Sarah Beverly LaBrie and Justin Samuel Lerner were married Oct. 19 at Windwood Ranch in Paso Robles, Calif. Ronan MacRory, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life Minister for the occasion, officiated.
The bride, 34, is a comedy writer and librettist. From May through August, she was a staff writer on the Paramount television show “Made for Love,” created by Patrick Somerville and based on the novel of the same name by Alissa Nutting; it is to premiere on HBO Max in 2020. She also co-wrote the libretto for “Hopscotch: An Opera for 24 Cars,” and wrote the libretto for the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s oratorio “dreams of the new world” with the composer Ellen Reid. The bride graduated from Brown and received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from N.Y.U.
She is the daughter of Kimberley G. Edwards of Houston. The bride’s mother, a registered nurse, retired as a home health aide in Houston.
The groom, 39, is a film director, writer and producer based in Los Angeles and Guatemala City. He graduated cum laude from Cornell and received a Master of Fine Arts in film production and directing from the University of California, Los Angeles. He’s also a visiting professor at Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala City. His most recent film, “The Automatic Hate,” premiered in 2015 at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. His other films have premiered at international film festivals such as the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.
He is a son of Jacqueline V. Lerner and Richard M. Lerner of Wayland, Mass. The groom’s mother is a professor of Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. His father is the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and the director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University.
Mr. Lerner first met Ms. LaBrie in 2008 in Los Angeles. He had gone to meet with a film agent at a talent agency where Ms. LaBrie worked as an assistant.
“I remember being struck by how pretty she was,” Mr. Lerner said. “But since she said almost nothing to me other than, ‘Hi, I’ll show you into his office,’ and ‘Do you want a bottle of water,’ I figured that was going to be the first and last time I would see her.”
As it turned out, he would see her again a year later, at an IHOP in Marina Del Ray, Calif., as they both were celebrating the birthday of another assistant from the same agency.
When Mr. Lerner arrived, the only open seat was next to a large metal column propping up the ceiling. On the other side of the column was Ms. LaBrie, whom Mr. Lerner recognized immediately.
“It was hard to make conversation around the column,” he said. “But I managed to put together that Sarah lived in Koreatown, a neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, where I’d also just rented an apartment.”
They began chatting and by the end of breakfast, they exchanged contact information.
“He was really smart and very friendly,” Ms. LaBrie said.
A week later, they went on a first date, to a coffee shop in Los Angeles. During their 90-minute conversation, Ms. LaBrie mentioned that she recently had her car totaled in an accident and was taking the bus back and forth from Koreatown to Beverly Hills for work.
Mr. Lerner offered to drive her to work, and wound up doing so every day of the following week. “He was so incredibly kind,” Ms. LaBrie said. “I began to wonder if I was really lucky enough to have met someone so considerate and generous.”
They were dating steadily within a week, and he took her to a Fourth of July party in Los Angeles, where they shared their first kiss. “The moment we kissed it all felt so right,” Ms. LaBrie said. “I was sure I had met the man I was going to marry.”
