Jamie & Scott's Wedding

For your reading pleasure…

From Scott’s Perspective:

I worked at River City Studio at the time. One of the things we did there was promotions for Union Station’s special exhibits. At the time (winter of 2009-2010), Union Station had an Andy Warhol exhibit they were running. As an employee of River City, I got some free tickets to go see the Warhol exhibit, which Jamie and I planned to go to on Friday, January 8th and make it a date night. Earlier in the week, I went to the library and checked out 3 of the largest books I could find about Andy Warhol. Two nights before our date night, I pull out the books on the sofa and start reading them while Jamie was relaxing. She thought I was crazy. I claimed I just wanted to be well-versed in Warhol information before we went to see the artwork. Art is often better with context, after all. But this was all just a ruse.

As a part of our date night with Warhol, we also planned to have dinner at Pierponts, a very classy restaurant inside Union Station. Jamie was not as excited about this part of the plan; Pierponts was too expensive, we’re trying to watch our money. Maybe we should just go for a nice brunch on Sunday when they have half price wine. I was determined to take her out to a nice dinner, and eventually, she relented to that fact.

Over my lunch break on Friday, I jetted down to Union Station to check out the seating options in the Grand Hall, just outside of Pierponts. There was this nice player piano right next to some benches. Perfect! Jamie loves pianos, and the songs it was playing weren’t awful or corny or anything.

Side note 1: at some point that Fall, Jamie observed aloud that we don’t have many pictures of the two of us printed off; they were all on our computers.

Side note 2: there is an Amtrak station inside Union Station too.

So, that night for date night, Jamie and I head to Union Station to have dinner and go see some art. I take along my office bag, but instead of having my computer in it, I have all the large Warhol books. This is ostensibly so I can pull out books to help with the context while we view the exhibit. As we’re getting out of the car to head to the restaurant, Jamie protests about the book bag. Why would we want those at the exhibit?? Feeling very embarrassed by her boyfriend with the bag of huge books, she relents, and we go have dinner.

One our way to Peirponts, we walk through the Great Hall. At this point in the evening, the sun is going down and its getting a little dark in there. As we walk past the player piano, Jamie, being playful, says something like “Don’t you think it’s a little spooky in here?” Obviously referencing the dark cavernous hall and a piano that looks like its operated by a ghost. I obviously disagreed and completely denied that sentiment and rushed her to dinner.

Dinner was great. The wine and the pork chop… so good. We spent a lot of our time commenting on other couples that were out on dates that night. The most memorable couple was what seemed like a divorced Johnson County woman having a fling with what looked like a slightly older college professor who had never been married.

On our way out of the restaurant, I pull a wrapped present out of the book bag and give it to Jamie. If you aren’t aware, Jamie LOVES unwrapping presents. We sat down on the bench next to the piano and she unwrapped a small photo album I had put together of all of our photos together. Jamie mentioned how all of these pictures were ones we had uploaded to the internet. I noted how all pictures get uploaded to the internet these days, I had no other photos to choose from!

About this time, an Amtrak bum, complete with out-of-control hair, huge traveling backpack and a guitar case, comes and sits just a couple feet away from us on the next bench over.

Eventually Jamie got to the pages where interspersed with the photos were 3×5 cards with messages that were lead-ups to my proposal. She started to get the picture as some of the last pages where filled with copies of the pictures we took standing in front of a wedding chapel in Vegas. She finally turned the last page, and I swung around down onto one knee and proposed. She said yes. We kissed. We talked while I remained on one knee far longer than was comfortable for the knees. After that we sat and enjoyed the Great Hall and just took in the moment for a good hour.

Later on, we ran into a co-worker of mine, Stacie Tindle. Apparently, she had wandered by at exactly the crucial moment when I had swung down to my knee. She had told her friend, “Oh, there’s Scottish, let’s go say hi.” But her friend had the presence of mind to tell her to maybe come back later, it looked like an important moment. Stacie had thought I had dropped something.

The rest, as they say, is history.

From Jamie’s Perspective:

I had no idea. We’d talked about it getting married someday, but I truthfully didn’t think he’d even looked at rings. Whenever we would pass a jewelry store, he would get really nervous and would never want to go in. I found out later, that was because he had already started shopping for a ring and he didn’t want me to know!

The first week of January, Scott asked me if I wanted to do a date night on Friday. Through the holidays, we hadn’t gotten a lot of alone time, so I was happy that we were finally going to have a nice night out. We had tickets to the Andy Warhol exhibit at Union Station and Scott wanted to go to Pierpont’s for dinner. Pierpont’s is pretty pricy, and I didn’t think we needed to spend that much on dinner, especially when there wasn’t a special occasion (foreshadowing?). Scott was determined and was finally able to convince me by telling me he had a coupon.

The night before, Scott took out these huge coffee table books from the library to study up on Warhol. I was trying to watch a movie but Scott kept enthusiastically calling out random facts about Andy Warhol. “Did you know that Andy Warhol coined the phrase ’15 minutes of fame’? Did you know someone paid $100 million for a painting called Eight Elvises?” etc. I thought he’d gone a little crazy, but then again, Scott has always been fully dedicated to anything he sets his mind to. I just figured this was one of those.

The next day, we both got off work and rushed to get to dinner on time. In the parking garage, Scott takes out his computer bag. I was like, “No way, mister. I know you’re attached to that computer, but there is no way you are taking that into a nice restaurant.” He told me that the bag contained the Warhol books. In my mind, I couldn’t figure out how or why he would want to reference huge coffee table books in an art exhibit, but I just finally decided to let it go.

Apparently, I’m a little difficult to propose to… Not knowing that Scott was planning to ask me to marry him in Union Station, I couldn’t help but comment how creepy the old train station was as we walked through. An old player piano was playing and an antique train set was in the corner with eery lighting. Scott was definitely not agreeing with me, so I kept talking about all of the creepy factors to try and convince him. I think I even brought up the old Union Station Massacre that I’d just been reading about. Oops!

The good news is that I didn’t deter him and after dinner Scott became really quiet. We had been having a great time at dinner, but now he was acting weird. I figured that he was just in a food coma and would come out of it soon. After all of the good food and wine, I was ready for a nap myself.

That’s when Scott pulled out the present. Yay present! I didn’t know what it was for, but wasted no time opening it. It was a photo album with pictures of us. I thought that he was really sweet for putting this together. I’d mentioned before that we had very few printed pictures and I thought that this random present was perfect. Then, as I kept flipping the pages, I noticed a couple of them had words written in… As I flipped, Scott’s handwriting told me that he loved me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. Then I flipped to the page that said “Will you marry me?” I looked up from the book and Scott was on his knee with a ring box.

Honestly, I don’t exactly remember my reaction. I think there was confusion, then tears, then I think there was a “yes” somewhere in there. The rest of the night was kind of a blur. All I know is that I am marrying the most caring and compassionate man who also happens to be my best friend.