OUR STORY

The setting: a sleepy California town called Orcutt

The era: long before Raising Cane’s ever set foot near the Central Coast.

The characters: A young man but already a seasoned musician, Chris Lambert was a name often seen on MySpace (yes, MySpace) flyers for upcoming shows at bars and coffee shops. When a girl named Alli was booking the first show for her freshly-formed acoustic band, she knew exactly who to reach out to.

Thus began a friendship that flourished in local music, Arrested Development references, and a lot of coffee. Chris and Alli found themselves spending time together even when there wasn’t a show to make flyers for, and a couple of years later, just like in the movies, they spontaneously kissed and confessed all of those big romantic feelings for each other.

Their relationship was immediately put to the test when, less than two months after that kiss, they embarked on a multi-state road trip along the West Coast, spending every moment together driving in a small pickup truck from San Luis Obispo to San Francisco, Portland to Las Vegas, and San Diego northward to home. They went to arcades by day and played shows and slept on pullout couches by night, head over heels and not looking back.

The Proposal

Alli: In October 2024, our friend Bradford Smith reached out to me with an idea. (We’ve been friends since junior high school, and in recent years, he and his wife Amy relocated from the Central Coast up to Eugene, Oregon, and had two adorable kids.) Bradford expressed to me that he wanted to surprise Amy with an early Christmas gift – family photos, taken by me, at their favorite video store in Portland. He offered to cover any cost to get me up there (by air! by land!) for the occasion. Oh – and it would be cool if Chris was able to join, too. (This wasn’t odd in the slightest, as Chris and Bradford had collaborated on a few occasions over the years.)

Chris and I had discussed taking a road trip up north several times over the past few months, and Bradford was flexible on timing, so why not take the opportunity? Chris and I marked December 2nd on our calendar to start our drive up to Portland.

In November, Bradford reached out again with more details: “Maybe you could be [waiting] in Movie Madness a little before 1pm? That way we’ll grab lunch around noon, all will seem normal, we’ll stroll into Movie Madness and nobody will be hangry, then BOOM! Amy turns to me and says, ‘Is that Alli..?’ and SURPRISE! Family photo shoot time!”

Something important to note: Bradford is canonically a man of big gestures. He famously got A-list celebrities to contribute illustrations to our junior high yearbook, and roped in various stars for his own marriage proposal to Amy. If you’re reading this and going, “Girl, this all seems mega suspicious!”, then you simply don’t know Bradford.

So! December came, and Chris and I started our drive. We spent our first night at the cutest renovated motel in Redding, and arrived the next day at the Crowne Plaza in Portland.

As the evening was winding down, Chris offered to check online for a nearby coffee stop the next morning before our meeting time with Bradford. I nearly derailed things here, worried that a coffee stop might blow our cover. What if Amy spots us and we spoil her surprise?? Sweet, oblivious Alli… Luckily, this was all smoothed over before bed, and we agreed to grab coffee at noon (plenty of wiggle room), and then head to Amy’s ambush spot at the video store.

The morning of December 4th, we enjoyed room service breakfast, and Chris drove us down Hawthorne Boulevard into the cutest Old Town section of Portland. We got a parking spot RIGHT across the street from the coffee shop he had supposedly just looked up the night before, and we went inside.

Directly to our right as we walked in was a string trio, violin + viola + cello, playing as patrons drank their coffee and worked on their laptops. They didn’t even seem out of place – it just seemed so Portland.

We waited our turn in line, then ordered a blended pumpkin chai to share. As we waited for our order, we watched the trio.

This sounds so familiar.

They’re here on a Wednesday? So lucky for us!

I need to get a video of this.

Soon it would all fall into place. The song they played next was our song: Crossfire by Brandon Flowers, a fairly obscure song that premiered right when we started dating, which we had listened to about 10,000 times on that 2010 summer tour.

As soon as the song ended, I turned to look at Chris, but he wasn’t there. He was down on one knee, holding a ring. “They’re with me,” he said, gesturing to the string trio. “Do you remember this place?”

As soon as he said it, I looked around again and suddenly realized where I was. This was the coffee shop we had spent hours in back on that tour in 2010, a perfect summer afternoon together playing Scrabble and talking about our future while we waited to start the long drive to Las Vegas.

Chris finally asked me to marry him, and I answered.

The string trio played as we exited, all of the shocked patrons applauded, and that was only the start of the best day.

You might be asking, “But what about Bradford?”

Turns out, Chris was the one who had reached out to Bradford in the first place to orchestrate this whole plan. Every message Bradford texted me had been meticulously workshopped by Chris. And Amy’s ‘favorite’ video store? They had never even been there before; it was just a super convenient location near Common Grounds Coffee that seemed so predictably in-character for Bradford.

Turns out, while Chris and I were enjoying breakfast that morning, Bradford and Amy were helping the string trio set up and get into place at the coffee shop before our arrival, which Chris had drawn detailed maps of to make sure the layout was perfect. We met up with them soon after at the video store, and after many hugs, Chris and I made some very happy phone calls to our friends and families, and then embarked on the next surprise of the day: a scavenger hunt of all the Portland locations we had visited and taken photos at in July of 2010. I’d brought a 35mm film camera on that tour, and obsessively photographed every quirky Portland bike rack and telephone pole.

We revisited street corners, motels, signs, and even listened to the same songs we did the first time around, almost 15 years before. Chris went to absurd lengths to track down all of the places we had once been – a pay phone I had photographed which isn’t even there anymore (he found the BOLTS in the sidewalk!), and a Subway I had photographed which is now a bank. Lastly, he located the exact parking spot where I had photographed him sitting in his truck just before we left Portland that night in 2010, a photo which has been hanging on the wall of our home for years.

The afternoon closed out with one final surprise: in that parking spot, he played me a video message from the person he had hired to be our future wedding officiant, something we had occasionally joked about as a pipe dream.

Chris finished off with an incredibly thoughtful (theme of the day??) choice: we already had a dinner reservation the Ritz-Carlton with our name on it, and he would even take me out to buy a nice dress beforehand, since I hadn’t packed one.

Option number two, and further proof that he knows exactly what I want: we could skip the fancy place and enjoy dinner and a big glass of milk at our own modest hotel’s restaurant, where we had enjoyed a beautiful quiet dinner the night before.

I picked the comfort of the Crowne Plaza’s empty restaurant, my favorite sweatshirt, and a tall, cold glass of milk.

Chris: Yep, that’s exactly what happened.