Sometimes two people are so perfect for each other, neither time nor distance can keep them apart.
Such is the case of Shannon and Eric Bishop, who had their first date on Valentine’s Day in 2006 before getting married seven and half blissful years ago. Both are performers, both are passionate lovers of the arts, and both are madly in love with the other.
But a cruel twist of fate nearly kept their life together from unfolding.
It was 1994 in State College when the two first met. Shannon was an undergrad at Penn State. Eric was playing in rock group called Man Alive. The band was a regular act at downtown bars on Friday nights.
Shannon says it was a different time for both them. She now keeps a photo of Eric from that time period in their living room, and says he’s embarrassed now by his old unkempt-hair-and-tattered-jeans approach to fashion.
“Maybe he thinks he looks like a dated rock star, but I think he looks wonderful,” Shannon says. “I can still look at that photo and remember how I used to feel when we first met.”
For Eric, Shannon was just a friendly acquaintance who sometimes came out to watch his band play. He says she was “pretty aloof at the time,” and he never realized her affections toward him. Since he was in a relationship with someone else at the time, it might not have mattered had realized Shannon’s feelings.
Shannon, suddenly giddy at the topic, says she had a “huge crush” on him. She can’t pin down the reason; there was something about his demeanor, his look, his actions that drew her to him.
And then she moved to West Virginia for grad school. Time passed, their lives took them in different directions, and whatever possibility of love there had been was forgotten.
More than a decade later, Shannon’s life took a turn – perhaps by chance, perhaps by fate – that landed her back in State College.
It was February 2006. It was bitterly cold. One of Shannon’s friends was pestering her to come to Zeno’s to see Spider Kelley, a favorite of the local music scene. After much pestering, Shannon relented and accompanied her friend to Zeno’s.
Little did she know that Spider Kelley is fronted by none other than Eric Bishop.
“My whole life has been built on dumb luck,” Eric says. “And that night was definitely very lucky.”
Shannon recognized Eric the moment he stepped on stage, though she doubted he would remember her – but she was wrong. She now recalls, with a slight blush, that Eric sent a song out to her after he noticed her dancing near the front of the crowd.
Neither can agree who asked who out – Shannon says she asked him, Eric says he asked her – but neither one is too worried about the little details. What’s important is that someone did ask.
They set a date for the only free night they had that week. As they realized later, that night just happened to be Valentine’s Day.
“I was certainly nervous, really nervous, but I felt great too,” Eric says. “I knew we would hit it off whenever we ran into each other again, and I was really looking forward to taking her out.”
Shannon says she waited anxiously for Eric to arrive on Valentine’s Day night, eagerly peeking though her blinds as she waited for his car to pull up. What plans did they have for their big first date?
When Shannon got in the car, Eric – ever the romantic – jokingly handed her a flyer advertising Valentine’s Day specials at McDonalds. They decided to see a movie instead.
After watching Capote (which they both agree was quite good, even if it wasn’t at all romantic), they headed to Otto’s Pub and Brewery, where they shared a mutual love of craft beers. There, Eric recalls they ran into a couple that would become two of their closest friends after their marriage, which he calls “a premonition” of the way their relationship would evolve.
Though their Valentine’s Date was perhaps a little unconventional, it ended with the two of them talking through the long dark of the night, finding joy in hiding from the world together.
“I knew he was ‘the one’ when he was getting ready for work the next morning after we’d talked all night, and I’d said that we should do this again sometime,” Shannon says. “And he immediately said, ‘how about tomorrow?”
Eric says that, in some ways, nothing has changed since that night all those years ago. He still plays in Spider Kelly, and Shannon still comes to see him play. They still enjoy dark, dramatic films and craft beers. Their conversations still flow with a manic energy.
In other ways, things have changed – as things always do. Eric says he’s loved watching Shannon blossom from a shaky belly-dancer-in-training into a professional performer in her own right, who’s been known to travel to Egypt and elsewhere to teach and hone her craft.
Spider Kelly has a gig this Valentine’s Day, so maybe they won’t have a big date. But Shannon says that she’ll watch him perform, and maybe afterwards they can go somewhere to enjoy a craft beer before talking the night away.
“Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be all teddy bears and chocolate,” she says. “We can make the day whatever we want it to be.”
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