Celebrating With 150 Guests and Jabba the Hutt

New York Times

09-05-2025

Hayley Michelle Finetti can't help but feel that the talent show championship she was awarded at age 10 should have gone to someone else.
'You should have won,' Ms. Finetti told her onetime competitor Emilio Lopez days before they were to be married in San Jose, Calif. 'It must have been rigged.'
Ms. Finetti and Mr. Lopez met in 2009, when she was a fifth grader and he was a new fourth grader at Discovery Bay Elementary in Discovery Bay, Calif., in the Bay Area. Mr. Lopez had moved to town that year with his mother, Lucy Rodriguez, a single parent.
Ms. Finetti is a native of Discovery Bay. She and her older brother grew up in a theatrical household where their parents, Jennifer and Chris Finetti, were community theater buffs.
'I started singing before I could talk,' she said. A rendition of Christina Aguilera's 'Hurt' won her the 2010 talent show. Mr. Lopez's talent was speed-drawing — he had set up a projector and asked audience members to name their favorite animals, then combined those animals into mutant monsters. 'It was real avant-garde stuff,' he said, jokingly.
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At the after-school care center where both were enrolled that year, they struck up a friendship. In middle school, it withered. But neither was willing to let budding talent die on the vine: In 2016, they reconnected through their high school's performance of 'Gigi.'
Mr. Lopez had a starring role. 'It was a freak thing,' he said. When the actor who had won the part initially slipped up academically, Mr. Lopez said, he became the last-minute replacement. Ms. Finetti was the show's assistant vocal director, charged with helping actors learn to sing. As rehearsals heated up, the play's romantic overtones took on real-life meaning.
'I maybe pretended I couldn't sing as well as I could so I could get more lessons from Hayley,' Mr. Lopez said.
In April 2016, Ms. Finetti asked Mr. Lopez, then a sophomore, to be her date for junior prom. During a slow dance that night, he asked, 'Will you be my girlfriend?'
'There was nothing about her that I didn't love,' he said. They have been together ever since.
Ms. Finetti, now 26, went on to study at California State University, Chico, where she earned a bachelor's degree in political science. Mr. Lopez, now 25, attended the University of Silicon Valley in San Jose, where he earned a bachelor's degree in art and animation.
By 2019, they were living together as college students in Chico. Both retreated to their parents' homes during the early months of Covid, but by 2021 they were again sharing a household in Santa Clara, Calif. In 2023, each took jobs — she as a senior subcontract administrator for Lockheed Martin, the aerospace company, and he as a designer at a robotics company — that routed them to their current home in Oakland, Calif.
A year earlier, in July 2022, they had become engaged at Rancho Rubalcava, a San Jose ranch owned by Mr. Lopez's aunt and uncle, but not everyone liked the timing. Mr. Lopez said his mother 'had been adamant that I wait until after I had my degree' to propose. 'I had made it all the way to my senior year, and we had been talking about marriage for years. I couldn't wait any longer,' he said.
The couple exercised considerable patience, however, in the nearly three years it took to plan their May 4 wedding at Rancho Rubalcava — in part because they needed time to work on projects for their wedding theme.
Mr. Lopez is among the many 'Star Wars' fans who celebrate May 4, or Star Wars Day ('may the fourth be with you'). 'I'm a huge nerd,' he said, as if to explain the life-size Jabba the Hutt sculpture he built out of chicken wire, liquid latex and craft foam for the reception.
The couple combined cultural traditions during a ceremony for 150 officiated by Mr. Lopez's uncle, Jesse Rodriguez, who became a Universal Life Church minister for the occasion, while Ms. Finetti's father participated in the ceremony. In a nod to Ms. Finetti's Jewish background, they stood beneath a huppah and stomped glass. Mr. Lopez's Mexican heritage was represented by his traditional charro suit and a lasso ceremony, in which a lasso is draped over the couple to join them symbolically.
The reception was held in a barn decked out in 'Star Wars' tchotchkes. There was a hora and a taco truck at the reception (the consumption of 'many tacos' was important both culturally and personally, Mr. Lopez said).
As Ms. Finetti and Mr. Lopez danced to a custom 'Guardians of the Galaxy' music medley, guests sipped 'Star Wars'-themed cocktails near Jabba the Hutt. Before they left for a honeymoon, Ms. Finetti and Mr. Lopez saw to the sculpture's future safekeeping: It will be installed at the famed museum of 'Star Wars' memorabilia, Rancho Obi-Wan, where the couple serve as volunteers.