The Marriage License: Overrated and Inconvenient

Marriage licenses...Pffft! Who needs 'em? Just when I was starting to feel like this last three month stretch before the wedding would be easy, the point was made that perhaps Kenny and I shouldn't wait until the last week-day before the wedding to go get our marriage license. Apparently, there are many, many things that could happen in the 24-hour window of time between our flight from Austin to NY on the Thursday before the wedding, and 5pm on Friday when the town clerk's office closes, that would prohibit us from getting the marriage license in time for the ceremony Sunday. For example, we could have a freak blizzard in Austin that shuts down the airport and prevents us from getting on the plane Thursday night. This freak blizzard could extend into Friday morning and prevent us from getting on that flight as well, thus missing the clerk's office by 20 minutes (assuming the blizzard cleared in time for us to catch the 11:40am flight). Those damn Texas blizzards! Or, a flock of angry seagulls could descend upon all of the New York City airports in a display of revenge for the one Kenny tried to blow up with Alkaseltzer when he was in the 6th grade. This would in turn prevent all inbound air traffic from landing, thus preventing us from getting our marriage license. Or, Nathan could suddenly develop the capacity for speech, and hypnotize Kenny and I using his newly found skills. This would also cause us to miss our plane, because Nathan would probably spend all of Thursday night and most of Friday commanding us to cook steaks for him. Or, more likely than any of these scenarios, my head could explode.
So we've now decided to forgo Thanksgiving with my parents in Dallas (short drive North at a reasonable hour of the day) in exchange for Thanksgiving in New York with Kenny's family (long flight north arriving at an ungodly hour of the night) and a shot at getting our marriage license in a timely fashion. Of course, it just would have been too easy for the New York lawmakers to allow us to get it when we were up just three weeks ago. You see, you only have a certain window of time in which you can obtain a marriage license- sometime between the 60th day before the ceremony up until 24 hours before. But you also have to go to the town clerk's office bearing a gift: a Shrubbery! A nice one, but not too nice. NI! And let's not even get into the difficulty in determining which clerk's office to go to. The municipal organization of the townships, cities, villages, tribal clusters and whatever of Long Island make the reorganization of former Soviet Bloc nations look like a first grade geography lesson.
Anyway, now that we changed our Thanksgiving plans to get this silly piece of paper, it got me wondering why we need it anyway. What's the point? There's nothing to stop us from getting married some other way. We were going to get married before the end of 2006 if it killed me because there's something psychological about waiting until 2007 when you got engaged in 2005. Also, Kenny has these great educational tax credits that will just go to waste on him if he files his taxes as a single person. I was determined that we would file jointly so I could get my hands on his tax deductions! Just kidding. Or am I? If the process did kill me, I think there's a tax deduction in there somewhere as well. Ok, so point being, license or no license, we would get married at the wedding.
The question that remained was whether Rabbi Hain would be thrown in jail for performing a marriage without a license? Jail seems extreme, but you never know with those crazy New York laws. I never got the answer to this question. I left a message for Rabbi Hain with a "question about the wedding." But he never called me back. I would have asked him, "Rabbi, will you remember to pack your toothbrush on Sunday, December 17th? Because Kenny and I might not have our marriage license." Don't worry, I'd have posted bail.