Veronica Wirges and Chris Long had two encounters before he got her attention on the third.
They first saw each other around 1998, as Chris and his friends waited for a table in a crowded Vino’s Brew Pub. Veronica and her then-boyfriend were almost ready to leave, and she offered Chris and his friends a place to sit as she finished her drink.
They had a second encounter around 2000, at a rave — they even danced together for a bit, but did not really talk.
“The third time, we went on a date,” Veronica says. “We were inseparable ever since.”
That was in 2002. Chris was working in a video rental store, and Veronica was a frequent customer.
“This gorgeous woman kept coming in and renting all of the great, nerdy video games that I was in love with at the time,” Chris says. “I think I kind of failed at any attempt at flirting with her.”
Veronica had just broken up with her boyfriend and had not noticed Chris or his flirtations. Veronica’s cousin — Chris’s co-worker — gave Veronica a heads-up.
“My cousin was like, ‘Well, the video store guy thinks you have something,’” she says.
Veronica called the store.
“I asked if the guy with the curly hair was still working,” she says.
Chris’s manager put her on hold and told Chris a girl describing herself as a redhead was calling for him.
“I was like, ‘Oh, hey, give me the phone,’” Chris says. “I had seen her all throughout 2002, and then her birthday was January 2003, and that was our first date.”
Veronica says she and Chris became best friends.
“I kind of think that’s the foundation of a good long-term relationship, that you would be friends even if you weren’t really with each other,” Veronica says.
When they first started dating, Chris told her he wanted to play music, and that he also wanted to be a masseuse.
“I worked at a bar that had live music, so I had some insight on how he should go into the music thing, and I was looking into going to school to do hair, so I had already researched that,” she says. “I was like, ‘Well, if you want to do these things, this is how you do them.’”
They worked together on their goals and spent as much time as possible together.
Their conversations often turned to the number of their friends spending gobs of money on weddings — and the number who were divorcing soon after.
“We were like, ‘I don’t even see the point. We’re practically married anyway,’” Veronica says. “Then my soon-to-be husband said he had been thinking about it for a while, and his next words were, ‘Well, I mean, if we’re basically already married anyway, why don’t we just go ahead and do it?’”
About six months later, on Aug. 10, 2005, they exchanged their vows at the Pulaski County Courthouse.
After the ceremony they went directly back to their restaurant jobs, which they were doing to pay for renovations on the building where they would soon open V-Star Salon.
Chris had been composing music since age 12, and several of the pieces he wrote involved a sound he couldn’t link to a particular instrument.
“He thought for a long time that it was a cello,” Veronica says.
He would discover, through a surprising turn, that the sound he had sought all those years was made by the baritone saxophone Veronica had played in high school. The sound she creates with her baritone sax is distinctive, he says.
“It’s different from what you hear from most baritone saxophonists,” he says.
In 2017, Chris was offered the opportunity to participate in Austin’s South by Southwest. Through some misunderstanding, it was assumed Veronica was in Chris’s band. She did not want to be a reason he didn’t get the gig, so she dug out and tuned up her old sax, shoved down her crippling stage fright and prepared to accompany him.
“I learned to play music by ear, which was no small feat, in like eight weeks,” says Veronica, “and I was on stage at the biggest new music festival in the world.”
She loved it. They began a delicate back and forth, with Chris not wanting her to feel pressured to play with him again if it made her uncomfortable and her not wanting him to feel obligated to let her.
“I had a whole lot of fun being up there, and with our old band she would be running lights or managing and I would be staring at her out in the crowd anyway,” Chris says. “I was like, ‘This is cool.’”
Throughout the covid pandemic, they had plenty of time to play music together. They play together now as the indie-rock band Monsterboy Lives.
“We worked on an album. We worked on new material, like original stuff, and I explored other woodwind instruments and we joined the Recording Academy,” she says. “And then we came out of the pandemic with what I call ‘half a record deal.’ They represent our music for TV and film, some deals with NPR and NPR affiliate podcasts. It’s been wild.”
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The first time I saw my future spouse:
She says: “I was just being kind to somebody who looked like they needed a place to sit.”
He says: “I thought, ‘This chick knows a lot about really cool music.’”
On our wedding day:
She says: “It was a really pretty day. I also remember that we were in quite a time crunch to get it done before we went back to work.”
He says: “We were waiting tables at that time so we could put money in our pockets so we could put all of this together.”
My advice for a long happy marriage:
She says: “Don’t ask your spouse to do anything you could do for yourself. The only time you ask them to go do something for you is when they are just exceptional at it or it’s something you are unable to do. But in the same way, if you see something that will make your spouse’s life easier, do it. Find opportunities to lighten their load.”
He says: “Set aside time every month or every couple of months and just sit down and talk about everything that’s been going on and what you think about it.”
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