This story first appeared in the Feb. 12, 2010 print edition of The Eagle’s Tale.

Heather and I met while attending WT. We were both doing a show with the WT Opera Department. She was a Puritan girl and I was an 80-year-old man. She looked good with her little bonnet, and I looked great with age lines, a hump back and a cane.

Heather is almost three years older than I and was by far the most beautiful girl in the music department. I thought that she was way out of my league. I did not pursue her because of that fact.

But luckily, she was interested in me.

She asked one of my friends to give me her number. Mysteriously, I never got the number, but my incredible good looks were apparently too irresistible! She finally cornered me in a practice room one day and asked me why I never called her. I fumbled and stuttered my way through some explanation that I didn’t get her number.

We dated for a year and a half before I proposed to her and asked her to be my Puritan girl and I to be her hump-backed old man for the rest of our lives.

Update: The Farrens will be married for 20 years in August.

“It’s interesting how your love grows. When you first meet, you are infatuated with looks and personality and how you behave with each other. After you’ve been married 20 years, you are so much more in love than you were because you love them for who they are, for who you are together.”