'A Magical Day' As LI Couple Gets Engaged Under Theatre's Marquee After Holiday Parade

LONG ISLAND, NY — After marching in Patchogue's nighttime holiday parade on Nov. 30, Gabriela Manfredi and Robinson Crothers went back to their office at the arts council to freshen up in preparation for hitting Main Street.

"Really everyone just started dispersing," Manfredi, 30, recalled, adding, "This is weird. What is going on? Are we not going out to dinner?"

Crothers told her that his sister and her family, who live in New Jersey, ended up coming to the parade, but was leaving and they had to go over to say goodbye to them.

She didn't suspect anything.

When they headed out to their destination, the street was still closed off to traffic, and though only minutes earlier it had been teeming with revelers in the holiday spirit, the crowds of people had gone back home or disappeared inside restaurants for a hot meal.

Main Street had fallen somewhat silent.

It was illuminated by the flicker of lights as patrons bustled about inside restaurants, spaced out amid decorated shopfronts. Overhead vintage-style lampposts and giant snowflakes twinkled. The Patchogue Theatre for the Performing Arts glowed warmly in the cold air as its marquee highlighted messages about upcoming events.

It was like something out of a movie scene, and then the atmosphere was stepped up a notch.

Crothers maneuvered Manfredi, still dressed in reindeer garb, over in front of the theatre, and he asked her to marry him.

"And then we got closer and closer, and he stops, and then he just gets down on one knee," Manfredi said. "I was in total shock. And at this point, I also still had antlers on and a full reindeer costume on. I just kept saying, 'It's real? Is this really happening?'"

Crothers was pointing to the theatre's marquee displaying his marriage proposal, and telling her that she needed to answer him.

"I was like, 'Of course, yes, I love you,'" she said, recalling how her boyfriend of nine years became her fiancé in a split second. "I can't wait to spend the rest of our lives together."

As the happy couple basked in the moment, their friends and family came out of seemingly nowhere and Manfredi "fully got the picture of what was going on."

To pull off the perfect moment, it was quite some time in the planning stage, and it took a village.

Asked when he knew he wanted to marry Manfredi, Crothers jokingly said, "Eight years ago."

He credited their relationship for being a Tinder success story, but there is that old saying that the course of true love never does run smooth.

When the pair first connected, Manfredi got spooked and actually stood him up on their first date, but they later worked it out.

Their first date Part Deux ended up taking place at Alive After Five.

Crothers, who grew up in Patchogue, settled on the village as the proposal's venue for its long-standing ties to himself and his family. Crothers, 36, took part in the wrestling program at Patchogue-Medford High School and then coached the team as an alum.

The couple is very good about communicating openly in their relationship, so marriage is something that they have always "talked about," and they wanted to do it at the right time, but Crothers also wanted it "to be a surprise," he said.

Last year at Thanksgiving, his cousin's precocious eight-year-old son, whom he coaches, pulled him aside and asked why he hadn't proposed to Manfredi. "I said, 'Look, I promise by the end of this coming year, I'll have proposed to her, so you'll have a wedding to go to,'" Crothers recalled.

"And then it just kicked in," he added. "I said, 'You know, I love this girl. I want to be with her forever.'"

Not long after that he wrote himself a list of what he needed to do to propose, concerning things like what kind of ring she wants and asking her two fathers for permission.

"And that is when the community really kicked in," Crothers said.

The couple, who live in Middle Island, have worked at the Patchogue Arts Council for roughly the last six years. Manfredi serves as its social media manager and Crothers as its fundraising assistant and the official tour guide of the village's wildy popular MoCA L.I.ights moving art and light installation.

Much of their lives revolve around the village and its community.

"I was the one that had to do it, but it took a village to get it done, because I would have been lost without everybody's guidance and support and advice and help," Crothers said.

Crothers was able to arrange the slot on the theatre's marquee for his proposal, which had graphics designed by Patchogue Arts Council Executive Director Beth Giacummo.

His colleagues, who were all aware, also worked to keep his secret and move his plans along right up until dispersing after the parade, and then hid to watch from afar as they unfolded.

To say there was a good amount of anxiety leading up to the event is to say the least — it got pretty bad about two weeks before.

Crothers also had help with Manfredi's ring, which came from Ideal Jewelry. He found out by accident that he had the wrong size when his little sister told him that Manfredi had tried on her wife's ring and it was a six and a half. Fortunately, he was able to get it resized the day before his proposal.

To add to the stress, on the day of he woke up with a sore throat. Then the parade lineup was taking too long and he worried they would not make it to 8 p.m. when the message went live, so he was trying to come up with a contingency plan of maybe proposing in front of the theatre as their contingent passed by the theatre.

They finished at 7:50 p.m. with just enough time to freshen up before heading back out.
He recalled that there were maybe thousands of people on Main Street during the parade, but it "was like a ghost town."

"All of our friends and family were sort of hiding out inside Kilwins and in the lobby of the theater, and they were all scattered about waiting for me to get down on one knee and do my thing," he said. "So everybody kind of popped out of the woodwork at the right moment, too."

"I said, 'Gabriela, loving you is the most incredible experience in my life ... Will you marry me?,'" Crothers recalled.

The butterflies had flown away.

"It was almost like, I don't know, like somebody swept everybody off the street just for us to have this moment together," he said. "You know, like a film set design."

Seeing the moment play out was beautiful, Giacummo said.

"And the silence of the streets being closed was really an added bonus because we actually didn't even think about that," she said. "It was beautiful that the streets were closed. It was a quiet, silent moment on Main Street, so they could have really special moment together, which was great."

Theatre director Michelle Rizzo-Berg said Crothers and Manfredi's proposal is probably the second or third advertised on the marquee.

"We always love to make special moments happen for people," she said.

It's a night that Manfredi won't soon forget.

"It was a magical day," she said. "The holiday parade was beautiful. And just seeing everybody excited to kick off the holiday season was really enjoyable."

"It meant so much to have our family there, our PAC family there, just everybody there to be with us. At the moment, it really just meant a lot," she added.

It's a story that took two people, one village, and nine years.

"I think some people hear that and they tease, 'What took this guy so long?,'" Crothers said. "It was the perfect timing for us, and everything happened exactly how it should and when it should, despite all the chaos. I guess at the end of the day, we were right for each other, and there was something that made it all work out exactly the way it should, how it should, and when it should."