Love at First Light

The pangs of love were actually quite excruciating for Dana Lawson '01. If a ceiling lamp hadn't fallen on her knee in the midst of a concert at the Tanglewood Summer Music Festival 1995, she may have never met her fiancee, Noble M. Hanson '00.

"After that concert, people were like 'You were the girl the lamp fell on! Oh my God!,'" she says. "Noble came up to be make sure I was okay."

Six summers later, the two Massachusetts natives are now getting married, and Dana still has the knee scar of their first meeting. The wedding will be in Dana's hometown on Cape Cod on June 9 with a church ceremony and backyard reception at Dana's home. They do not have honeymoon plans yet, because Dana will be leaving town the morning after the wedding to attend a music festival in New Mexico for the summer.

In the fall, they will be reunited in New York City, where Dana, who plays the viola, will pursue a master's at Juilliard. Noble, who has given up the clarinet, will be continuing his work in private equity at an investment banking firm.

First Impressions

Admiring her from afar the Church pews, Robert McPhie had a hunch that Megan M. Anderson '02 might just be the right one for him.

"He called to ask me out completely out of the blue," she says. "We never even had a conversation before."

And he was right to follow his hunch. Their first date lasted nine hours, with a dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, and then a romp in the Brookstone Store, where both of them played with the foot and back massagers.

One year later, Robert recreated the sequence of events of this first date to ask Megan for her hand in marriage. "At the end of the night, he took me for a walk around the business school," she says. "It was freezing. I wanted to go inside. But he insisted that we stay out there. Then he asked me."

The wedding will be on June 8 at the Church of Latter Day Saints in Robert's hometown of San Diego. After their honeymoon in southern California, the two will return to Cambridge to finish up their degrees, Megan at Harvard, and Robert at MIT.