Subject: Quaint Old Custom Revives in New York: Marriage Licenses Date: Published: 10/6/87 150 lines Source: WALL STREET JOURNAL. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Quaint Old Custom Revives in New York: Marriage Licenses --- Porn Actress, Victim of AIDS Contribute to the Boom; A Day in Line at Room 262 --- By Michael W. Miller Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal NEW YORK -- James Fiora wanted to know whether he could get a license with an option to renew after five years -- "you know, like the magazines." His friend Ann Monteverde found this less than amusing. "Typical Jim," she said. "He always has to come up with something." A tall, blond woman pushing a baby girl in a Kanga-Roll stroller conceded that her timing was unusual. "But we really know what commitment is about and we're ready to make it," she said, waiting her turn in line. "And" -- she pointed at the stroller -- "everyone else here can see what they're getting into and decide if they still want to get into it." Murray and Sarah's timing was unusual, too. For 50 years Murray and his wife, who died seven years ago, were friends of Sarah and her husband, who died two years ago. "I was waiting in the wings, as it were," said Murray, who is 78. "Oh, Murray, that sounds so ghoulish," said Sarah, who is 80. One recent day these people all made their way to the same dilapidated downtown office in the corner of an old granite building. It is the room where affairs of the heart meet affairs of the state in New York City. Inside, the city clerk sells marriage licenses, an administrative duty that is a land-office business in New York right now. New Yorkers aren't particularly known for observing social customs, but last year 67,688 of them filed through here, two by two, to ask permission to spend the rest of their lives together. The number is one-third higher than it was at the beginning of the decade. (Nationwide, marriages are up only a fraction of a percent since 1980.) City officials say the local upsurge mystifies them. "I never sat and dwelled on it," says Joseph Sanfedele, an assistant to the city clerk. "Maybe people are going back to the old values." To get a marriage license in Manhattan, you can't send your paralegal or your valet to pick one up for you. You and your future spouse have to go down to Room 262 of the Municipal Building yourselves and wait in line with the rest of betrothed New York. Thus, for anyone interested in the state of the institution of marriage today, Room 262 -- the epicenter of a marriage earthquake in perhaps the world's most diverse city -- is the place to go. "We get celebrities, and we get people who between the two of them don't have $10 to get the license," says one official. "I don't think even Motor Vehicles sees the broad spectrum of people we see." On this day, a Sing Sing prison guard and a Broadway bus driver wait their turn behind a NASA policy analyst and a U. S. arms negotiator just off the plane from Geneva. By the time the day is through, a Brooklyn cabinetmaker who fell in love with his neighborhood grocer; a pair of 22-year-old Guatemalan emigres with their seven-month-old baby in tow; and a porn-movie actress who is making one of the most extraordinary matches of the year in any city have also been formally licensed to wed. How does it feel to be on the verge of wedded bliss? There are many different answers on display here. In one corner, a security guard in uniform is planting light kisses all over the face of his beaming fiancee, who appears to be near tears. A young electrical engineer and his pharmacist girlfriend embrace ecstatically when a clerk calls out their names. "This is it, kiddo," one woman tells her fiance, giving him an affectionate tap on the arm. "What a ridiculous waste of time," says her future helpmate. Along one wall, John Mesagno, a state official from Queens, philosophizes about the plunge he is about to take. He is 30 years old, and his bride-to-be is 32. "So if things don't work out," he says, "we'll still be young enough to start over." Many of the couples who pass through here choose to return to the Municipal Building and get married in the city chapel down the hall, a small room where the radio was recently playing "To All the Girls I've Loved Before." But New Yorkers can get married anywhere in the state as long as they wait at least 24 hours, and no more than 60 days, after receiving a license. Some people apparently arrive in Room 262 still confused about these logistics. A handwritten sign at the front of the room declares: "Getting the license DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU'RE MARRIED; YOU ARE NOT. " "We've had Russian immigrants come in who know they've filled out a form and said yes to something, and they think that's it," says 27-year-old William Thymius, the clerk's-office lawyer who drafted the sign. Mr. Thymius, who is single, also helps adjudicate waivers to the office's No. 1 rule: no house calls. Two exceptions: a convict in jail and, on rare occasions, a hospital patient. Mr. Thymius hesitates to mention that second category. "There are eight million people in the city, and half of them are going to call and say they have a cold," he says. "The per]V has to be either terminally ill or there's at least a very good chance they're not going to make it." In other extreme cases, a member of the clerk's staff will go down to the sidewalk outside the Municipal Building and let an incipient bride and groom fill out their license on the street. "If somebody's on a machine or on an ambulette, OK," Mr. Thymius says. "Or even a very old person with a walker." Bernard Dixon, a Sing Sing guard and groom-to-be, is one of the few people in the room whose work takes him to an occasional wedding. He checks guests at Sing Sing weddings for knives, guns, alcohol, marijuana -- "anything that would upset the normal order of the facility." Without a doubt, the most unusual couple in the room today -- perhaps all year -- is an actress named Veronica Vera and her fiance, Robert (who doesn't want to reveal his last name because his parents don't know all the details of his wedding plans). Ms. Vera's recent credits include "Consenting Adults," "Times Square Comes Alive" and a documentary called "Portrait of a Sexual Evolutionary." Robert, her next-door neighbor for 10 years, is a homosexual who quit his job as a chef this year when he developed AIDS. "I didn't think I would get proposed to -- not at this stage -- by anyone, much less her," he says. Says Ms. Vera: "I'd been thinking this summer about how much I care about him and how I would probably never find someone who I cared about so much. I thought, Why not do something where we celebrate what we have instead of worrying about what's going to happen in the future? " The staff members of Room 262 are strong believers in marriages of all description. "It's in the interest of the state to have people get married," Mr. Thymius says. "That's why it's easier to get married than unmarried." Mr. Thymius has the misfortune of working in one of the most unpromising places in New York for meeting unattached women. Still, he looks forward to someday standing on the other side of the counter in Room 262. "Nothing in the immediate offing, though," he says. "Any candidates, let me know." 0 END OF DOCUMENT [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]