Nothing in Common--Except Love
It’s a classic oil-meets-water story. He likes earth tones. She likes brights. He never accumulates debt. She’s a credit nightmare. He’s the only person her age she knows who didn’t protest the Vietnam War. He’s a homebody; she’s traveled through Europe with a backpack. And they’re made for each other.
“He’s the guy my mother would have wanted me to marry, but back then I wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. He’s the ultimate nerd,” says Sandi Strome, 47, who met Stephen Bell, 49, two years ago through a Jewish computer dating service. While she joined the service to meet eligible Jewish men, he joined because it was cheap, “only $60 compared to the $2,500 other services charge,” he says.
Proving again that opposites attract, Sandi and Steve, both of West Hills, married, each for the second time, in a traditional Jewish ceremony at the House of Books at Brandeis-Bardin Institute in Simi Valley on Tuesday evening. Tuesday is the only day mentioned twice in the book of Genesis, and, according to the biblical story of the creation, it is the day that God separated the land from the sea and started green growing things. For Sandi and Steve, it represents the first spring and a new beginning.
Their first date hardly portended things would go so well. Steve, who owns a clothing store in downtown Los Angeles, invited Sandi, a nurse case manager for the VA Hospital in West Los Angeles, to dinner at a deli. When he picked her up, she was wearing a Bullwinkle T-shirt and jeans. He wore navy slacks and a yellow button-down. She’d asked him to bring a rope to help get the mourning doves out of a tree in her backyard. She had called the Department of Agriculture about the birds, a protected species, and was told to tie a rope to their branch and pull on it a few times in the night to encourage them to move on. Sandi thought the rope-hanging was a perfect job for a man. When Steve looked at the tree and figured he’d have to climb 20 feet, he gallantly said, “No way.”
“He wasn’t even embarrassed about it,” she says. What’s more, he wouldn’t leave her the rope.
“It cost 3 bucks, and I didn’t know whether I’d see her again,” he says.
“You have to know him,” she says. “He’s very Woody Allen.”
“There was no chemistry,” he recalls, “but she was better than anyone else I had dated.” He called her again three weeks later.
On their next date, things got a little worse. They went to his place, and she got cat hair all over her clothes and his dog bit her.
On the third date, Sandi wore a sexy black dress that he thought was too young for her and too short.
“But it worked,” she says. Indeed, it was this night he began to think that maybe someday they could have a relationship. She was already sure of it.
About four months ago--after they received financial counseling--Steve proposed.
See, despite their differences, they also have a few things in common. Their religion, for one, although he is Orthodox and keeps a kosher house.
“He wasn’t too pleased that I came in and mixed up all his dishes,” Sandi says.
Neither can dance, and both snore. And each has two kids, 14 and 19, who aren’t too crazy about the marriage. But children and parents united atop a vista overlooking the Santa Susanna Mountains, where Steve’s daughter, Jennifer, and son, Danny, and Sandi’s youngest son, Max, walked them down the aisle. They left a chair empty for Sandi’s oldest son, Dan, who is serving in the Israeli army. Steve’s two brothers and Sandi’s sister stood with them during the service Sandi had written, which included excerpts from the Book of Psalms and the Song of Solomon. In keeping with the Hebrew tradition, she walked around her husband seven times during the sunset ceremony. The bride wore lilies of the valley in her hair and a long ivory dress with a crocheted jacket, which Steve had bought for her for Hanukkah when his daughter suggested he buy her something nice because she had awful taste. Steve wore a gray suit with a burgundy tie.
Though many friends and family members think the union is a bit unlikely, they see, as do Sandi and Steve, that in the final analysis both want to be a bit more like the other.
“I was tired of struggling, and I wanted a more conservative life,” Sandi says. “I wanted to be part of civilized life. He’s square and reliable, and I’m very lucky to find him.”
“There’s something about Sandi that always leaves you guessing,” Steve says. “She’s loosened me up some, and that’s probably good.” She talked him into his first overseas trip, to Israel, and his first pair of sandals.
“I mean, you should have seen him before, always in his shoes and socks, he looked like Nixon on the beach,” she says.
And it was Steve who got a little crazy and picked wedding invitations with frogs on them.
“Looking at all those formal invitations was giving me a headache. I just said, ‘Oh, heck, why not these with the frogs?’ ” They admit they then got carried away with the frog motif and ordered centerpieces with water lilies and gave out Kermit the Frog Pez dispensers as favors. But, hey, they’re in love.
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