Just hours after Lauren Schneider and Lawrence Moss were married on Jan. 28 at Sandals South Coast, a resort in Whitehouse, Jamaica, they received phone calls from many friends and family who couldn’t attend.
They weren’t congratulatory calls. They were calls of concern.
A magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck at 2:10 p.m. in the Caribbean Sea between Jamaica and eastern Cuba, according to an Associated Press report from Havana. It was felt from Mexico to Florida and beyond.
“Our hotel just sort of gently began rocking back and forth, for somewhere between 30 and 45 seconds,” Mr. Moss, 64, said of the earthquake. “It was pretty wild.”
Ms. Schneider, 61, said the shaking “had people racing out of the building. We were worried because we didn’t know what was going on outside.”
Within minutes, the couple’s friends and family in New York and Washington were reaching out. “We told them all that we were fine,” Ms. Schneider said, “and that we hoped no one got hurt.” (According to The Associated Press, there were no reports of casualties or heavy damage.)
Ms. Schneider and Mr. Moss had been married earlier in the day by Richard Oliver Ramsey, a justice of the peace in Jamaica. The morning ceremony was on the jetty where they got engaged, “surrounded by water,”’ said the groom, and it was over “in time to get to the breakfast buffet.”
The bride, the founder and president of Broadway Fantasy Camp, an entertainment agency in New York that allows theater enthusiasts to perform alongside theater professionals on Broadway stages, and the groom, a lawyer in Chicago, met 20 years ago in Lake Delton, Wis., at the bat mitzvah of a mutual friend’s daughter.
Since that time, their long-distance relationship has not gotten any shorter, as Ms. Schneider and Mr. Moss, of Chicago, have lived in their respective cities for the last two decades. (Ms. Schneider is also entrenched in New York’s theater scene, having been the producer of the Drama Desk Awards for 15 years, from 1998 to 2013. She is also the producer of the American Theater Wing Gala, which at various times she has also directed.)
The couple said that getting married would not change their living arrangement.
“Every time we get together, it’s like a first date,” Ms. Schneider said. “When we are apart, there are enough phone calls and emails to provide the emotional support we might need to get through a bad day. If we lived in the same city, my career, which I am driven by, would have been a source of conflict instead of celebration.”
When asked why they decided to get married given their comfortable lifestyles, Ms. Schneider said simply, “Marriage is a very happy way to celebrate 20 years together.”
■ The day before their Jan. 28 wedding ceremony in Jamaica, the couple, in the company of their dive master, Alton Williams, staged an underwater ceremony. On Feb. 2, Rabbi Danny Moss and Rabbi Susan Landau Moss are to lead a traditional Jewish ceremony on the beach in Hollywood, Fla.
■ Ms. Schneider graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the daughter of Charlotte Schneider of St. Louis, and the late Irvin Schneider.
■ Mr. Moss graduated from Columbia and received a law degree from the University of Chicago. He also received a master’s degree in Jewish history from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is a son of the late Barbara J. Moss and the late Henry S. Moss, who both lived in Glenview, Ill.
■ The day after they met, Ms. Schneider, who was in Chicago, met Mr. Moss for a first date at what she assumed would be a restaurant there. Instead, Mr. Moss asked her to go swimming with him at his health club. When she said she didn’t have a swimsuit, he bought her gym shorts and a sports bra, and off they went. (Mr. Moss is now the coach of a United States Masters Swimming club team in Chicago called the High Ridge Y.M.C.A. Bottlenosers, and Ms. Schneider is one his top swimmers. Sorry team, they missed a meet last week to take another kind of plunge.) VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
