Oh my lord, this is cute. This is an article from the New York Observer in 2005 about couples that are soon to be married. John Green and the Yeti (Sarah Urist Green) are the first ones. Their section of the article reads as follows:
John Green and Sarah Urist
Met: September 1993
Engaged: April 22, 2005
Projected Wedding Date: May 20, 2006
John Green, a published author at 28 (grrrr), is marrying Sarah Urist, 26, a candidate for a master’s in art history at Columbia. Mr. Green’s coming-of-age novel, Looking for Alaska, was published by Dutton last spring and is being turned into a screenplay by The O.C.’s Josh Schwartz, who will also direct the project.
Just call the couple the Marissa and Ryan of Indian Springs, Ala., where they met at prep school. “I knew him as a character,” said the bouncy, brunette Ms. Urist, remembering a skinny blond kid who reeked of cigarettes and tried a bit too hard to be cool. “Everybody knew who John Green was.”
“I only remember that you were the hot ninth grader,” Mr. Green said.
“Ewww, gross!” she complained.
They re-encountered one another eight years later, having both uprooted to Chicago; he was dating her boxing partner, who fortuitously was about to move to Italy. The three met in the Windy City’s lone bagel café, the Bagel. “I thought you were gorgeous,” Mr. Green said, addressing his fiancée. “Hotter, dare I say it, than in the ninth grade.” He was also impressed by her grammar and punctuation skills. “If she said ‘Civil War–era,’ you could almost hear the N-dash between ‘war’ and ‘era,’” he said.
Ms. Urist liked him but worried that he was a bit too skinny. “I’d been malnourished,” Mr. Green said. Still, they struck up a cyber-correspondence. “Through her e-mails, you just got this portrait of this searingly intelligent woman,” he said, “and I was just incredibly frustrated that I couldn’t make it happen.”
In desperation, he asked her to take his author photo, showing up well-groomed at her apartment for an amateur shoot. While Ms. Urist was preoccupied with the camera, he turned the conversation to the guy he thought she was dating. “Oh, I broke up with him three months ago!” she said.
“Does that mean I can pursue you now?” Mr. Green asked. She nodded and smiled. Smooch time!
They began spending more and more time together, as Ms. Urist anxiously awaited graduate-school acceptances. One evening, Mr. Green pasted a note to her mailbox reading “Don’t check your mail!” and placed a rose on each step of the four flights of stairs leading to her apartment. A sign clarified: “If you’re not Sarah, these flowers obviously aren’t for you.”
Alas, his elaborate plans were upstaged when Ms. Urist got her Columbia acceptance from FedEx before coming home. “My news was trumped,” Mr. Green said.
But when Ms. Urist saw the flowers, she sensed something special was up. “John Green! You dirty trickster!” she yelled. Her boyfriend was waiting at the top of the landing, bearing a ring the couple had chosen together from Stanton Harris Inc. jewelers: three adjacent emerald-cut diamonds, totaling just over a carat, set in platinum.
“I thought, because John’s a writer, there would be some kind of speech prepared,” Ms. Urist said, but Mr. Green just blurted out: “I love you so much … will you marry me?”
They will wed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Ms. Urist’s hometown of Birmingham, with a reception to follow at the local art museum featuring country music, crawfish cakes and fried green tomatoes (bring Pepto!). “We decided to embrace the Southern theme,” said the bride-to-be.
It’s a world apart from the Upper West Side neighborhood where they’ve found a charming beginner’s-luck one-bedroom in a brownstone. “I think people just get completely accustomed to it,” Mr. Green said, “but every 10 or 15 steps you get a clear whiff of pee.”
