They met at a 2021 Labor Day cookout in Quogue. That they agree on. They’ll argue over the exact time. “It was quarter past delta,” she says. “No,” he’ll correct softly, “it was quarter of omicron.”
Shauna Singleton Meagher Nguyen Glickstein (the bride will keep the name of her third husband) had loved the pandemic life. Barricaded in her Two Bridges brownstone, bingeing Hulu on her second husband’s password, flirting through her mask twice a week with the FreshDirect guy, she felt she had found her best self in her mid-50s. Or, as she coined it, “Studio 54½.” The TV never yelled back, and every phone call went straight to voice mail after her lilting pre-recorded greeting: “Yeah, what?”
The cookout, which doubled as a gender-reveal party for both her first husband’s second grandchild and her first husband, was an invitation she couldn’t possibly decline “with regrets.” She had to show up.
“I was hiding behind an Adirondack chair, trying not to be chosen for croquet,” Shauna recalled, “and the next thing I heard was ‘May I join you?’”
Originally, he introduced himself as “Luke Prince,” but for the next two hours, while they whispered behind the Adirondack chair, he changed his name half a dozen times and his occupation eight. Finally, when he referred to himself as “Deacon Bob” from Bitcoin MMO and AMMO, Shauna said, “So, you’re Satan.”
“That’s when I exhaled,” he says. “That’s when I told her, ‘Yeah, you got me.’ But that’s over. My work here is done.”
On Earth, sure. But on that fertile pitch in Quogue, a courtship began. Sowing intimacy. Building trust. The real work.
Anyone who has seen Shauna and Satan together will describe them as soulmates, a seemingly seamless shift from the transactional relationship with souls he’d been used to for eons.
“It’s amazing,” she says. “We both hate everyone!”
“So, you’re Satan,” Shauna said. “That’s when I told her, ‘Yeah, you got me,’” he says. “But that’s over. My work here is done.”
Ms. Glickstein, who graduated magna cum laude in romance languages from Wesleyan, often regretted that she never really put her degree to use, other than ordering in restaurants. She worked as a volunteer on a number of local and national political campaigns, most notably as an advance woman on former senator Bill Bradley’s unsuccessful 2000 presidential run. “I ended up saying, ‘Watch your head,’ a lot,” she recalls.
Her time was equally split between New Jersey, Manhattan, and Bimini, and dominated by the thankless work of “taking care of three very special babies,” which is how she describes her former husbands.
It is the first legal marriage for Mr. Satan, who will now go by the Slavic pronunciation of his name, Shuh-TAN. He still has an enviable head of chestnut hair despite being anywhere from 20 to 40 centuries old. “I weigh maybe five pounds more than I did in high school,” he notes. ” I just can’t eat dairy anymore.”
Satan has been unofficially retired since 2017, when, as he described it, “I woke up one morning in January and realized the Evil business had become a young man’s game.” After skiing on every continent (the only item on his bucket list), he bought a two-bedroom in the Villages, in Sumter County, Florida, then left six weeks later because “everyone there was trying to set me up. Clearly, I wasn’t close to ready. Not yet, anyway.”
Anyone who has seen Shauna and Satan together will describe them as soulmates. “It’s amazing,” she says. “We both hate everyone!”
“Yet” turned out to be last Monday night at Joe Allen, which is notoriously Broadway-dark on Mondays. Fifty guests were invited, including Patti LuPone, Scott Rudin, and Victor Garber, who officiated the ceremony, as he had for Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner in 2005. Music was provided by Madison Square Garden C.E.O. James Dolan, who was not invited.
The couple will honeymoon at Cove Haven, in the Pocono Mountains.
Like his bride, Mr. Satan spent the first two years of the pandemic with little or no human contact, although his version of the Two Bridges brownstone was Linda Blair’s guesthouse in Coto de Caza, California.
He ventured east to Quogue on Labor Day 2021 as a return favor to the entertainment lawyer Bernard Meagher. Long after his divorce from Ms. Glickstein, Meagher had wrangled Satan backstage passes for the 2012 40th-anniversary reunion of the original members of Blue Öyster Cult at the Palladium Times Square. “Let’s just say I really, really overpaid,” Satan admits. “But it was a seller’s market. Which I kind of invented.”
Three months after the cookout, he had moved into Ms. Glickstein’s brownstone, converted the attic into a guitar-amplifier-repair workshop, and discovered the revelations that are Zoom Pilates, oat milk, Pam & Tommy, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Y: The Last Man. And FreshDirect.
“They’re all great, but when you get to share them, then it’s another level. Another two levels,” says the groom. “I get it now. My whole life, I thought it was all about me and my influence. But you know what? That? That was eternal damnation.”
Shauna holds up one hand. “Could he be any more full of shit?” she says.
Bill Scheft is the author of five novels. He was a staff writer for David Letterman for 24 years
