A Winning Love Story

By Shannon Hicks

“It’s not every woman who thinks her husband might be an axe murderer the night they met.”

That is the opening line of an essay Lois Barber submitted to a contest called Tell Us Your Love Story recently offered by Sal e Pepe Restaurant. It’s a good enough lead, in fact, that it caught the attention of restaurateur Angelo Marini and his panel of judges, and the remaining writing held everyone’s interest enough so that Mrs Barber’s essay was selected as the winner of the competition.

For her winning efforts, Mrs Barber and her husband Jim were treated to a free dinner, which they enjoyed last Saturday night at the Main Street South restaurant.

“It was kind of a belated birthday dinner for Jim and an early anniversary treat for both of us,” Mrs Barber said this week. Lois and Jim will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary on May 10.

“I thought it was unique, it was such a happenstance how they met,” Angelo Marini said of Mrs Barber’s story. “I also loved the way she started it. That was cool.”

Sal e Pepe hosted the competition in February, encouraging its regular customers as well as those who may be unfamiliar with the restaurant to take a chance on a free dinner. Mrs Barber found out about the contest by reading about it in The Newtown Bee.

“It was just a little blurb, but I started writing right away,” she said this week. “I’d only eaten there once before, during a Christmas party with a woman’s club, but I really enjoyed it.

“Right now I’m collecting unemployment so we don’t have the cash to eat out, so this would be a welcome treat,” she added.

Mrs Barber’s story tells about the night she met Jim Barber. She and some friends were in Manhattan and were approached by a man with a camera. What started as a questionable decision by some young single women who agree to go with one (three, it turned out) strangers to a loft developed into a story of a first date between one of the women and the man with the camera. (See sidebar for Mrs Barber’s full story).

After the February 28 contest deadline, Mr Marini and his panel of judges — wife Renia and sons Matthew, 12, and Benjamin, 10 — went through the dozen entries that had been received. Most entries came from members of Sal e Pepe’s Rewards Club, a frequent buyer program, and those writers each earned additional credits in their accounts. Ironically, Mrs Barber is not member of the Rewards Club.

The group read through all the essays and placed them in the order of their preference.

“It was unanimous. We all liked this one best,” said Mr Marini, who said he decided to try running a contest to bond with some of his customers.

“There were a lot of cool stories,” he said, “Even though we were unanimous in our decision, there were good stories and it was nice to be allowed into the private lives of some of our customers.”

Among the other stories that caught his interest was one from a woman, recently divorced, whose mother is a real estate agent in lower Fairfield County. Her mother was showing a Greenwich house to a male client and in talking, the realtor and the client realized that the client had known the realtor’s daughter a few years ago. The mother arranged for her daughter and the client to meet again, and the two are currently dating.

In another story, a man waiting to board a flight at an airport noticed an attractive woman, but was too busy preparing for a meeting while waiting to board his plane that he did not consider approaching her. Once on the plane, however, it turned out he was seated next to the same woman he had noticed in the terminal. She asked to borrow a pen. Fast forward to today, and those two people are married.

Mrs Barber was notified a few weeks ago by Mr Marini that her essay had been selected as the winner for Tell Us Your Love Story. She and Jim decided to split the time between his birthday and their anniversary, and enjoyed a great dinner out this past weekend.

The Barbers enjoyed a “great, wonderful” meal, Mrs Barber said this week. She described her entrée as cannelloni stuffed with veal, which was so plentiful that she enjoyed one of those cannelloni on Tuesday while composing a thank you note to Mr Marini and his staff.

“The second best thing about Jim not being an axe murderer (the first being that I wasn’t hacked to death),” she wrote, “was winning a free dinner for two at your wonderful restaurant.”

The Barbers also got a kick out of meeting one of the Sal e Pepe waitresses.

“She came up to me and said she [had similar thoughts] about the man who is now her husband,” said Mrs Barber. “Here I am, thinking I was all unique, but I guess that happens. There is a worry, sometimes, when you meet someone at a bar, or out somewhere, and then you find yourself going out with really a total stranger and thinking ‘Who is this person?’

“Fortunately we have a very happy ending.”

How We Met

By Lois Barber

It’s not every woman who thinks her husband might be an axe murderer the night they met.

It was in the late 1970s and the Punk Rock movement had just hit New York. I was standing outside a Manhattan hot spot called Max’s Kansas City with four other young women, three of which were really “punked-out.”

A young man stopped and told us he would like to photograph us. He explained that he was a photographer and his loft was right around the corner. All those cautionary tales your parents drum into you “Don’t go anywhere with strangers!” seemed to have flown right out the window when the opportunity to be photographed like a model presents itself. The young man did not tell us that he was with two other male friends, who had walked about half a block behind us as we walked to the loft. As we entered the building the two other guys stepped in quickly behind us, and bolted the outside door.

As I took the elevator up to the fourth floor, I just kept thinking, “So this is how my life ends. I’m murdered and chopped up into pieces.” When the doors opened onto what was indeed a photography studio, my knees almost buckled with relief. (The other women also told me the same thing — they thought we were going to be killed. Yet, not one of us tried pushing the alarm button or tried to escape when we were right by the front door that led out onto Broadway, a busy city street.)

After my initial first dark impression of him, the photographer, named Jim, turned out to be a great guy. My feelings of him went from “He’s an axe murderer” to “What a doll! Imagine marrying someone like this!”

I went back the next week to see the photo proofs and Jim asked me out on a date. We’ll be married 30 years this coming May 10.

The story does not end there. Years ago, the New York Post ran a contest for the most unique “How we met story.” The prize was dinner for two and a night out on the town. Our story came in second.

The winner was a Jewish couple who met during WWII. He was in a concentration camp and she passed food to him through the fence and kept him alive. I found out last year in a national news story that the man made their story up!

A book was written about their love story, they were on Oprah, and a movie was about to be made when a fact-finder for the production company told the movie’s producers that the story was a hoax. The layout of the death camp made it impossible for anyone on the outside to get near those imprisoned. I lost to a liar!

It would be so great to finally get a free dinner for two for our unique love story, which is a true one. I still have the photo of the night we met on my bedroom dresser.