Some matches owe their provenance to sharing either friends or college campuses.
Michal Raz-Russo, 30, and Zev Salomon, 31, attended The Cooper Union in New York during the same years, so they have both things in common. The two were enrolled in the school’s five-year architecture program, which is “so tiny it would be impossible not to know each other,” says Salomon. Raz-Russo was a year behind him, and they knew each other only superficially. In fact, he admired her from afar when they met, but she had a boyfriend, he laments.
That eventually changed. After his second year of school, when he realized he really didn’t want to be an architect at all, Salomon decamped to the Cordon Bleu in Paris, where he took a yearlong break from architecture and refined his culinary skills. When he returned to The Cooper Union a year later — with a Grand Diplome and 30 extra pounds under his belt — they were in the same class and she was single.
Soon they also found themselves coupled as partners on a grueling, time-sapping yearlong project. “At first, we butted heads a lot,” concedes Raz-Russo. But on breaks, they would head to the nearby A&P, buy a whole rotisserie chicken and “pick at it. It was like a primitive mating ritual. Eating gave us a chance to talk about things outside of school. So food brought us together a second time, because we wouldn’t have gotten to know each other if I wasn’t in her class,” Salomon says.
During their talks, “we discovered we were on the same wavelength, had all the same frustrations and were so different from everyone else around us,” Raz-Russo says. Like Salomon, she had no intention of ever practicing architecture. But both were determined to get their degrees.
They did, graduating in the spring of 2001. When 9-11 occurred that fall, they moved to Chicago and settled in Uptown. He got a job as a real estate developer with Belgravia Group while she became an art consultant. Only her grandfather in Jerusalem was troubled by the arrangement. “He wanted me to get married,” laughs Raz-Russo.
Her grandfather was thrilled when Salomon proposed to Raz-Russo on a visit in 2006, right in his living room. “I was raised in that house, so it was really meaningful for him, especially since he was way too old to make it to the wedding,” she explains. He died three months later, and the couple resolved to have a traditional Israeli-style wedding. In Raz-Russo’s generation, that means “a huge party with great music, lots of dancing and incredible food,” she explains.
They decided to have different food stations, for salads, meats, fish and grains, Salomon says.
The entire event took place at the Chicago Illuminating Company on May 24 of last year, and the food was only one highlight of the night. Dancing — first to the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble and then to deejay Jesse de la Pena, was the second. “We never got to eat anything, but everyone says the food was fantastic,” recounts Raz-Russo.
Today, the couple lives in River West, right near a Whole Foods, which Salomon maintains “has the best rotisserie chicken in town.” And they still pick at it. “I learned it from my parents, and I’m sure we’ll pass it on to our children,” teases Salomon.
— BY LISA SKOLNIK
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Jessica Moss and Kavi Gupta
She knew everything about art, and he ‘just had to know her’
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It began in 2002, when gallery owner Kavi Gupta looked across the VIP reception at Art Chicago and eyed a sophisticated young woman who, he recalls, “knew everything about the art, was dressed stunningly” and happened to be strolling on the arm of her grandfather.
“I just had to know her,” says the now 40-year-old Gupta, who wasted no time in “doing a little research,” tracing the provenance of this breathtaking new face on the contemporary art scene.
But it would be another year and a half before he finally spoke a word to Jessica Moss, and it was only after she started working in the West Loop art gallery downstairs from his.
“We wound up going to the Matchbox,” a sliver of a bar barely big enough for a row of bar stools, he recalls. There, they sipped pink cosmos out on the sidewalk where Ogden Avenue slaps hard against Elston Avenue.
Wasn’t long before the two art aficionados met up in Berlin at the Biennal, an every-other-year global art happening. And by then, well, they were headed for the altar.
Make that two altars. And, actually, make that the mundap, or Indian wedding canopy. And the chuppah, the Jewish wedding canopy.
In two ceremonies, each richly brocaded with the poetry and pomp of their respective traditions, Moss, who is Jewish, and Gupta, who is Hindu, were married first in an Indian banquet hall in Schaumburg on a Friday night in August, and instead of riding in on an elephant, as is traditional, the groom rode in standing on the back seat of his beloved navy-blue ’66 Ford Mustang convertible.
