Meet-Cute

Tell me how you lovebirds met; plus, Justin and Amanda Leonard's romance, Claire Tabouret's controversial stained glass, American Woman(?), and a few things I'm enjoying.

Hi readers,

One thing about me: I'm a sucker for a how-they-met story. It's probably because I like those segments in "When Harry Met Sally" when the older couples talk about how they met and fell in love. One of my favorite lines from those bits is when Mrs. Ben Small of the Coney Island Smalls says she knew Ben was the one because, "I knew the way you know about a good melon." The older I get, the funnier that line is. I don't know why. Sometimes I even imagine a woman in the mythical supermarket "guy aisle" inspecting and sniffing and flicking a prospective love, and then sticking the one that smells and sounds and feels just right in her cart.

But I also like real-life love stories where the love almost didn't happen because of some misunderstanding, or missed meet-up, or person who had misgivings about allowing themselves to be vulnerable with someone else for whatever reason. I like ones with chaos and comedy, and hell, even the enemies-to-lovers trope, because, you know, who would have thought?

Anyway, it's Valentine's Day Eve, and I wrote a fun feature about a cute couple – golfer Justin Leonard and his wife Amanda – that likes use their powers for good, something that's crucially important right now. I hope you enjoy the piece, which begins below, and continues at the link beneath it, so be sure to click through.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend ahead.

Be my Valentine,

Paige

Meet The Leonards

Justin and Amanda Leonard on golf, love, and giving back to those in need

Justin and Amanda Leonard’s origin story has all the makings of a Hollywood romantic comedy. He was a Texas-born PGA Tour golfer who spent 25 to 30 weeks of any given year on the road, and she was a marketing and public relations executive for a startup that had just been sold. After cashing out her stock options, Amanda purchased a townhouse two doors down from Justin’s in Dallas. Soon, mutual friends began conspiring to set them up.

You know what they say about the best-laid plans: they often go awry. Justin was usually gone for weeks at a time on tour, and Amanda had just gotten out of a relationship, so she wasn’t eager to start anything new. When they were finally in the same place at the same time, Justin asked Amanda if she wanted to grab a beer sometime. It seemed harmless enough, so she said “okay” once, and then twice after that first beer never came to pass.

The thing is, Justin never wanted to go for a beer with Amanda at all. He wanted Amanda to let her guard down so he could eventually ask her to dinner, which he eventually did. Fortunately for him, Amanda said yes, and they had such a good time on that first date, they talked until 2 a.m.

“I called my mom the next day and she asked me about my date,” Amanda recalls. “And I told her, ‘I have no idea if I will see this guy again, if we’ll be friends, or if he’s the guy I’m supposed to marry, but there was something different about last night.’ It was like nothing else I had ever encountered before.”

What happened next? Please click here for the rest of the story, which ran in this month's Jupiter Magazine.

Writing prompt: Think about your favorite love story and write about it. Or, write about a romance that didn't have a happy ending, and discover how you dodged a bullet there, my friend.

You've got to invest in the world, you've got to read, you've got to go to art galleries, you've got to find out the names of plants. You've got to start to love the world and know about the whole genius of the human race. We're amazing people.

-- Vivienne Westwood.

Endnotes

Our Lady of Changes

Many of you know by now that I get really geeked out about things. One of those things is stained glass. Over the course of the past year I've been fortunate to see a lot of it, some of it while I was ogling the restoration work at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, which had reopened after a devastating fire in April 2019. After the fire, French president Emmanuel Macron said the rebuild would include a contemporary gesture. After kicking around modern addition ideas like a glass spire, or a 300-foot carbon fiber flame, it was decided that six undamaged stained glass windows from the mid-nineteenth century would be replaced with something new. "It's not very French to change stuff," says Claire Tabouret, the 44-year-old once-relatively-unknown artist who was selected to create the works. The Guardian ran a piece on Tabouret, her glorious work, and the drama aroused by putting something new in an 863-year-old landmark, which you can read by clicking here. “When you live in a country with so much history, so much architecture and heritage you cannot just freeze time,” she says. “The question is, how do we create a harmonious dialogue between new layers in buildings like Notre Dame that are made of layers? If you stop those layers it makes no sense in my opinion.”

American Girl...You'll Be A Woman Soon

If you're around my age, and you have a kid who is roughly in their early twenties, and you have overzealously well-meaning grandparents, then you definitely have an American Girl doll or two stowed away in a closet somewhere. Now that American Girl is 40, the brand is taking a peek at what kind of woman one of its original three dolls – Samantha – has become. Later this year, it will be releasing Samantha: The Next Chapter by New York Times-bestselling author Fiona Davis. The story is a riches-to-rags tale, written for grownups, about 25-year-old Sam, the suffragette shopgirl who is grappling with the fact that her posh childhood home and inheritance have been stolen, and so New York City isn't the same when you don't have money. Having read the OG Samantha book for youth, I'm kind of curious about her mixing with the criminal underbelly, and learning about workers' rights. On the other hand, I feel like maybe American Girl should learn from Star Wars and realize that not everything needs to be spun off and explored to death.

A few things I'm enjoying

Binge-watching "Hijack" (with Idris Elba, ooh la la) on Apple TV. Cozy waffle-weave joggers from COMOCO cotton. An early dinner and a book talk with one of my favorites. Everybody who got to brag about being sugarcane in Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show.

Please consider...

...making a donation to the Immigrant Defense Project, which fights the targeting of immigrants for mass imprisonment and deportation. Thank you!