There’s no other way to describe it. Ours was a semi-long-distance, whirlwind romance. I was in Los Angeles working each day on Entertainment Tonight. Connie was in Palm Springs filming P.S. I Luv U. During the week we did one of two things. Either I would drive to her shooting location in Palm Springs after I finished ET in the early afternoon, or she would drive the two and a half hours to LA in order, at the very least, to be home two or three times a week when Gib woke for breakfast.
On the days I drove out, when Connie’s work day ended, we’d sit and talk for an hour or two and then I would drive back to the Paramount lot, where ET was taped, around 2:00 a.m. I would sleep on my office floor until the producers called me to Stage 28 to shoot that day’s show. On the nights Connie drove home, I would keep her on the phone while she was driving so I could confirm that she hadn’t fallen asleep. I also used that time to play her pieces of a song I was composing called “Concetta,” which was ostensibly my musical description of her personality. It grew over the days and weeks of our courtship, from verse to chorus to full orchestration.
Thanksgiving weekend 1991, mere months into our courtship, I suggested to Connie that we spend Thanksgiving weekend in Carmel, California. There was a great opportunity to serve the homeless that week and it was a very romantic area.
I also had another motive. I knew that I knew that I knew it was time to put a ring on her finger. I was not sure what her answer would be. Ours had been an intense, albeit hyperdriven, courtship. However, we had both been married before. We knew what we did and did not want in a partner. Still, I’ve never played poker with Connie for the same reason I was unsure what her reaction would be to an engagement ring. Italian girl from the Bronx. No tells. Hard to read? Yep.
When we arrive at our dinner destination, Spadero’s Italian Restaurant on the Friday after Thanksgiving, there’s a sign on the door of the restaurant, along Cannery Row, which Connie immediately spots.
“Oh no, it’s closed for a private party,” Connie says, disappointed.
“Let’s go in anyway. Maybe it was from yesterday,” I say to her, opening the door.
When we walk in, there is no party. The place is completely empty, save for restaurant staff and a string quartet in the corner. They are performing a song she immediately recognizes. It’s her song, “Concetta.” As the violins and cellos rise in crescendo, the maître d’ escorts us to our seats by the window overlooking Monterey Bay. I grip Connie’s hand tightly as we walk through the tables covered in white cloth. It’s soon evident to her that no one else will be dining in the restaurant that evening. The room is ours. I’m hoping this Don Juan–esque gesture has not been too forward. She doesn’t try to sprint for the exit, so I take that as a positive sign.
With the sun setting over our shoulders, we laugh and marvel at the velocity of our courtship. Dinner comes and goes, and before we know it, the dishes and coffee are cleared, night has fallen, and I’m hoping that what is about to happen next isn’t too premature. My plan this entire time has been to conclude our dinner with the proposal. (Earlier that week I had phoned her widowed mom, Marianna, in New York to ask for Connie’s hand. She was wonderfully flustered and gave her consent.) Suddenly the specter that Connie might say no taps my brain. I can feel the version of me from the limo ride back to Palm Springs barely six months earlier starting to surface. I quickly shake it off and get down on one knee. I reach into my pocket for the ring and formally ask Connie to spend the rest of her life with me.
She says yes. I ask her to repeat it. Yes.
There was one final coup de grace to cement the yes from Connie when I popped the question. I had planned a fifteen-minute fireworks display to be launched from a barge over the water. As weather would have it, however, a dense fog had rolled in over the bay a few hours before dinner and the fireworks company had called to tell me we’d have to delay the fireworks to the following day.
So the next night we return to the restaurant. I take Connie’s hand and lead her out past the restaurant’s deck and onto the sand at the water’s edge. With a signal from a tiny flashlight I’ve pulled from my pocket, a small barge, floating just offshore, erupts in spectacular fireworks. Connie is properly awestruck and in that Bronx brogue, she screams over the explosions in the air, “These are mine? These are for me?”
People are now running from the street to the sandy shoreline, eager to enjoy the fireworks. Connie reacts again, smiling and this time screaming and claiming ownership of our public display: “Hey, these are mine! I’m sharing them with you, but these are for me!”
The following year on April 4, 1992, Connie and I are married, and a partnership is formed that nearly three decades later catapults us together as a couple into the world of supernatural healing.