E8 OnLove NUPTIALS ALLURE MULTIMEDIA PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO
Holidae Hayes & Matthew Gavin
Holidae Hayes, 46, is a financial adviser. Matthew Gavin, 51, is an orthopedic surgeon. They live in Northwest Washington and Leesburg.
Wedding date: May 30.
Locations: Royal Poinciana Chapel and Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Fla. Guests: 120.
How they met: Mutual friends introduced Holidae to Matt 20 years ago, but only last year did she discover he was a doctor and went to see if he would remove a couple of stitches. He was puzzled but agreed. The two had dinner in Georgetown and, as Matt walked Holidae to her car, he asked if she was serious about the stitches. She revealed them, and under the glow of the car’s rearview mirror light, Matt impressed her with his steady hand as he cut them away.
The proposal: In January they were watching the sunset in Punta de Mita, Mexico, and a resort employee approached Holidae with a florist box. Matt had filled it with carrots and the engagement ring because he wanted to ensure there were sufficient “carats” to elicit a yes. The next morning, Holidae woke up with food poisoning; Matt jokes that she was reacting to the commitment.
The wedding: On the last evening of their three-day wedding celebration, Holidae snuck out of the ballroom, changed into an ostrich-feathered dress and reappeared on a smoke-covered stage, dancing to Madonna’s “Holiday.”
Honeymoon: Early-morning hikes, zip line rides and crocodile watching in Costa Rica.
—Kathleen Hom
KLMNO
ON LOVE ONLINE Julia Lichtman Kepniss and Carin Rosenberg Levine, owners of Hitched bridal salon in Georgetown, offer tips on wedding fashion — from the bride to the bridesmaids — at 11 a.m. on July 20 at
washingtonpost.com/onlove.
SUNDAY, JULY 18, 2010
STAYING POWER Restaurateur Andy Shallal shares how his wife’s dedication has helped him realize his dreams and strengthened their union at
washingtonpost.com/stayingpower.
SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST WEDDING BAND:Shawn Wright, 27, and Samantha Lewis, 21, center, strike rocker poses with bridesmaids at their wedding at Washington’s Hard Rock Cafe. by Ellen McCarthy At first, Shawn Wright and Samantha
Lewis weren’t going to tell anyone. The plan was to get a marriage license, hire an officiant and run off to the woods where they could exchange vows in se- cret. A wedding would be expensive, and worse than that: Their families might not approve. Wright had first seen Lewis across the
bar at a Damascus house party in Sep- tember 2009. “I just remember looking over and being like, ‘Wow — who is that? I want to know that girl.’ ” But he didn’t introduce himself, and when he asked around about the petite brunette, no one seemed to know whom he was talking about. Of course, Lewis’s friends knew exactly
whom she was talking about when she mentioned catching eyes with the cute rocker guy. Wright’s well-teased hair was hard to miss. A month later that unmistakable mane showed up when Lewis logged into her Facebook account and there was a note suggesting that she add him as a friend.
She sent the friend request immedi- TOM KACHADURIAN
Coral Shaw & Michael Negron
Coral Shaw is 28 and Michael Negron is 30. They are lawyers and live in Northwest Washington.
Wedding date: June 12.
Locations: St. Francis Church and Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City, Mich.
Guests: 200.
How they met:When Coral and Mike were Harvard law students, they lived in the same dorm and had mutual friends but didn’t date. Then in fall 2006, about the time that Coral broke up with her long-distance boyfriend, she was in a class with Mike. She and Mike bonded over instant messages and studied for finals together.
The proposal: Mike planned a weekend trip to Charleston in January 2009. Though Coral wasn’t expecting him to pop the question until months later, he took a ring on the vacation. After a packed day that included a carriage tour, art shopping and an aquarium visit, Mike took Coral to a park, where he asked her to be his wife.
The wedding: Coral suffered from a couple of strange headaches, during which she could not talk correctly, and went to a doctor in April. She was flabbergasted to learn that she had a brain tumor. The tumor was removed less than two weeks later, and she and Mike were relieved it wasn’t malignant. The wedding went on without a hitch in Coral’s home town.
