Laura May DiLorenzo got an unexpected add-on in October 2023 at the Bumble and Bumble hair salon in Manhattan’s meatpacking district right before her first date with David Mark Diskin.
“Be careful, I have a reputation for doing people’s hair on the first date with their future spouse,” she recalled Erickson Arrunategui, her hairstylist, saying after she mentioned her plans for the evening. (He said later, over email, that he’s had about three other clients who have met such a fate.)
DiLorenzo, 53, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from Assumption University in Worcester, Mass., is the chief marketing officer for Second Stage Theater, a nonprofit theater company that produces works by contemporary playwrights. She has won two Tony Awards for best revival of a play — “Appropriate” in 2024 and “Take Me Out” in 2022.
Freshly coifed, and a bit nervous, DiLorenzo, who considered her hairstylist’s romantic track record a good sign, took a cab to meet Diskin for drinks at the now-shuttered Orchard Townhouse restaurant in Chelsea.
“Weren’t you supposed to introduce me to your sister?” Diskin, 61, had finally asked DiLorenzo’s brother, a couple of weeks earlier. He was a friend, and business partner at Accordion Sharing, an app that organizes and shares digital files, which Diskin founded this year.
Diskin had been devastated after his wife, Faith, died of kidney cancer in 2021.
“It was pain, beyond pain,” said Diskin, who had been married 29 years, and has two daughters, now 25 and 28. “My wife was encouraging me to live my life and to be happy,”
So did DiLorenzo’s brother, Jim, who used to take spin classes with Faith Diskin, and Evelyn DiLorenzo, DiLorenzo’s sister-in-law, who had gone paddleboarding with Faith.
“She thought we would make a good couple,” based on a dream in 2022, DiLorenzo said, but Diskin tried online dating first instead.
After a year, he turned to his friends for a “better, direct connection,” he said, only after the “right alignment” eluded him.
“It was scary to step out,” said Diskin, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and art history from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and grew up in Calgary, Alberta, after his family moved from Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, when he was 8.
“I thought he was handsome, and had piercing blue eyes,” said DiLorenzo, who quickly felt at ease by his “warm gentle spirit” as she sipped pinot noir, and he French chardonnay.
Since he was soft-spoken, she leaned in and listened carefully, a trait she gets from her mother, as he spoke about his wife. Her attentiveness moved him. (DiLorenzo’s best friend, Jena Truoiolo, had also died from cancer in 2017 at the age of 43.)
“She’s very gorgeous, she looks like an incredible Italian movie star like Sophia Loren,” Diskin said, and was also glad she was a dog lover since he then had Fred, a toy fox terrier, and Leo, a Shetland sheepdog.
After a couple of hours into the six-hour date, they shared a cab to the Upper West Side, where she lived and he was staying overnight at the Wallace hotel, and stopped for a nightcap at the Owl’s Tail, a cocktail bar and restaurant.
“Are we in a Woody Allen movie now?” he asked, as they sat under an awning, and flirted to the patter of raindrops.
Later, when the rain let up, they stood on the corner of Broadway and 75th Street, and he leaned in for a kiss. They held hands as he walked her home, and then parted with another kiss.
“I liked the way he looks at the world through an artistic lens, a philosophical lens,” she said.
Until 2022, Diskin owned Artivise, a home design firm that created 5,000 original large-scale wall art designs on canvas including music collaborations with Dolly Parton, the Jimi Hendrix Foundation and Ziggy Marley. He also channeled his grief into sculpture and painting, with an exhibit in fall 2023 in East Hampton, N.Y.
The next day he sent her a bluesy, cool Chet Baker song, which was music to her ears.
“Let’s get lost, lost in each other’s arms,” Baker crooned and played trumpet while she was en route by train to visit her parents in Hartford, Conn., where she grew up.
They kept in touch during her trip with a friend to New Orleans, and two weeks later had another six-hour date including dinner at Lavagna, an East Village Italian restaurant. By the third date they exchanged “I love yous.”
In November, during his five day-stretch in town, their bond deepened when she accompanied him one afternoon to the now-closed Bowery location of Bang Bang Tattoo where he got a peacock feather tattoo representing “gratitude for all things in life,” he said.
“I think you’ve been loved,” he told her that evening during dinner at Babbo in Greenwich Village. “I don’t think you’ve been honored, and I want to honor you.”
