Dr. Dana Cohen and Henry Caplan were instantly attracted to each other during an improv course in 2011. But their decision to marry at a Las Vegas chapel was the opposite of spontaneous.
When Dr. Dana Cohen and Henry Caplan met as classmates at a Manhattan improv course in 2011, both were partially motivated to be there by their careers.
Mr. Caplan, 57, had previously worked as a theater actor and director; from 2000 through 2010, he performed off and on in New York and on a tour of Japan as the M.C. at “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” a show that includes audience participation.
He enrolled after starting his current career as an independent corporate communications coach, thinking he might be able to learn exercises to use in his coaching. (The course was also being taught by a friend who needed to fill an extra spot. “I could be a ringer for you; a participant who asks good questions,” Mr. Caplan recalled telling him.)
Dr. Cohen, 55, an integrative medicine specialist with a private practice in Manhattan, signed up thinking that improv would be “an incredible thing to learn, especially for somebody like me, who has one-sided conversations all day long.”
“In doctor mode, it’s usually a Q. and A.,” said Dr. Cohen, who received a medical degree from St. George’s School of Medicine in Grenada and, in 2018, published “Quench,” a book about how to optimally hydrate using food. “I am guiding people to get answers for their medical history. There is not a lot of give and take, and sometimes, I forget how to have a real conversation.”
As the six-week course progressed, Dr. Cohen and Mr. Caplan established a palpable connection during its weekly two-hour classes, and he quickly became charmed by her “spontaneity.”
“Dana always volunteered first,” he said. “She didn’t have a problem being everything from an over-excited clam to a carnival barker. She just dove in and loved to play.”
But it wasn’t until a few months after classes ended that a mutual friend from the organization that hosted the course played matchmaker and suggested the two get together.
“I think we just needed somebody else to say you should take the risk and go for it,” Mr. Caplan said.
“I had been married before, so I had been through the dating rabbit hole and was feeling a little burned and a little cautious,” added Mr. Caplan, whose previous marriage of nine years ended in divorce in 2008.
For their first date on Dec 9. 2011, they met in Bryant Park and, from there, headed to a nearby Greek restaurant. The conversation flowed so easily that they reconvened right after the holidays.
Dr. Cohen said that Mr. Caplan’s sense of humor, especially his penchant for lacing conversations with puns “like a Borscht-belt Jewish comedian,” was among the qualities she found attractive in him. Another: His gifted improvisations on the piano, despite never having taken a music lesson.
“Even now, just thinking about it makes me swoon,” she said.
When the couple started dating, Dr. Cohen said, “I was in my mid-40s at the time, and all I had looked for my whole life were fireworks and butterflies in my stomach.” Her developing relationship with Mr. Caplan offered signs of both, as well as a feeling of stability. “It was so calm and fun and pleasant and happy,” she said.
As someone who grew up in a Jewish household in Montreal, Mr. Caplan knew his mother, aunts, uncles and cousins would approve of the romance. (He lost his father to pancreatic cancer decades before the couple met.)
“When I told my family I met this wonderful woman at an improv class, they would say, ‘She’s an actor?’ ‘No,’ I’d say, she’s a doctor.’ And my family would laugh hysterically because in a Jewish family if you can’t be a doctor, the next best thing is to marry one,” he said.
Mr. Caplan’s Jewish heritage, Dr. Cohen said, was also something she appreciated.
“Even though my mother wasn’t Jewish, I grew up in a Jewish home,” said Dr. Cohen, who was raised in Coral Springs, Fla., and lost both of her parents by the age of 32. “But I never dated a Jewish man before. There were so many things that just felt comfortable and like family right from the very start.”
Early in their relationship, Mr. Caplan said his weekdays were comprised of “planes, trains and automobiles” because he traveled extensively across the country and around the world for work. But the couple made up for it on weekends: Dr. Cohen said they were together “99 percent of the time” when he wasn’t on the road.
“I would usually sleepover at her place in Manhattan,” said Mr. Caplan, who owns an apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. “She rarely slept over at mine,” he said, alluding to Manhattanites’ age-old resistance to having an Out-of-Borough Experience.
