Love Story shop in Cambria becomes a wedding venue for one romantic couple
A bicoastal couple who met online competing against each other in Words With Friends games recently eloped and were married at a Cambria store that has love in its name and its business model.
The bride, Tracy Shaw, 52, is a Maryland resident who works as a paramedic. Groom Keith Privratsky, 60, lives in Thousand Oaks.
They were married July 22 at Cambria’s Love Story Project shop.
The groom wore a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. The bride was in a sleeveless blue, button-front dress. Both wore sandals.
Actress/wedding officiant Jill Turnbow of San Luis Obispo did the honors, and shop owner Alan Fraser was the witness during the 10-minute nuptials.
Casual? Yes. Almost spur of the moment? Indeed.
But unquestionably romantic.
The couple are planning a full wedding ceremony Oct. 22 in the tiny western New York burg of East Aurora, a town that’s very special to Shaw, and which is about the same size as Cambria.
The wedding date will be two years to the day when they began conversing online, although they’d been competing in the Scrabble-like game for about a year.
At that point, they only knew each other’s first names and playing styles.
Their courtship, 2,374 miles apart
How it got from Privratsky teasing Shaw because she’d played so many high-points, seven-letter words to “I do!” in 19 months is a love story for the modern age of the Internet and social media.
They relayed the tale during a phone interview Monday, Aug. 8, and in their recorded “love story” video at www.thelovestoryproject.org.
Shaw said she’d played Words With Friends (WWF) for about a decade, competing occasionally against Privratsky.
Then, on Oct. 22, 2020, he messaged her, she said jokingly, “yelling at me about my seven-letter words.”
Privratsky replied with a chuckle, “She was kicking my butt,” which she continued to do, because “I think her next play was another seven-letter word.”
They messaged back and forth, and eventually Shaw asked Privratsky where he’d been standing for his profile photo, with him in front of snow-capped mountains.
It was in the Sierra Nevada, he told her, and it highlighted his love of backpacking and hiking.
Those are passions they share.
Privratsky mentioned doing a trial run, and Shaw asked what that meant, so he sent her a profile of the trail.
“At that point,” she said gleefully, “I knew his last name … I did a little stalking … well, a lot of stalking.”
By the end of the day, Shaw knew a lot about her WWF competitor, his job, where Privratsky lived, his history. Both of them are divorced; neither has children.
In her next message, she said she was going to send him a Facebook friend request, so he could send her some of his backpacking photos. He did.
Learning about each other long distance
By January 2021, after a months of texting, Facetiming and “chitchatting,” Privratsky told her Shaw he wanted to visit her in Maryland.
“There are no mountains here, it’s very flat, humid, miserable,” she told him.
His response? “I want to be out there, be with you.”
“After being together for 12 hours,” Shaw recalled, “we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.”
Between then and the Cambria wedding, “every month, one of us travels,” she said. “We’d spend a week or 10 days together. We’re so looking forward to making one home ours.”
Plus, the couple has traveled a lot together, to Oregon, Massachusetts, New York, in locations as romantic as Maui and Niagara Falls.
They hadn’t been looking for love, Shaw said. “We’d both given up, and were resigned to the fact that we’d be alone for the rest of our lives.”
With a catch in her voice, she said, “We’re so lucky to have found each other.”
The proposal
Then there was the formal commitment.
“We do things a little differently,” she said. “We’re all about infusing humor in everything we do.”
So, on April 10, 2022, the day before Privratsky turned 60, while they were at the Ali’i Kula Lavender farm in Maui, Shaw proposed to him during a picnic, in a quirky manner that fits their outlooks on life.
She’s a quilter, so she made an elaborately intricate 44-by-44-inch one replicating the WWF game board. Then, with fabric game-tile letters, she created carefully choreographed plays to fill the board.
Rather than leaving anything to chance, Shaw had “controlled everything,” she said, and “forced the situation so each word could only be played in one place.”
Shaw put the letters for each word in a numbered envelope, with blue ones for him, pink ones for her. Two other envelopes were to be used at the end of the game.
She said, “The first word was ‘adventure.’ He had to unscramble the letters in each envelope.”
Shaw told Privratsky that the words represented “a lot of the reasons why I love you.”
Toward the end of the game, she played a three-minute montage of photos of all the adventures they’d shared, with the song “You Are My Person” playing in the background.
Then she set out her last four words, in red, which spelled out “will … you … marry … me?”
His final envelope had only the word “yes,” in it.
Teasing her, Privratsky said, “I don’t have options? Where are my options?”
Of course, his answer was yes.
Since then
In the whirlwind since then, they decided he’d sell his condo and house in Thousand Oaks and look for a home to share perhaps in Virginia or Maryland. It seems that Shaw’s rental cabin in Maryland is too snug for two people to share, no matter how much in love they are.
He’s in the process of retiring from nearly three dozen years as a process-systems engineer in the aerospace industry. She’ll continue her paramedic career, which she said she “absolutely adores.”
Their Oct. 22 wedding at the Old Orchard Inn in East Aurora will still be small by today’s over-the-top standards, she said with “maybe 35 guests, including us, in a tiny, adorable town” with family significance for her.
The wedding, and why Cambria
The couple’s Cambria wedding was triggered by some health issues he’s facing, and their desire to be together sooner.
During their courtship, they’d taken a trip up the California coast, Shaw said. “He knows I love cute shops and cafes. That whole area is full of beautiful little towns. We found The Love Story Project last June, and while we were there, Alan (Fraser) asked us if we’d like for him to record our love story.”
The business records customers’ love stories and also sells photos and gifts, many of them customized, at its location at 734 Main St. It’s been open for seven and a half years, according to Fraser.
Shaw and Privratsky couldn’t do the video then, but decided they’d need to “go back someday” to let Fraiser preserve their story for posterity.
Once they decided to elope for an earlier first ceremony, everything just fell into place.
So, at about 10:46 a.m., June 22, with the Love Story shop door locked and the four of them gathered in the back, Turnbow performed the 10-minute wedding.
“It was short, simple, loose and easy,” the officiant said by phone Aug. 5. “They’re a really fun couple. What struck me the most was he could not stop smiling, grinning from ear to ear the entire time. It was adorable.”
Later, in keeping with the couple’s unusual approach to joining their lives together, Shaw and Privratsky discussed whether she should take his name after the wedding.
They’ve decided she’d hyphenate it as Privratsky-Shaw.
With a merry laugh, she said, “That way, we can abbreviate it to Pshaw.”
