to sleep after 10:00 in the evening. New York is shut down. She shut down. They have a curfew. We got a curfew. I'm just shut down. I'm inside, shut down, resting.

And as I'm resting I'm realizing, man, I don't want to spend another second on this earth without her, at all. I could do maybe 30 seconds without her, you know. I need to go to the bathroom by myself. You don't want to be sitting down seeing somebody's eyes when you're on the commode. You don't want that. But at the same time, I don't want to spend no more times without her.

Stand-ups happening again. They're still locked down. Now Belize is locking themselves away from us. Because the virus is so rampant in our country, they've locked themselves away from us.

Hitting her up, talking to her, we're trying to feel when we're going to reschedule the date, when we're going to reschedule the wedding. And I said, “Look, we just got to get close to each other. Let's find a way.”

Belize opens their borders. And then as they open the borders they get hit by a hurricane. A hurricane. Excuse me. I should know how to say that. I'm from Florida. A hurricane. Hit by a hurricane. Country's devastated.

They postpone the airport. I'm like, “Cheese and crackers, when the freak can I see this woman?”

Next you know, they delay her flight. Then they delay her flight. And she has a connecting flight so the connecting flight's delayed. So she finally gets on the plane.

Then when she gets there, she goes, “I missed my flight but this Belizean, I think this Hispanic dude, there's a Hispanic guy working.”

I was like, “Just use your language. Spanish people help out Spanish people.”

So she's talking to the dude. He goes, “Hey, I'll put you on this flight. Don't worry.” So he switches her flight. It's no cost to me. And she goes, “I got to get to JFK instead of La Guardia.”

So I pick her up. We exchange salivas. I pick up her bags and we catch a $70 Uber and we get home. I tell her, “Look, I don't want to spend another moment without you. I don't know when the next wedding is going to be. Let's go to the courthouse. Let's make it right.”

Part 2: Jamie Brickhouse

Michael and I are about to get married in 30 minutes and not only are we not even dressed, I haven't even picked out our outfits yet. And the thing is, neither one of us ever wanted to get married. I'm not sure if it was Trump or COVID that made the decision for us.

But when we met 30 years ago, 30 years, it wasn't even an option. Not anything we even thought about. And whenever people asked us how we met, by the way, I always tell them the same story, or I used to.

We met September 23rd 1990 in Central Park on the first day of fall at dusk.

“Oh, that's so romantic,” girls would gush.

Now, it's impolite to ask gay men how they met because the answer is rarely polite. I mean, we did meet in Central Park but we met in the Ramble, the Brothers Grimm wooded area famous for watchers of birds and seekers of snakes, the one-eyed kind.

Now, Michael and I both had wandered in there merely looking for a pearl necklace, which we got with each other. But you know what? We emerged with something better, a pearl of love. We went out a week later and we've been together ever since.

And when I tell this story to gay guys, they always say, “Oh, my God, you’re so lucky. The only…

And when I tell that story to gay guys, they always say the same thing. “Oh, my God, you’re so lucky. The longest relationship I ever got out of the Ramble was 20 minutes.”

Yeah, sure, we're lucky. But you know what? I believe in that concept of luck that you have to be prepared, have to be ready when luck happens. I think we both were primed for it.

I had been in New York for six weeks and I was desperately looking for a job and a man, and I found the man before the job. Michael, a month before we met, he had been in Scotland and he visited the fairy web tree. It's a magical tree where you tie an article of clothing to it…

It's a magical tree where you tie an article of clothing to it and you make a wish. He tied a tube sock to it and wished to meet the love of his life. I wish it had been a jock strap, but hey.

And 30 years, that's a long time to be with someone. We have been through a lot, seen a lot. My God, the Persian Gulf war, the death of our beloved cat Stoley, 9/11, my alcoholism and recovery, Hurricane Sandy, the death of both sets of our parents. And when it became legal for gays to get married, of course we were happy about that but it was like it's not for us. We don't need that. We don't need a piece of paper to validate our relationship. It just felt like we would be aping the institution of straight marriage. Although we did exchange rings but no ceremony, and that was just between us.

But this past summer, after a late winter of COVID, we were out in Cherry Grove, Fire Island, this pretty much all-gay community where we spend a lot of our summers. It was so wonderful to be there where we spent most of the summer, because we were working from home, so to speak, after being locked down. And to be able to walk around outside and for it to be warm and sunny, it was wonderful and liberating.

