WE DO.(The Talk of the Town)(Maryann Reid, mass wedding)

Maryann Reid, the engineer of Marry Your Baby Daddy Day, is neither married nor a parent. But she is an old-fashioned romantic. Although she writes fiction of the single-girl-in-the-city variety for a living (recent titles include "Sex and the Single Sister" and "Use Me or Lose Me"), she has found dating in New York a "disturbing" experience. Having become increasingly impatient with her own prospects, Reid, who is thirty and lives with her mother in Marine Park, recently turned her ambitions to those with more immediate possibilities. Her basic idea was this: Find ten cohabiting couples with kids. Plan them a free wedding.

The other day, at the House of the Lord Church, a Pentecostal congregation in downtown Brooklyn, Reid was stage-managing the rehearsal for the mass wedding, which was to take place two days later. In attendance were ten affianced couples (they were chosen after submitting to phone interviews and home visits by Reid), their parents, siblings, best men, and maids of honor, and their children, who ranged in age from fourteen months to sixteen years.

To finance the festivities, Reid had solicited donations: ten gowns, veils, and headpieces; ten wedding cakes, by Fort Greene's Cake Man Raven; twenty bouquets; three hundred invitations; fifty bottles of champagne; and one reception hall (the Brooklyn Borough Hall rotunda). The gowns were particularly appreciated. "Seeing the dress on me made me really emotional," one bride said, recalling her fitting. "I was hyperventilating. They were running around getting me water. I was holding on to the footstool." Most crucial, Reid had secured the assistance of the House of the Lord's Reverend Doctor Herbert Daughtry, who would counsel and marry the couples, and of a professional wedding planner, Patricia Washington. "When she ...