WEDDING TIME TRAVEL.(The Talk of the Town)(Association of Bridal Consultants)

When Toni DeLisi got married, in 1986, her wedding met the standard criteria of the day among Italian families in New Jersey. "My hair was big; my dress was pouffy; I had a band that I hated," she said the other day, with fond reminiscence. "It was on the water--at the Nyack something. It's now a psychiatric hospital." DeLisi is the head of the New Jersey chapter of the Association of Bridal Consultants, and her recollections were prompted by a visit, in the company of three other members, to a matinee of the Broadway musical "The Wedding Singer." Like the movie upon which it is based, the show charts the romantic travails of an entertainer and a waitress at the Touch of Class Catering and Banquet Hall in Ridgefield, New Jersey, and offers a sentimental tour through the popular culture of the nineteen-eighties, incorporating Van Halen licks, A Flock of Seagulls hair, and a Cyndi Lauper impersonator, all of which are greeted by the audience at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre with the same inexplicable enthusiasm shown by the public at large two decades ago.

For the professional wedding planner, the show consists not just of a flashback to bubble-skirted bridesmaid dresses, wedding gowns with sleeves like flotation devices, and vivid cummerbunds paired with dinner jackets abbreviated at the waist. It also offers a glimpse of a time before the advent of such innovations as the response card offering entree pre-selection, the pet dog as ring bearer, or the need for a professional wedding planner to manage all the other innovations.

"Twenty years ago, the wedding was five hours--it wasn't this series of events it is now," DeLisi said, over a glass of Pinot Grigio at Charly O's, after the curtain fell. "Twenty years ago, everyone had prime rib," she said. "Now it's filet mignon, sea bass."

"I think our taste has gotten better since the eighties," said Julia Erlichman, a planner from Hoboken who referred to herself as "the queen of beachy weddings," and who had just ...