Merriam-Webster defines a meet-cute as “a noun referring to a cute, charming or amusing first encounter between romantic partners, often occurring in movies or television.” But these occurrences aren’t limited to scripts written for screens, and real-life people can cross paths in adorable, serendipitous ways.
In the Valentine’s Day spirit, the Greenfield Recorder recently sat down with four Franklin County pairs who shared their stories of meeting through less-than-typical circumstances. Enjoy.
Cady Coleman and Josh Simpson
It started with a phone call.
Catherine “Cady” Coleman, a then-University of Massachusetts Amherst doctoral candidate and aspiring NASA astronaut, was serving in the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, and had returned to the area in December 1990 to defend her dissertation.
She decided to get in touch with an old friend she knew had worked for world-renowned glass artist Josh Simpson and called the phone number she had for that friend.
“And this guy answers the phone,” she recalled.
Simpson had moved to his picturesque Shelburne property in 1976, and was selling his art all over the world by the late 1980s, a time when automatic answering machines were becoming widely used.
“I refused to get one because it just was so impersonal. I didn’t want to have a machine answering for me,” he recalled, adding that he began picking up the phone with elaborate accents to amuse himself when receiving calls at inconvenient hours. “When it’s noon in Germany, it’s 6 a.m. here. And so I began to answer the phone with a fake accent, and I’d pretend to be not me.”
So when Cady called around 8 p.m., he answered with a fictitious accent and gave a name that borrowed from several people he has known over the years. He told the unassuming woman on the other end of the line to give her friend his name when they connected.
“Most people would have just hung up, but Cady was so, so polite that she said, ‘I can’t say that name,'” he recounted. “So I made her practice this name over and over and over. And there is something in my personality that if you believe the story that I’ve told you, I will continue pulling your leg. And so, anyway, we practice this name over and over again, and eventually Cady actually got it and I never broke character. We hung up, and I might never have heard from her again, but she got her friend Amy on the phone.”
“I said, ‘Amy … there is a nut in Josh’s studio,'” Cady chimed in. “[Amy said], ‘It’s just Josh, and he screens his calls at night.'”
So Cady hung up with her friend and decided to call back that jokester.
“Anybody that fun should have somebody be funny back,” she said. “So I called him back and I said I was from [the] Russian KGB … and that we had numerous reports of glass breaking in the area.”
The two eventually broke character and continued talking, and Josh invited Cady to visit his studio. Encouraged by another glass artist she knew, she drove to Shelburne the next day.
“She walked in and, for me, it was really love at first sight. It took Cady several months to come around to that point of view,” said Josh, 76. “And, actually, interestingly enough, she came to visit, [I] gave her a tour of the studio, and we chatted for a while, and she mentioned that she was thinking of applying to be an astronaut.
“So she said that and I just thought, ‘God, she’s really sweet, she’s really pleasant, she’s gorgeous,'” he continued, “‘but she’s obviously delusional.'”
But, in fact, Cady was selected from more than 1,000 applicants in 1992. She took flights on NASA space shuttles in 1995 and 1999, and launched from Kazakhstan to the International Space Station in December 2010, returning to Earth in May 2011.
Following years of a long-distance relationship, Cady and Josh got married on the Shelburne property in October 1997. The couple also share a son together.
“It sort of speaks to, I think, people who are sort of optimistic about who people might be,” said Cady, 65. “You have to let people surprise you, because people often are so much more than you might think. If you think you know, you don’t know enough — there’ll be more.”
Mary Canning and Ingo Winzer
Being widowed at 43 was not something Mary Canning could have expected. But her first husband, Dr. Harold Goldman, died of cancer in December 2004, after being diagnosed the year before. This led her on a journey of healing and she found peace and solace in beekeeping.
She founded the Follow the Honey apiary (www.followthehoney.com) and met Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jack Wyatt at a party around the time she was getting the business off the ground. She delivered some honey to him in Sudbury in 2008 and the expert in retinal implants invited her to a holiday party, which she attended in hopes of seeing Eric Chivian, a mutual friend she hadn’t seen in a year or two. By the time she arrived, Chivian had left — but Ingo Winzer, one of Wyatt’s Sigma Chi fraternity brothers, had not.
“She went looking for Eric, and she found me instead,” said Ingo, 78. “Sorry, baby.”
The two soon found themselves in the same group conversation.
“She finished her glass of red wine. I said, ‘Could I get you another glass?'” Ingo recalled. “I think that was the first thing I said to her.”
After talking for a while, Ingo excused himself to secretly cancel dinner plans with a woman in his building so he could spend more time chatting with Mary. The following day, Mary emailed Ingo to say it was nice meeting him and that perhaps their paths would cross in the new year.
“He immediately emailed back, ‘Let’s cross paths,'” she recalled.
They had some Skype conversations before meeting up at the Abe & Louie’s steakhouse in Boston. Canning mentioned they both ordered large steaks, and Ingo gave his leftovers to her.
