Katie Barry & Evan Pugh

Evan Pugh and Katie Barry fell in love the night they met at a resort in Indian Wells. Pugh asked Barry to dance and later, in lounge chairs beside the pool, they talked beneath a starlit desert sky.
Then they kissed — a moment each remembers quite differently.

Pugh liked Barry so much, it was awkward for him. “I felt like a dork,” he said. But for her, “It was so romantic and magical, I was just swept away — like, whoa, what is this?”

That was in May 2009. Two months later Pugh proposed on a gondola at the Venetian in Las Vegas. He got down on one knee — not an easy feat in a narrow boat on a lagoon — and proposed.

As soon as Barry gave her answer, the gondolier began singing in a booming voice, “She said yes! She said yes!” while onlookers from the bridge and other gondolas burst into applause.

Pugh, 29, owns Make Yourself Screen Printing, a T-shirt printing company in Camarillo. Barry, 31, a math teacher at Pacifica High School in Oxnard, is working toward her PhD in math education at UC Santa Barbara.

Their July 9 wedding at Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort in Santa Barbara was attended by 120 guests. The ceremony, officiated by Mary Jean Valente of A Ceremony of the Heart, took place on the beach beneath an arbor of white bamboo and red roses.

At the reception, the newlyweds made their entrance on a Schwinn tandem bike given to them by Pugh’s grandparents, Lenore and Kazell Pugh, who bought it when they were married 52 years ago.

“I cried before I even saw Katie,” said Pugh, who was thinking, “I’m about to marry my best friend.” As Barry walked down the aisle, she said, “I couldn’t stop smiling, because he’s the love of my life.”

—Maxine Nunes, Custom Publishing Writer