Until the age of twelve Erica lived in San Francisco. When her mother remarried, she took the family to live anew in London. "Erica from America" she was called by the kids, who marvelled at her strange accent and saffy ways. Erica graduated from Oxford University in 1993 and then pursued graduate study in Philosophy across the pond at MIT. After getting her masters, she decided to go work for Shakespeare and Company, a theater group based in the Berkshires. A few years passed and tired of living in poverty, Erica thought maybe she should try getting into this hot fad of computer programming. She was accepted as a student in the first and only class of Ars-Digita, a pro-bono computer jock school created by a dot-com multimillionaire. It subsequently closed its doors one year later, like so many kozmo.coms, but it helped Erica land a programming job at a Cambridge startup.

Mat grew up in suburban northern New Jersey, USA, a real all-americasville. He spent much of his adolescence playing video games, working for his father at his drugstore, twiddling on his guitar and listening to very obnoxious "music". He went to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts where he double majored in ultimate frisbee and rock bandage, although these disciplines were then housed by the Philosophy and Foreign Language departments, respectively. After a year of teaching English in and traveling around South America, he lived for a bit in New York City, before moving back to the Boston area. There he faked his way into a series of jobs for internet software companies, spending a lot of his extra curricular time on middling careers, again, in ultimate frisbee and rock and roll.

They Meet

This more or less brings us to August 2002, when Erica and Mat met at the Plough and Stars bar in Cambridge on a blind date. They chatted about their similarities - the computer jobs, the artistic/creative side projects, the philosophy studies, the interest in travel, the silly nicknames. To their surprise, they had more than one drink, which in Mat's mind definitively means "a very successful date". It went so well that they both decided to see each other again. Their second date involved a trip the DeCordova Museum, including a picnic out in the sculpture garden. One thing led to another and love bloomed like so many flowery flowers. In 2003 they moved out to California together so Erica could finally finish her phd at the University of California at Berkeley. And boo-yah! Mat proposed in the sand dunes of Aruba after the two spent the day cycling around the island. Now they're actually going through with it.