He then slipped in: “I’m glad you’re my girlfriend,” and marked the occasion the next evening with an Elsa Peretti open heart and diamond bracelet from Tiffany’s.
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In mid-December 2023, Diskin accompanied DiLorenzo to the Second Stage Broadway opening of “Appropriate.”
“I take him to everything we produce,” she said, “sometimes twice.”
On New Year’s Eve, they toasted in 2024 at midnight with Champagne as they watched fireworks over Central Park from the 50th floor of the Mandarin Oriental hotel. In January, she showed him around Miami, which she knew well from winter vacations with friends.
“When we met, all of our parents were in their 90s, and we were able to spend time with all four of them,” she said. “I saw a lot of my father’s nobility in David.”
His mother was a descendant of an original Jamestown settler; while his father, a Holocaust survivor, often visited Japan, and self-published an autobiography “From Danzig to Dharma.”
“I always had a spiritual nature,” said Diskin, inspired by Buddhism and Judaism.
Diskin also got on famously with DiLorenzo’s mother.
“They were delightful and delicious together,” said DiLorenzo, who described her mother as an innocent flirt, who turned to her daughter as soon as she met him, and asked: “Will he marry me?”
He then stood by during her parents’ illnesses, and in summer 2024 when first her father, 99, died, followed eight weeks later by her mother, 91.
In April 2025, during a trip to Paris en route to the Louvre one morning, Diskin served up a bit of local history, with a twist when they stopped at Pont des Arts overlooking Pont Neuf.
“Also on this day in history,” he said, as he went down on one knee with an emerald-cut diamond ring, “David Diskin asked Laura DiLorenzo, ‘Will you marry me?’”
They then saw the Mona Lisa, and celebrated that evening with an epic 12-course dinner at Restaurant Guy Savoy, overlooking the very spot where he proposed.
In June 2025, they moved together to a house in Sag Harbor, N.Y., while keeping her Upper West Side apartment.
On July 25, Rabbi Daniel Geffen, affiliated with Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor, officiated the ceremony before 138 guests on Mecox Beach at sunset by the Bridgehampton Tennis & Surf Club in Bridgehampton, N.Y., where the bride’s best friend, Deanna Pancoast, also read the prayer of St. Francis, a nod to the bride’s Roman Catholic upbringing.
After their vows, as Christine McVie’s “Songbird” for Fleetwood Mac played, a sea gull hovered overhead.
“We were blessed by the angels of nature,” Diskin said.
At the reception, each guest received a personal note from the couple along with the table number, and the couple’s first dance was a jazzy bossa nova to a Frank Sinatra recording of Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave.”
“We both had to go through separate journeys to fall in love as quickly as we did,” said DiLorenzo, who wore the pearls from her mother’s wedding in 1962.
“A primary feeling is gratitude,” Diskin added. “Love is bigger than you think it is.”
And now Arrunategui, the hairstylist, can add another success story to his roster.
On This Day
When July 25, 2026
Where Bridgehampton Tennis & Surf Club, Bridgehampton, N.Y.
An Inspiration: DiLorenzo’s Fourth of July flag cake, using Ina Garten’s recipe, became a 20-year tradition, and a bit of a legend, at her brother and sister-in-law’s July 4 barbecue. Kathy Burton Cakes, a Sag Harbor baker, created a 6-by-24 inch sheet cake based on it including French butter cream and raspberries, later garnished with blueberries. Instead of a flag, the cake said “Just Married.”
The Iris Connection: DiLorenzo said she tried on about 60 dresses. “I wanted something different, artistic with a bit of an edge,” she said. She settled on the Lua gown by Danielle Frankel studio, which had a crinkle organza and chiffon bias, and hand-painted white irises at the waist. Diskin wore a three-piece Cad & The Dandy blue suit, and a British vintage silver and rhinestone iris pin, from the bride, as a boutonniere.
Salute! L’Chaim! Amore Spritz made with limoncello, prosecco garnished with basil and lemon wedge over ice was a nod to the bride’s Italian roots; while the Mazel Tai, a riff on a Mai Tai, with lime juice, orgeat almond syrup, cointreau/triple sec, light and dark rum and piece of mint, evoked the groom’s ties to Hawaii — who “spent a great deal of time in Maui with my parents in the 1980s onward” — and his Jewish background.
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