Met At MAC

By Jake Ten Pas

The club is a great place to fall in love

When we asked for couples’ stories of how they met at MAC, the response was heartwarmingly overwhelming. The list was whittled down to six great tales of romance, running the gamut of ages, professions and interests, just like MAC as a whole. Grab someone you love, open a bottle of red wine, and raise a toast to the many inspiring couples who continue to make this club what it is today.

The “friend zone” is a myth. Don’t believe it? Ask Conor and Emily Arcuri.

When Emily joined MAC as an Athletic Member in high school, Conor was already entrenched in the community as a legacy member. Both were distance swimmers, and were paired as training partners on the club’s team.

“I knew no one on the team when I first joined,” Emily says. “When you train with someone, you become pretty close, fast friends, though.” Their relationship remained platonic throughout high school and the first half of college, or at least from their perspective.

“Everyone made fun of us, even our coaches,” she recalls. “We were like the old, married couple. We’d bicker and fight, but we were 16, so no one really thought anything of it. Or, I guess we didn’t!”

Halfway through college, after hanging out over the summers, and continuing to stay in contact by Skype and text, the latent romance manifested itself when they decided to stop fighting the feeling and make it official.

After five years of dating, they got married on the rooftop of Hotel Deluxe, facing MAC, with many of the coaches in attendance who’d detected the blossoming romance before Conor and Emily were fully aware of it.

“I think we always kind of had a crush on each other, but we were swimming together and training together, so nothing really could happen,” Emily says. “I definitely think we needed time to mature and figure out our goals in life before dating. I was very immature in high school!”

Now, they’re like two lenses on the same pair of goggles. They continue to swim and participate in triathlon at MAC, and look forward to the Peacock Lane Run every year. They recently bought a house, filled it with their cats and sheltie, and work together to tick off items on their five-year plans.

Conor is a mechanical engineer, and Emily describes him as “very precise and exact and really into the details.” She works in marketing-communications for Intel, and says she’s definitely more of a big-picture kind of person.

“It’s actually really funny,” she says. “I’m surrounded by engineers all the time, and then I come home to an engineer. He helps me understand where they’re coming from, and the finer details of the semiconductor industry, at least to a certain extent. I think that we mesh really well!”

Romances don’t get much more “MAC” than that of Natasha and Steve Brown. Their match was made by a fellow member, they had their first date at Joe’s, and three years later, they still work out at the club together. While Natasha loves singing karaoke, and Steve clearly prefers being in the audience, both say that they’re looking forward to the upcoming Grease Sing-Along.

“We use the club independently, and we use it together,” Natasha says.

“We use it socially, we use it athletically, and we use it culturally,” Steve adds.

That they have time to use MAC at all seems like a minor miracle when you consider the pair’s respective schedules. Natasha works an overflowing week as an Organizational Effectiveness Partner at Intel, and is a full-time student pursuing her PhD in Leadership Studies at Pepperdine University. Steve is a wealth advisor to an exclusive number of high-net-worth families and businesses by trade, and an amazing cook by night, according to Natasha.

Both are heavily involved with athletics at the club. Natasha is an avid squash player, who won last year’s in-house tournament at the Women’s B level. After years of playing contact sports, Steve opts for yoga, weights and spin classes, but also has served on a number of committees, including Yoga, Athletic, Wellness and Audit.

It’s no surprise, then, that fellow member and mover and shaker Emily Crumpacker thought that they’d be quite compatible.

One day three years ago, as Steve was leaving 1891 and Natasha was saying sayonara to the Sports Pub, they encountered Emily in the library. Seeing the two of them in the same place, Emily took

the opportunity to announce that she was making her famous truffle cupcakes for Natasha’s upcoming karaoke birthday party. Then, she invited Steve to come!

“I felt my heart beat a little fast because I knew Emily had this idea about Steve for me,” Natasha says. “She planted the seed in my mind that it might be nice for us to date each other.”

Steve is much more stoic about his own motivation, deadpanning that, “Anything Emily cooks, you want to eat.”

“Yeah, I kind of wonder if Steve accepted the invitation to get the chocolate cupcakes,” Natasha jokes, giving Steve a saucy look.

Soon, though, the texts and emails were flying, and in between squash matches and a headstand clinic, they rendezvoused for smoothies at Joe’s. Steve ordered two, one peach and one berry, and let Natasha have her pick.

The next day, she invited him to the holiday squash party, which she characterizes as a big deal. “I’d never brought a date to the squash party before!” Steve offered to pick her up, and arrived in his Porsche, sporting a black sweater with a gray bird on it. She was smitten.

So was he, and after being together for a year and a half, they got engaged. That only lasted for 29 days, and they surprised everyone at their engagement party by turning it into a wedding. Everyone except Emily, that is, who created a full-size cake out of the flourless truffle cupcake recipe she’d initially used to bring them together.