With one day in between for rest and last-minute errands, they married again on Sunday afternoon in the English Walled Garden of the Chicago Botanic Garden with all the hallmarks of a Jewish ceremony, the seven blessings and signing of the ketubah (a marriage contract), the exchange of yet another set of rings, and, finally, triumphantly, the ceremonial smashing of the glass.
Oh, sure, it was twice the work. And sometimes, “it felt a little like deja vu,” laughs Moss, 29, assistant curator of contemporary art at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum.
Except for the photographer, everything came in twos: Two tastings, one for the Indian banquet, another for the vegetarian sit-down dinner; two orders of flowers; two sets of musicians; two rounds of invitations; even two wedding gowns, one a fuchsia sari made and shipped from New Delhi, the other an ivory Vera Wang with Irish silk netting.
In the end, it was all worth it, they say.
“We wanted to experience the best of each culture completely,” Gupta says. “We didn’t want to dilute it. Each is so specific, so rich, there was no reason to make up something new. It was perfect.”
— BY BARBARA MAHANY
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Shawn Donnelley and Christopher Kelly
An overseas romance, from Cambridge to Chicago
Born on ancient ground and nurtured by the tools of modern technology, the relationship between a Chicago philanthropist and a British scholar began one lovely June day in 2000 on the quad at Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University.
That is where Shawn Donnelley was introduced to Dr. Christopher Kelly, professor of classics and history at the university, founded in 1209 and attended by Donnelley’s grandfather, and soon to publish his first book, “Ruling the Later Roman Empire.”
He was single, as was Donnelley.
“I thought he was great,” Donnelley says. “There was, though, the not-insignificant matter of geography.”
They began, gingerly, to get to know one another, across an ocean and through the old-fashioned means of postcards and letters. Eventually e-mails began flying, and growing in length, substance and style.
“Two, three pages and more in which we began telling each other all about our lives,” says Donnelley.
She told Kelly about working for the family firm in Washington, D.C. (she is not affiliated with R.R. Donnelley & Co., which prints this magazine); hosting a current-affairs TV show; of her unsuccessful run for Congress from the 10th District; and her involvement with cultural institutions, such as serving on the board of the Goodman Theatre (she is now president).
In 2005 on a London theater tour organized by the Goodman, Donnelley and Kelly had what she considers their first date. It was modest (a cup of coffee) but momentous. “There are two reasons why people would decide to have a relationship even though they live in two different countries, 4,000 miles apart,” she says. “You’re crazy or you’re serious. We were not crazy. This was no casual relationship.”
In 2006, Donnelley and two Chicago friends, philanthropist/businesswoman Debbie Bricker and Leslie Hindman, of auction house renown, went to Rome to visit Maria Bechily, the public affairs executive, who was spending the summer there.
Kelly came too. He met the friends. He charmed them. They all told Donnelley, “He’s great. You’ll figure out how to make it work. Marry this guy.”
He proposed the next year at Cape Finisterre, the rock-bound peninsula on the west coast of Spain, a place the Romans called “the end of the world.”
“It was the best proposal any girl could ever have,” she says.
A weeklong series of celebrations culminated on Aug. 16 last year in a wedding in front of 500 or so guests at the Fourth Presbyterian Church. That’s the bride and groom, 39 and 43 respectively that day, on the right.
The wedding was also a sartorial sensation, thanks to the hats worn by the female guests, a colorful and wild and, here and there, wacky array. There was cake and champagne at the Casino Club, before dinner at the Museum of Contemporary Art Warehouse.
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The honeymoon began in Florence and ended a month later after an around-the-world tour. The couple now has homes here and in England. They see each other, depending on schedules, a few days every month or sometimes two or three weeks at a time. She is head of the philanthropic consulting firm Strategic Giving and fulfilling her charitable chores; he is teaching and writing. His latest book, “The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome” will be published in June. A Canada/U.S. book tour is planned, with a stop, naturally, “and very happily,” says Donnelley, in Chicago.
— BY RICK KOGAN