[brewinhard]

Keep the yeast cold until you are ready to pitch.  No real need to let the yeast warm up.  They will quickly acclimate to the warmer wort temps.

This.  I've actually seen some evidence that colder yeast into warmer beer is preferable.  Not to mention it's worked great for me for hundreds of batches.

Denny, I used to let my yeast warm up a tad prior to pitching until you mentioned it was unnecessary. Now it goes straight from the fridge into my cool wort.

[Jack13]

UPDATE from OP:

Unexpectedly ended up brewing yesterday rather than next week.  Pitched yeast slurry (no starter, as recommended here) around 6pm last night.  As of 7am today, the fermenter is chugging away!

It is my first wheat beer--the wort looks different than anything I've done.  Boil was different, too--the hops and other gunk caked the sides of the kettle.  I accidentally covered the top completely right at the end of the boil (I like to cover at least a part of the kettle to decrease chance of bird sh-t) after doing a 5 min hop addition, and it bubbled up and out.  Seemed to be mainly hops, so I threw another 0.5oz in...oh, well.