“You have a 20,000-person community of intelligent, smart and active people that already have some commonalities among them,” Steve says. “That’s the neat thing about the MAC — it’s got just about anything you can do.” Including, evidently, finding the love of your life.

If at first you don’t succeed, train, train again. It worked for Mandee and Tony Louie, MAC’s most recent staff love story, or at least the newest one that’s old enough to be divulged.

Listening to the personal trainers tell their tale, it’s impossible not to see all the points at which the whole proposition might have collapsed. If true love is the story of perseverance, then Mandee and Tony’s saga is so real it hurts.

A few years back, both were working at Nike and MAC simultaneously. “I’m taking a Pilates class with a mutual friend, and she said, ‘Don’t you know Tony?’ And I didn’t,” Mandee recalls. “We might have heard about each other, but somehow our paths had never crossed.”

The mutual friend introduced them, but it would take several tries to make the acquaintance stick. After that first meeting, a few months went by with no contact before they saw each other at the MAC Fitness Party. While they struck up a conversation and Mandee gave Tony her number, again, months went by with no connection.

Then, like all great love stories, the tides turned around the hanging of a Pilates poster. “I was running down the hall in desperate need of a fixture to hang this poster on for a workshop, and I didn’t know where to get it or who could help,” Mandee explains. Along came Tony, like a knight in shining gym shorts, to the rescue. “He was like, ‘Oh Yeah, I can do that.’ He hung it up for me … and then he followed up and asked how it went, or something like that.”

This led to Mandee asking Tony about working full-time at MAC, a career path she was herself contemplating. They agreed to meet at Goose Hollow Inn in May, but when Mandee showed up, all was not as expected.

“So, we met at the Goose, and I thought there was maybe dating potential even though I was still really thinking about the jobs and stuff,” she says. “He brought Darrell [Duvauchelle] with him, and I instantly though, ‘Oh, he’s not interested in dating.” Because who brings Darrell [MAC Fitness manager]to a potential date?!”

Darrell ended up being in Tony and Mandee’s wedding, so clearly, Tony brings Darrell to a potential date.

Of course, before the proposal, or even the first actual date, Tony would become

Mandee’s trainer. Soon, they were hanging out every day, only as friends and coworkers at first, despite what some of their peers might have thought. As the weather continued to heat up, their workouts moved outdoors, where the romance followed a similar temperature shift.

Their first real date was a summer hike to Beacon Rock. By November, they couldn’t keep their feelings to themselves any longer, and “came out” to co-workers at the Employee Recognition Dinner. “All the trainers, they’re all best friends,” Mandee says. “All of our best friends now are everybody who works here. That was a new thing for me, so it was kind of hard. Because a few of the people knew, but they had to try to keep it quiet. We didn’t want to make it public unless it was a serious thing!”

Even the proposal came with challenges. “It didn’t work out quite as planned,” Tony recounts. After taking Mandee on a hike to their old Gorge trekking grounds, Tony was initially thwarted in his attempt to ask her to marry him by a wind storm of Biblical proportions. “I was picturing the wind blowing the ring away,” he says, laughing. After hitting a couple more spots, they ended up in wine country, where Tony eventually found the right time to pop the question.

“I kept thinking he was going to propose, and then he wouldn’t! I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ Mandee adds.

Mandee and Tony now look back on all of these false starts and potential pitfalls with humorous detachment. They’re currently offering a joint personal training workshop that brings together Tony’s passion for boxing and Mandee’s love of Pilates. It’s the third time they’ve done so.

“It’s just like our personalities,” Mandee says. “It’s a really good combo.”

At MAC, group exercise classes can change your life. Not just in a “I lost a few pounds, felt more confident, and finally asked for that raise at work” kind of way, either.

“I was so close to being a lifelong bachelor. I could have done it!” Mike Mathews says. But fate, and MAC’s group exercise program, had other plans.

The year is 1985, and he’s taking an aerobics class. He notices a “cute girl”

MICHAEL PENDERGAST

standing in front of him. She looks at him, and he looks right back. After class, they start talking. Her name is Wendy. “Hey, you want to get a drink?” he asks.

“I can’t,” she responds.

“Oh, okay, maybe next time. Hope to see you again,” he says. That’s the end of that from his perspective. Except, it isn’t.

Within a week, Wendy is back in class. “We’re standing in the same spots, because everybody has their spots in class,” he points out. She’d never been there before that week, and now, here she is again. Mike takes it as a sign and tries his luck again.

Soon, they’re talking over beverages at MAC Snacks. Before long, the conversation moves to Goose Hollow Inn. That drink leads to dating, then engagement, and within two years of that first meeting, marriage.

In those days, Mike recalls, the single life in Portland was a very different game. Someone going out on the town in hopes of making a romantic connection had far fewer options. “In my age group, a lot of people got married right out of high school,” he says. “If you didn’t get married out of high school, and you didn’t go back to your hometown and marry someone there, how did you meet people?”

