By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Few people get to do something that they love for three decades, let alone do two such somethings. So I feel blessed that I have been married to the same woman, and worked for the same law firm, for 30 years. They both came into my life at the same time.
A few years after graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1983, I was just finishing law school at the University of Utah when I met, at church of all places, a young woman named Vicki Comeau. She was a student leader at the St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center, a Catholic university parish run by the Dominican priests and where we both attended. I was about to start a new job at the Salt Lake City law firm of Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough.
Brimming with confidence, when I met I suggested we get together for lunch. With no business card yet, and in the pre-cell-phone era, I handed her one of my checking account deposit slips that had my name and phone number on it. She didn’t deposit anything, but she called me, it worked!
We met for lunch at a local piano bar called “Harveys.” Apparently, I did well enough on that first date that she agreed to a second, and then a third, both which mainly involved her tagging along on my part time hobby of watching and reviewing movies for a local weekly newspaper. We saw a lot of movies together.
Some of them were awful. One was a mindless and bloody Sylvester Stallone detective movie called Cobra. The film was so bad that my review urged it to slither back into a hole. Luckily, Vicki blamed Stallone, and not me, for this particularly bad date.
We reviewed some good movies too, like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Top Gun, Moonstruck, and Raising Arizona. And then one day we watched a movie called Dirty Dancing (which also recently celebrated a 30-year anniversary). We were smitten…with each other, of course, but also with the movie soundtrack.
It is interesting to listen to those songs now and realize how well they described our blossoming relationship. Bruce Channel sang about the initial encounters: “Hey, hey baby, I want to know if you’ll be my girl…” The Ronettes described the growing bond, “So won’t you say you love me, I’ll make you so proud of me, We’ll make ’em turn their heads every place we go.”
Patrick Swayze waxed poetic about the impact of love: “She’s like the wind…She’s taken my heart but she doesn’t know what she’s done.” And Eric Carmen crooned out “Hungry Eyes,” singing: “I’ve been meaning to tell you; I’ve got this feelin’ that won’t subside; I look at you and I fantasize….” I’ll let you figure out what that one meant on your own.
And then, of course, there was the most popular song from Dirty Dancing. More on that in a moment.
Maybe we watched too many movies, because we unintentionally turned our engagement story into a basic rom-com plot. She asked me to marry her, and I said maybe (poorly played Mike). She left town. A few months later, under the stars on the beach in San Diego (well played Mike), I asked her to marry me. She said maybe. We finally had a meeting of the minds and wed on August 12, 1989 at Salt Lake’s Cathedral of the Madeleine.
There were lots of warm feelings around that wedding. I mean really warm…ours was one of the last nuptials there before the place got air conditioning. In the words of Robin Williams from another movie we reviewed, Good Morning, Vietnam, it was “hot! Damn hot!”
Of course, Dirty Dancing supplied the song for our first dance together at the reception as a married couple: “Time of My Life” performed by Bill Medley (one half of the Righteous Brothers) and Jennifer Warnes. We did a swing, and not the infamous lift (I’m no Swayze), but we otherwise moved in perfect sync to the famous lyrics: “Now I’ve had the time of my life, No, I never felt like this before.”
I did not fully realize was happening back then, of course, but thirty years and three kids (and many more film soundtracks) later, it’s clear we got the Hollywood ending. Our first dance was not just a wedding song. It was a prediction of what was to come. My friends the Utah Trappist monks called it a vocation, but it started at the movies.
Dearest Vicki, despite the crazy and unpredictable rollercoaster ride that life put us on, it really has been the time of my life: “Yes I swear it’s the truth, And I owe it all to you!”
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
Hello Mr Obrien,
I’m with Mountain Arts and Music in Ogden Valley, and we are working in partnership with Weber State Anthropology Dept to do an oral history of people’s experiences with the Huntsville Monastery. I’m not sure if you contacted us about the film screening we had in April, but this oral history project has come from that experience.
We would love to include your experiences in our project. Would you be interested in being interviewed for our project? I know you are writing a book about the Monastery, and perhaps some of what we collect would be interesting to you in your endeavor.
If there is anyone else who would like to share their experiences with the monks or the monastery, we’d love to include your stories. The interviews will be transcribed and archived at Weber State, and we are developing plans to make them into a podcast. They will be available to anyone interested in the lives and impact the monastery has made on the community. more information can be found at http://www.mountainartsandmusic.org.