No Scrooges here!
The first page of an old, gifted scrapbook that Courtney Czarniak gave her husband many years ago contains two single tickets.
The slightly faded tickets still read December 21, 2008, for “A Musical Christmas Carol” by Pittsburgh CLO at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts.
Those two tickets were for Czarniak and her friend, Peter, who decided to tag along for the performance. Little did she know that when the curtains opened her future husband, Jeremy, would be center stage.
“We had a mutual friend that was a sound engineer,” Jeremy recalls of the weeks leading up to the show. “He mentioned Courtney’s name because we worked for the same company but at different times. A little bit later, she appeared in my sidebar of suggested friends on Facebook, so I introduced myself.”
“I had known who he was for 15 years,” Courtney says. “I had heard of him. I knew what he looked like. I had heard stories about him. When I got an email notification from him, I honestly thought he was offering me some kind of job.”
A few conversations later, she declined the two separate occasions Jeremy asked her out on a date.
“I was like, 29, and had been through the worst number of bad dates and was just done,” Courtney says about the continuous rejections to her future husband.
But playing as Scrooge’s nephew with the very first line in the show, the first in-person impression had the three talking in the lobby and finishing their conversation at Six Penn Kitchen steps away from the theater.
“We were talking the whole night after the show and she would finish stories about me,” Jeremy remembers. “She told them to me better than I could tell them to her.”
The couple, who have been married for five years and reside in South Fayette Township, still both have love for one another and the passion that originally brought the two together: the performing arts.
Courtney is the owner of Fairytale Princess Visits – a character company that attends wide variety of events – and performs and manages Holiday Harmonies Christmas Carolers.
Jeremy fills his time as the associate director of theater operations the Strand Theater in Zelionople, a spokesperson in commercials for Northern Ohio Public Energy Council, disc jockey, professor at Robert Morris University and is in the process of initiating his own tap company.
However, the holiday season that united them is now a time where they rarely see much of one another.
“If I hadn’t had a similar experience performing, I think it would be harder,” says Courtney. “I get that it is feast and famine. We are in different directions a lot of the time, but not one part of what I do is for the money. I’ve never done it for the money. I sing to make people smile at Christmas, because you can make people – even for a split second – forget about their troubles.”
The difficulty of being apart for a majority of the holiday season is what makes the both of them thankful for the week they do have from Christmas Day to the New Year in the place the well-traveled couple plan to stay for quite some time.
“Getting to that point is always a relief because you not only need a break, but it’s the time to reflect on what you’ve been able to do,” says Jeremy. “It’s really a time where you see how fortunate you are.”