Turns out the answer was, and still is, MAC. In the mid-80s, the club’s centralized location, safe atmosphere, and social emphasis made it the perfect place to make a love connection. Mike was a member of the Singles Committee, and paints a vivid picture of the dance floor that used to adorn the Women’s Lounge – now known as the Sports Pub.

After leaving the single life behind them, Mike and Wendy continued to dance at the club, in contexts ranging from New Year’s Eve Parties to Zumba and other group exercise classes. They even passed their love of movement along to their kids, who came up taking classes at MAC before his daughter danced professionally with Ballet Tucson and his son performed through high school with ACMA Dance West.

When Mike spent three years working hard on the club’s 125th anniversary, Wendy was extremely supportive, even accepting the McAlpin Award for Mike when he was out of town. “That’s what makes our marriage continue,” he says, clearly full of gratitude that he didn’t continue to live the bachelor’s life. It’s amazing what aerobics can do for the heart.

A lot of things have changed at MAC, and everywhere else, since 1976. Rosalie and Tom Stevenson’s love for each other isn’t one of them. The two first met at a MAC singles function that spring, and were married by September of the following year.

“When we met, I just knew that we’d get married,” Rosalie recalled in a February 2004 Winged M feature. “We were strangers, and then we were best friends,” she adds today, looking back on that article. At the time, she was working as a bridal buyer at Lipman’s, a department store located at 5th and Alder streets.

When asked what he was doing when they met, Tom replies without missing a beat, “Shaking in my boots.”

Nevertheless, he got over his nervousness enough to make a positive impression on Rosalie, and the two have been together ever since. They held their wedding reception at MAC, which has been a backdrop for their lives since, at least when they’re at home.

One of the great passions Tom and Rosalie share is a love for travel. From Uniworld riverboat cruises, to exploring Antarctica together, to flying their own plane over New Zealand with 15 other private aircraft, they’ve packed the past 40 years with adventure. Both advise their fellow members to take advantage of MAC’s reciprocal club network, which has allowed them to take many pleasurable jaunts to Hawaii to stay at the Outrigger Club.

“There are a lot of ups and downs,” Rosalie says of such a long marriage. “We’ve compromised, and we’ve done lots of traveling, both of which help.”

“The family that plays together stays together,” Tom adds.

When not jet-setting, the Stevensons keep themselves busy at the club. Between them, they’ve served on just about every event committee, and both were actively involved with the club’s Centennial and 125th Anniversary celebrations. She won the McAlpin Award as a testament to her hears of social committee involvement

They held Rosalie’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary at the club, as well as her father’s 70th birthday, which featured an ice sculpture in the shape of a John Deere tractor to honor his long career with the company.

In less than a decade, they’ll consider hosting their own 50th-anniversary party at the same club that has housed so many of their life highlights. Reflecting on the role that MAC has played in their lives together, Tom says: “One of the things regarding the club is there’s enough diversity that you aren’t stuck into one rut. People change their interests as they go along. The club is always evolving.”

“If you want to get involved and meet people, join the committee system,” Rosalie recommends. “It’s been like a family in a lot of ways. This club has been a very important part of our lives for the past 42 years.”

Met at MAC

Nancy & Rob Petit

Rob and Nancy Petit are a lot alike, except when it comes to the story of how they met.

“I say we met in the lunchroom at the big table,” Nancy says.

“I think we met before that, in line down at Joe’s, back when it was called MAC Snacks,” Rob replies. “I just remember thinking, ‘That lady has a nice smile,’ while talking to her waiting in line for something. We didn’t meet again until the lunchroom.”

Regardless of when they first made each other’s acquaintance, that conversation around the big table was the spark that started the fire. “We were both single parents at the time, and so we started talking about our kids,” Nancy narrates. “My son and his daughter were both dating someone older. We both didn’t really like that, but we were trying to figure out what to do. You can’t really say too much, because it will have the opposite effect!”

“I thought he seemed like a really great guy, and he obviously really cared about his daughter, which I thought was an admirable quality.”

After Nancy’s two sons and Rob’s daughter went off to college, the pair got married, and they’ve proven just as aligned in their lives together as they were in their separate approaches to parenting. Both love to go out for dinner, as well as enjoy a good tumbler of bourbon.

While they say they didn’t try to keep their relationship a secret from their co-workers during the dating years, neither did they skip down the halls holding hands. “There was a behind-the-stairwell kiss goodbye,” says Rob, who still likes to nip down to Nancy’s office in the Excercise & Conditioning Room for a quick chat in the afternoons before his gymnastics students arrive.

MICHAEL PENDERGAST

“It works out well because we’re across the street from each other,” Nancy says. “We go whole workdays without seeing each other, and still randomly run into each other in the hallway or lunchroom.”

“There’s a time after dinner, when we pause the TV and chat about the day for however long it takes,” Rob says. “Once the commiserating happens, we forget about it.”

Describing how they like to cook together, and share harmoniously their small kitchen, Rob says something that seems to sum up their entire relationship together: “It’s kind of like a dance, just moving around each other.” WM