Block Island diary: the biggest (non) event of the summer.

August 1

News Flash: The New York Post's gossip column lets drop that none other than Barbra Streisand and her fiance, actor James Brolin, will be getting married this August 9 on Block Island. That's a pretty big event for a sleepy resort town off the coast of Rhode Island. Then again, the place has gained some cachet as a fashionable wedding site ever since Edward Kennedy Jr. got hitched there during a four-day blowout a few years ago.

August 2

The media vultures have already started circling. Camera crews from Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and reporters from USA Today and the supermarket tabloids descend on the island, all of them hungry for a scoop on exactly where the wedding reception will take place -- and what win be on the menu.

The town rumor mill also whirs into gear. Reporters are eager to tap locals for the inside dope, the kind of tidbits traded over mugs of black coffee at Bethany's Airport Diner or while knocking back beers at the Narragansett Inn hotel bar. As one longtime islander puts it, this is a place where "old timers know what's going on behind closed curtains before the people behind the curtains do."

August 6

The Post's gossip column retracts its original story. In a short item under the heading, "Press Power," the column claims that Streisand has nixed her Block Island wedding plans because of the publicity generated by the earlier column.

August 7

Babs is furious at the Post. Just to teach them a lesson, she gives an "exclusive" to USA Today's Ann Oldenburg. In a statement issued through her Beverly Hills publicist, Streisand tells USA Today that she and Brolin NEVER planned to marry on the island. And she blasts the Post for "having the utter gall to say we had canceled our plans because of [its] scoop."

August 8

10 a.m. My newspaper flies me to the island to find out what's really going on.

10:45 a.m. Town officials, taxi drivers, local hotels and area caterers all tell me that there never was any truth to the Streisand rumor. Still, the story won't die. News vans continue to roam the island, and I traipse from hotel to hotel, a pen clutched in my fist.

1 p.m. I approach two summer residents returning to their cottage after a day in town, and ask them what the word is on the street. They tell me that a friend they trust has given them the low down on the Streisand nuptials: The ceremony, just as the Post had originally reported, will take place tomorrow at the Spring House hotel, a majestic Victorian mansion perched above the waterfront. The reception will be held at the secluded Lewis Farm, the very same place that islanders say was once guarded by a fierce old man with a shotgun. Oh, and President Clinton, who everyone knows is an old friend of Barbra's, will be flown in by Marine helicopter -- but he can only stay for a couple of hours.

4:30 p.m. I head over to the bar at Spring House and order a lemonade. The waiters and bartenders tell me they can't believe the story is still alive -- and they say they're getting fed up with all the questions. Still, the paparazzi are clearly providing these locals with a good chuckle -- like the TV reporter who scrambled up the hotel's front steps in such a frenzy that he tripped and fell backwards into a mud puddle.

Hoping to squelch the story once and for all, Spring House's general manager walks out onto the hotel's sloping lawn and gives an interview to a Providence TV station. He says there will be a wedding tomorrow, but it absolutely won't be Barbra's.

"When we had the Kennedy wedding here a few years back, that was crazy -- but not like this," he tells me after the camera stops rolling. "I'm just so awed by how out of control it's gotten."

August 9 Wedding Day!

7 a.m. The owner of Spring House, Frank DiBiase, walks out of the hotel and stumbles upon a freelance photographer who has camped out in a truck in the parking lot. DiBiase orders the photographer off the property.

3 p.m. A photographer and I park near the front gate of the hotel and get out. A news van pulls up and raises its microwave dish toward the sky. Other reporters photographers also begin lining up. DiBiase, wearing blue jeans and champing on a cigar, comes to the gate and insists one more time that the wedding this afternoon is not Barbra's. The bride is a Connecticut woman, a non-celebrity, and she's already told the hotel's management that she doesn't want her wedding ruined by a media mob that thinks she's a front for Streisand.

The hotel girds for the worst: It hires members of the Block Island Lions Club to keep reporters at bay.

4 p.m. Wedding guests gather on the hotel's verandah, after making their way past two burly Lions stationed at the entrance to the hotel's long driveway. The bride has made a wooden sign that says, "No, Barbra Streisand & James Brolin are not here!!" One of the Lions hammers it into a patch of soil beside the front gate. Outside the gate, island residents press binoculars and cameras to their faces and continue to titillate reporters with gossip they have picked up in town. "They say they closed the airport for five hours this morning," says a giddy Mary Giles, a middle-aged real estate broker form Waltham, Mass., who is here on vacation. "That tells me that somebody pretty special is coming."

But as the afternoon wears on, it becomes painfully clear that there will be no Babs, no Brolin, and no Bill.

4:45 p.m. A cool wind starts to blow off the water and clouds mass in the sky. The crowd of gawkers begins to disperse, and the news crews start packing up their gear.

5:30 p.m. I drive back to the cottage the newspaper has put me up in and sit down at a laptop computer. I have less than two hours to file my story before the last plane leaves the island.

Suddenly the phone rings. It's the city desk, back in Providence. The voice at the end of the line has a breathless quality I find familiar and, by now, faintly irritating. "We just got a tip that Barbra's yacht has pulled into Champlin's Marina," the editor says. "You better go check it out."