Honeymoon: Snorkeled, hiked and rode a zip line in Maui.
— Kathleen Hom WEDDING WATCH Making dress dreams come true for military brides by Ellen McCarthy
Jessica Brawn drove 28 hours to make her appointment at Chevy Chase Bridal last weekend. The 21-year-old Fletcher, Okla., resident
was surfing the Internet looking at dresses when she came across an announcement about a wedding gown giveaway for mili- tary brides. “I was like, ‘Oh, that can’t be right.
That’s not possible,’ ” said the student and Air Force Reservist, whose fiance is about to deploy to Afghanistan with the Army. After reading accounts from women
who’d gotten dresses through the pro- gram, she called the organization, Brides Across America, booked an appointment and plotted her route to D.C. In an era when the bad behavior of limelight-seeking brides has become a television mainstay, the July 10 event seemed like an alternate reality — one touched by gratitude on both sides of the exchange. Heidi Janson, a boutique owner and
sales trainer who grew up in the bridal in- dustry, started Brides Across America three years ago after hearing from a sol- dier in Afghanistan who felt like overseas efforts were being forgotten at home. Jan-
ELLEN MCCARTHY/THE WASHINGTON POST
BEAMING BRIDE: Mary Katherine Kennedy came from Atlanta for the July 10 event in Washington.
son called on fellow bridal shop owners and designers to contribute dresses to a giveaway in New Hampshire. That week- end, more than 60 dresses were distribut- ed to female soldiers and the intended brides of male soldiers who’d been de- ployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. “There’s so much waste, because it sits in the closet,” Janson said of the dresses, which are often samples or discontinued styles. The organization hosts twice-yearly bridal events in two dozen cities across America. They have given away more than 3,000 dresses ranging in price from $500 to $6,000 and expect to distribute another 2,000 gowns by the end of this month. Nicholas Kassman, owner of Chevy
Chase Bridal, donated several of the 20 dresses that were given away at his shop last weekend. Sales clerks styled the flip- flop-wearing brides-to-be as they would any customer, adding trains and veils and tailoring the dresses with temporary clips. Any alterations would be done at half the usual price. “A lot of these girls don’t have the
wherewithal to be able to go out and af- ford to buy a wedding gown of that sort,” Kassman said of the brides, some of whom traveled from places such as Georgia and Charlottesville for the event. “And I’m sure
they have lots of other wedding expenses. . . . It’s really the least we can do, to be able to help in some very small way.” Kassman will host another Brides Across America event in November. Brawn wasn’t entirely sure her cross-
country trip would be worth it. She had a pretty specific vision in mind when she ar- rived at the shop, after waking at 5 a.m. and driving almost five hours from a rela- tive’s home near Norfolk. Though she wasn’t certain when her big day would be, she knew that her groom would be in his dress uniform when they wed and that they’d walk beneath an arch of swords af- ter the ceremony. She wanted a gown be- fitting the occasion, something that would make her feel like a princess.
She bounced out of the dressing room
in the first dress, one chosen by a stylist. “I’ve never tried on a wedding dress be- fore,” she exclaimed. Standing in the next one, a full-skirted
strapless dress with a rhinestone belt that she’d spotted as soon as she walked in the store, Brawn started to cry. “It was the best feeling I ever had,” she
said. It got better when they bagged the gown, asked to see her fiance’s deploy- ment papers, and sent her on her way. No charge.
mccarthye@washpost.com
ately. “I was like, ‘Man, there she is!” Wright recalls thinking the day he got the request. “This girl seems interested, too.” But Wright wasn’t exactly single. The 27-year-old was in the midst of a breakup with a girlfriend of four years. He was about to move out of their apartment and back to Damascus, where he’d grown up. Lewis, 21, had done the same thing a couple of months earlier, when her own relationship unraveled. But in mid-December, Wright, the lead
singer of a death metal band called Exter- mination Angel, e-mailed to ask Lewis out. They worked opposite schedules — he was up early for a 6 a.m. shift with the grounds maintenance team at Mont- gomery College, and her tech support job kept her at work until almost 10 p.m. — so the first date didn’t happen until after New Year’s.