It was also kind of sad because Cherry Grove was always this fun and festive place where there was always a celebration going on. You couldn't spit without hitting a drag queen. There was always a party at somebody's house or there was always dancing downtown. And every weekend there were three or four drag shows going on simultaneously. I was supposed to do a solo show there. They have a lot of theater there. Of course that was all canceled, so it was kind of a solemn and somber summer.

But Michael and I, we were talking to another couple on the beach and they had also been together a long time and had recently gotten married. They said they decided after all the years they were together they weren't going to leave each other anytime soon and it just made sense financially and legally to get married.

And we thought, you know, we didn't know what was going to come with the next four years if we were going to have the orange man back in office and maybe we couldn't legally get married, and of course COVID brought our own mortality to light and we were like, God, what if we did get sick? And what if we died?

And we were like, you know what? I think maybe we should get married while we still legally can and while we're still both alive. And then if we do get sick, we don't have to deal with any of those legal problems that we've heard some domestic couples, gay, straight or otherwise, have have…

So we don't have to deal with all of those legal troubles if one or the other couple…

And then we thought maybe we should also get married because if one of us got sick or died, we wouldn't have to deal with all that legal mess that we've heard other gay couples unmarried and even other straight couples unmarried have had to deal with. So we thought, “Yeah, I guess it's time.”

Then we decided we would get married on our 30th pearl anniversary, September 23rd 2020. But we weren't going to do a big to-do. No ceremony, no big wedding, and of course this is in July or August that we decided this so it was pretty much down to the wire. And I thought, you know, we'll just go to the courthouse and have a justice of the peace wedding. I'll wear a nice gray suit with a peplum and a hat with a veil and some county clerk will throw rice at us.

But of course it's COVID so we can't get married at the courthouse because it's closed. We have to do it via Zoom. I'm like, “Well, that's kind of depressing, but we’ll make the most of it.”

The idea was, you know what? Fine. We’ll get married on Zoom. We'll take a few cute pictures. We'll post them on Facebook. Get 500 likes and then we're done. And then go on with our life as normal.

Michael is an architect, so he's the one who organizes everything. He's the one the pictures are always hung straight with him, the drawers are organized to a tee, and he's the one who takes care of the finances and filling out the forms and setting of things. So he was the one who found us a date on Zoom and figured out what we needed to do.

Well, I made the mistake of telling a friend of ours nicknamed Blue Eyes out in Cherry Grove that we were getting married. He said, “Oh, girl, I've got to throw a party for you.”

And I said, “No, no, no. I don't want that. We don't want that and you'd have to plan it.”

He was like, “No, no, no.”

And I said, “Besides, it's COVID. What do you mean a party?”

He said, “Well, no. It'll be you know I have that huge deck that overlooks the ocean and it'll be perfect. So it'll be outdoors. It'll be COVID-safe.”

And I was like, “Uuh.”

He had gotten married a couple of years earlier to his long-term partner because his partner was sick, not with COVID. The partner died and he was still in mourning and he regretted that he didn't get married.

I was like, “You know what? Okay. If you want to do that, fine.” I said, “But you know what? My one stipulation is that the dress code is all the guys have to wear pearl necklaces.”

He said, “Okay. You got it.”

So the day of September 23rd, Michael and I are in the apartment working away from home and we have 30 minutes, back to where the story started, to get ready for our marriage. I look at Michael and I said, “Uh, I guess we should kind of dress up or something, right?”

And he says, “Yeah, I guess so.”

So it's my job. That's my job. I'm the entertainment czar. I'm the one who books the restaurant reservations and the theater reservations when we could go to the theater. So I go into the closet and I pull our outfits, tuxedos, not matching tuxedos because we're not those kind of queens, and I'm like, “How are we going to wed each other?” Because we did exchange rings and that feels like an also-ran and, again, it feels a little too traditional for my taste.

I was like, “Ah.” So I grab the matching Wilma Flintstone pearl necklaces that we’re going to wear at the party on Saturday that our friend is throwing, and they were left over from the times that we were the junior league housewives of Cherry Grove one Fourth of July. That's a whole different story.

I'm like, “You know what? We can wed each other when the moment comes. Instead of rings, we'll use the pearl necklaces.”

So we log on to Zoom and there we are in our little tuxedos, no bottoms, only tops, and there are a lot of jokes right there.

The county clerk guy, really sweet, he takes us through all these different forms and, “sign this,” and, “do that,” and then, “answer these questions,” and blah, blah, blah.

