Fresh out of Columbia University with a BA in French literature, David Divita landed a job that most aspiring journalists would kill for. On the basis of a friendly reference and a good interview, the personable young man was hired by the New York Times to work in one of the paper’s most important departments. Not the metro or arts section, not the Washington bureau or the op-ed pages–the promising 23-year-old had snared a spot in society news, writing the wedding announcements that run in the paper’s hefty Sunday edition.
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“I was what they call a news assistant,” says Divita. “In the old days we were the people who might have started as copyboys.” His task was to plow through stacks of announcements, calling to verify and clarify every bit of information before rewriting them to conform to the Times’s famously stodgy style. “It wasn’t strictly formula,” he says. “You have about a two-millimeter margin for creative writing….You gotta call the bride and the groom and usually both sets of parents–or all four sets in the case of stepparents. Sometimes they’d say, ‘Why can’t you just print what we wrote?’ But you don’t presume something is true just because it’s in an announcement.” His questions ranged from “Are you going to keep your name?” and “Is this your first marriage?” to whether a person had graduated from a prestigious Ivy League school magna cum laude or merely cum laude. “People take that kind of thing very seriously,” Divita says.
Instead, he began working on a one-man show. Society Blues is about his experiences as a single gay man writing wedding announcements for the Times. Directed by a fellow New York-to-Chicago transplant, Carolyn Cohagan, Society Blues is a collection of comic monologues and vignettes that combine Divita’s observations of his job and its absurdities (“I finally get to exploit all these characters I had to deal with on a daily basis”) with memories of his own personal crisis at the time, what he calls “feeling paralyzed by all my possibilities. I deal a lot with the issue of loneliness–what do you do when you’re single and surrounded by people who are in love and prepared to commit to each other for the rest of their lives?”