“I thought, ‘That’s so sweet! What a hunter-gatherer!'” she said.
The two then went out for drinks at the Top of the Hub restaurant on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Tower to continue talking. There was an undeniable spark. That June, they traveled to Scotland together for 10 days to hike the West Highland Way.
“There’s no better way to get to know someone than when there’s no blow dryers and showers,” Mary said.
What started as a casual courtship quickly blossomed into something much more. Ingo proposed on the Fourth of July in 2010, and they were married that New Year’s Eve.
A month before they met, Ingo had gotten divorced following 26 years of marriage and had zero intentions of tying the knot again.
“I wasn’t planning to meet anyone else,” he said at the pair’s quaint home in Orange on Tully Pond on Jan. 16, the 17th anniversary of their first official date. “And I, certainly, was absolutely sure I’d never, ever get married again — ever.”
Mary had felt the same way but figured it was meant to be, as she had just gotten back from India when she met Ingo and he had recently returned from Africa.
“Life is for the living,” said Mary, 65. “I didn’t have an agenda.”
Kelley Jewell and Sam Guerin
One late summer day in 2015, Kelley Jewell’s landlord texted her:
“You’ve met a few of the people touring the downstairs apartment. Any thoughts on who should get it?”
For Kelley, then single in her early 20s and yearning for the possibility of love, it was an easy choice — the cute, quiet artist with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. So she typed back, “Sam is cute.” Then, the landlord replied: “lol just this once, Kelley.”
Sam Guerin, a Buffalo native, had just graduated from art school in Boston and was new to Turners Falls, where he had moved for an internship. But Kelley, who grew up in Shelburne, knew the backroads, swimming holes and bars, so she figured she could introduce him to western Massachusetts.
She engineered hallway “coincidences,” baking cookies and apple crisp and leaving them at his door, eagerly awaiting the return of a dirty dish on her doorstep. She would send in her cat, Barney, who loved scratching and howling at Sam’s door until she had to “rescue” him.
Slowly, Sam came out of his shell.
“My telling is always a little inverted, because I was completely oblivious to the schemes that she was manifesting,” recounted Sam, 32.
“I used that to my advantage all the time, because Sam was so cute,” Kelley chimed in.
She even “accidentally” unplugged her record player on more than occassion, just so Sam would have to help fix it. They started off as friends but there was a shift in October. And the, just after Halloween, she invited him for drinks at a bar. After a few margaritas, the two got the idea to take their half-rotten jack-o’-lanterns down to the canal and throw them in.
Standing in the center of the canal bridge, they plunged their soggy gourds into the water and Kelley looked at Sam and said, “You know, this would be a really good time to kiss me.” The two shared a peck and call that their “smooch-iversary.” The rest, as they say, is history.
The two eloped in 2022 and now have four moves, two states, and a couple of cats under their belt, and they recently bought their first house in Millers Falls.
And it all began with a simple text.
Andrew and Barbara Smith
Andrew Smith and his wife, Barbara, didn’t have a “Lady and the Tramp” moment, though their meet-cute did involve dogs.
The two animal lovers were walking their canines when they met in Washington Park in downtown Albany in December 1986. Barbara was working as an emergency room nurse at Albany Medical Center and Andrew was earning his master’s degree in atmospheric chemistry from the State University of New York at Albany.
“I know for me, I was instantly struck with this woman and her dog and everything,” Andrew recounted. He remembers having to embarrisingly cancel plans shortly after they met because he had mistakenly double-booked the date for the night before a crucial exam.
“But we ended just walking the dogs frequently,” he said. “Then, one day … we just knew we were going to get married. I don’t know how to describe it.”
Andrew, now 65, proposed at the Lark Street Tavern in Albany in the spring of 1987 and they were married on July 21 of that year.
“The funny thing is, we’ve been together so long that, come July 28, 29, we’ll go, ‘Oh, our anniversary was last week!'” he said with a laugh.
They had to elope at Albany City Hall because Andrew’s parents did not approve of the union.
Barbara eventually got her master’s degree in nursing and became an evening shift supervisor at Albany Medical Center and then earned her nurse practitioner certificate. The Smiths raised their three children in an Albany suburb and moved to Orange in April 2020, shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Barbara’s family has owned a Lake Mattawa camp since the 1950s.
“We had everything in our house,” Barbara said of raising her family. “We’ve had every animal you can think of.”
This love of animals was passed down to their children — their son is a veterinarian and one of their daughters is a veterinary technician by trade and works for IDEXX in Maine. Also, their other daughter, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, owns a dog.
Andrew was elected to the Orange Selectboard in 2021, and he resigned in late January to become assistant town clerk. He will handle marriage licenses, death certificates, dog licenses and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and has offered to take over the responsibility of maintaining the municipal website. He also said he will likely undergo the certification process to become a notary public.
“I want him to do what he wants to do,” Barbara said.