After dating for a year, Mr. Caplan said, “I felt that Dana and I were a solid team.” But in the years that followed, he said neither prioritized marriage.
“We both didn’t feel a strong compulsion to make it legal,” Mr. Caplan said. “In theater we say ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’”
Said Dr. Cohen, “I love hosting a good party. I love feeding people. But the idea of having a wedding where I walked down an aisle and all eyes were on me terrified me.”
The two lived separately until 2020. When Covid struck, after a few months, it became financially prudent to consolidate and Dr. Cohen moved into Mr. Caplan’s apartment in Queens.
There was a period of adjustment.
“I had lived like a bachelor, so putting a shirt away meant crumpling it up into a ball as opposed to putting it on a hanger,” Mr. Caplan said.
The year after they started living together, the couple experienced back-to-back events that made them reconsider married life together. Last fall, one of Dr. Cohen’s closest friends passed away from breast cancer. At about that same time, Mr. Caplan settled his 81-year-old mother into a nursing home.
With mortality on both their minds, one day last October, Mr. Caplan turned to Dr. Cohen and said, “‘We should get hitched,’” she recalled.
Of his thinking at the time, Mr. Caplan said, “We act as a family, anyway. So we should really catch up, take the final step and be there for each other on paper.”
In the weeks that followed, the couple debated about where and how to wed, and in late November, Dr. Cohen came up with the idea of marrying in Las Vegas since they would be there for an upcoming medical conference. The cherry on top would be having an Elvis impersonator preside over the ceremony.
“It’s so perfect for him,” Dr. Cohen recalled, noting Mr. Caplan’s vast store of obscure show-business facts and factoids. “The idea made me giggle.”
“I’m a big Elvis fan,” said Mr. Caplan. “I’m a little bit more of a Johnny Cash fan, but there’s not a lot of Johnny Cash chapels in Las Vegas.”
They wed on Dec. 11, 2021, at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Brendan Paul, a co-owner of the chapel and one of its three Elvis Presley impersonators, who was ordained by American Marriage Ministries, officiated. There were no guests.
“‘Elvis’ was way more sincere than I thought he would be for someone who has officiated so many weddings as Elvis,” Dr. Cohen said. “It was lovely, and yet it was fun.”
For two who put off the idea of marriage for so long, both the bride and groom said they were caught off guard by how overcome with emotion they became as they approached the altar.
“I just felt very warm and very close to her,” Mr. Caplan said. “The verklempt that I got was not outward. The verklempt that I got was like, I wish my mom could see this. My mom would have loved the fact that it was an Elvis wedding and that it was fun.”
Said Dr. Cohen, “I cried as soon as I got up there because it was so special. I was surprised. I was having a good time, and as soon as you faced each other, it was, like, ‘Oh, my God!’ The truth is that we’re family. Without any doubt, he is my family.”
On This Day
When Dec. 11, 2021
Where Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas
The Vows In keeping with how they met, Dr. Cohen and Mr. Caplan searched online for wedding vows that they liked, then ad-libbed off them. “Neither of us remember exactly what we said; we both got a little emotional,” Mr. Caplan said. She improvised from the lyrics to the chorus of “Everything,” by Alanis Morissette. Mr. Caplan’s jumping off point came from the website Wedding Forward, which included a vow that began, “I believe in you … and the person we will be together.”
The Bouquet Dr. Cohen thought she was going to walk down the aisle with the single red rose provided by the chapel. But a friend of hers, Dr. Leslie Dick, surprised her by having what Dr. Cohen called a “beautiful, gorgeous bouquet” delivered to the couple’s room at the Venetian resort before the ceremony.
The Postnuptial Meal After the wedding, Dr. Cohen and Mr. Caplan had caviar, one of his mother’s favorite dishes, at Bouchon in the Venetian resort. “Caviar is not something we have every day,” Mr. Caplan said. “It’s a ritual we have to celebrate an important event.”