And then we're like, “Okay. You going to marry us?”

He says, “Oh, no guys. I'm sorry. And you look so nice.” He said, “But this is just kind of administrative paperwork. After this you have to wait 24 hours legally and then you have to have an actual ceremony with an officiant.”

I’m like, “Oh, my God. They are determined to make us have a wedding.”

So we're like, “Okay, fine. You know what,” I said to Michael, “why don't we just we'll find someone out in Cherry Grove who can marry us and do it like right before the party on Blue Eyes’ deck?”

So we call a friend who's a minister and he says, “Sure, I'd love to do it.” He said but he can't do it on Saturday before the party because he has a funeral, a COVID funeral. Oh, my God. We're soaking in COVID.

And he says, “But I can do it on Friday at your friend's deck.”

And we're like, “Great. We can get out there by Friday.”

So we rush out there on Friday and then the weather sucks. The clouds are all gray and pregnant with rain. I'm like, “Oh, great. None of this is right.” We weren't able to get married on Zoom like we wanted to on our actual anniversary and the weather is not cooperating and the guy can't marry us when we want him to marry us because of the COVID funeral and it's just like, ahh, this fucking pandemic.

So we get to Cherry Grove and we get to our place and we have a quick turnaround and we put on our little tuxes. And another thing, the minister also said, “Have you written your vows?”

I'm like, “Vows? Can't you just say do you take this man that you've lived with for 30 years to be your lawful wedded husband and be done with it?”

He said, “Yeah, I can, but other guys that I've married when they didn't do their own vows they later regretted it.”

I'm like, “Okay.”

So we were being pressured into having a reception, pressured into having a ceremony, now pressured into having vows. Fine. I'm the writer. It's my job to write the vows.

So I've written the vows. We put on our tuxes and we practice our vows, and then like, oh, my God. We need a pearl necklace bearer, as opposed to a ring bearer.

So I text my friend Mark and I said, “Are you out here? Are you on the island?”

He said, “Yeah. Why?”

I said, “Well, we're getting married in about like less than 30 minutes. Can you be our pearl necklace bearer?”

He said, “Pearl necklace?”

I said, “Not that kind. A real pearl necklace.”

He's like, “Okay. You got it.”

So we get to our friend's deck and the minister texts and he's not going to be able to make the ferry in time to get there to wed us, so he's going to do it via Zoom. So we're still going to get married via Zoom. How very COVID .

And we get to our friend's deck and he has the altar set up, the altar being a black Weber grill. He drapes a white sheet over that and I put my computer on top of it so that the minister can join us via Zoom.

And there we are in our little tuxedos and Mark, our friend, is holding our pearl necklaces. And then the clouds part. I'm not making this up. And the sun comes out and the last rays of sun shine down onto the ocean. It's dusk, just like we met 30 years ago, plus two days. The minister appears on the computer and he weds us.

We say our vows, and with these pearl necklaces we thee wed, and we're married, and then the party is fantastic. Everyone has pearl necklaces on. Everyone rose to the occasion. Blue Eyes threw a fantastic party. I was so worried about all the details and everything but he did a perfect job.

But the best part was walking to town in our tuxedos and our pearl necklaces after we had just been wed and people go nuts over our wedding. Gay people and lesbians go even crazier because it's still a novelty. It's still something special even after, what? Ten years that we can get married.

They're like, “Oh, my God. You look fabulous. Congratulations. That's, oh, my God. You waited just the right amount of time,” blah, blah, blah.

We get to the pizza parlor and there is our favorite cocktail pianist playing away, because he can't play in the bar because of COVID. So he set up a stage outside and people are gathered out there to listen to him. He serenades us with our song, September song.

I had incorporated some of the lyrics of that song into our vows. It goes something like, “These precious days I'll spend with you. These 30 years of precious days I've already spent with you.” Something like that.

And standing there, Michael and I are beaming. We're glad that we got married. And we're glad that we wrote our own vows. And looking at everyone who's so happy for us, many of these people are good friends, some are just people we know by face from being out there all these years, and everyone was so happy to have this celebration after this kind of stagnant, solemn, quiet summer where nothing, none of the joy that they were so used to out in Cherry Grove happened.

And people came up to us afterwards and said that they were so happy that there was something finally to celebrate after all these months of death and sadness and not being able to connect with others. And standing there, we felt really lucky. But you know what? We had 30 years to prepare for it.

Thank you.