common. They had the same favorite col- ors (red and black), the same religious views (agnostic), the same sense of com- petitiveness and penchant for hanging out at home. “Stuff would come out of his mouth,
and I’d be like, ‘You read my mind! That’s what I would say,’ ” Lewis recalls. “We’re just the same kind of person.” On Feb. 19, as they barhopped in Fred- erick, he kissed her. For the next two months he would visit
her at work so they could at least spend her 20-minute breaks together. But that didn’t seem like enough, and during a conversation about whether Lewis should find a new job, she said some- thing that surprised herself: “I want to marry you.” “I’d always said marriage is just not
me, and my brain was just telling me, ‘She is the one, Shawn. You better take her now.’ ” The next morning, April 17, they drove to the Montgomery County Courthouse and picked up a marriage license. Later that day they each got an intertwined de- sign of their Zodiac signs tattooed on the backs of their necks. But before long, Lewis, an only child,
started to doubt their secret plan. She wanted her parents’ approval. Still, both were nervous about the family reaction to the quick engagement.
“I think we both understand that, you
know, it was really fast. We did meet each other and then just decide to get mar- ried,” she says. “So for other people who are just looking onto the situation, it might look like we’re moving too fast.”
They went to the movies, and barely said a word to each other. “We were so nervous around each oth-
er,” Lewis says. “This was the first time I’d actually gone out on a date with some- body I didn’t know.” Things didn’t improve much with the
next few dates, often spaced out over a week and a half because of their schedul- ing conflicts. When they did find time, they’d spend it watching TV from oppo- site sides of the couch and ending their evenings with an awkward wave. Slowly their comfort level grew, and they began to discover things they had in
something that I even want to venture into,” she explains. “I didn’t feel the need to be trapped with anybody, but I guess that’s ’cause I never met anybody I want- ed to be trapped with.” Wright quickly replied that he wanted to marry her, too. “And I said, ‘I’m not joking,’ she recalls. “And he was like, ‘I’m not joking either.’ I said, ‘Let’s go tomor- row.’ ” “Anytime I’ve ever dated somebody,
I’ve had doubts in my stomach about the person or the situation because of things. With her, none of that has occurred,” Wright says. “My body was just telling
“Wow — who is that? I want to know that girl.”
Samantha Lewis & Shawn Wright “But they don’t feel the connection,”
Wright adds. “They’re not there to wit- ness what we feel.” “I have to tell you something,” Lewis said to her mother. And before she could go any further, her mom guessed that they wanted to marry. After a series of questions about her certainty, Lewis re- ceived her parents’ blessing. Her father even called all his friends to share the news. “I’ve dated a lot of losers,” she ex- plains. “I finally got a winner, and he was all excited about it.” Wright’s mother was also skeptical, es- pecially concerning Lewis’s age. The mu- sician asked his mom to withhold judg- ment until she met his fiancee and her family. She called him the day after that meeting, he recalls, to say, “Shawn, you know I was doubting it all the way down to her house, but as soon as I met her family it changed everything.” Resources were pooled, and the couple planned a May wedding at the Hard Rock Cafe in Washington. When Wright’s fa- ther, who lives in Ohio, said he wouldn’t be able to make it that weekend, they postponed the event for a month. During the lunchtime rush on Friday, June 18, the pair were married on a second-story balcony of the Hard Rock, cheered on by tourists eating chicken fingers and french fries in the dining room below. Surrounded by playlists, guitars,
framed band T-shirts and black and red flowers, the couple celebrated their union with friends, family and a Hard Rock manager who told them that for the rest of their lives, they could eat free at any of the restaurant’s locations on their anniversary. (The plan now is to eat at a different one each year.) “We’re both in this 100 percent, and
that makes all the difference,” Lewis said after the wedding. “I think the problem with most relationships is that either one or both people aren’t in it 100 percent, so somebody’s trying too hard or nobody’s trying enough. We both understand that relationships are work.” “And we’re willing to do that work,”
Wright added.
mccarthye@washpost.com
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