Love of animals inspires pair’s charity wedding
In lieu of gifts, couple ask guests to donate food to S.F. shelter
When Alex Farr and Mara Nicole met at a fundraising event for San Francisco Animal Care and Control five years ago, they bonded over a longtime love of animals — so it was only natural that when the shelter ran into financial trouble, they decided to use their impending wedding to help out.
Guests at the couple’s summer nuptials in Calistoga are being asked to donate food directly to the shelter instead of buying the soon-to-be newlyweds gifts from a traditional registry, which didn’t feel practical for the couple.
“We’re older now, my fiancee is 37, and I’m in my 40s,” Farr said. “We don’t need the Cuisinarts, the microwaves, the dishes, the blenders. We already have all that stuff.”
Nicole agreed, saying, “We don’t need anything more, so we thought it would be great to give back.”
For some guests, the idea of a chari- ty registry took some getting used to.
“I told my mom we were registering at the shelter, and she said, ‘So people are going to send blenders over there?’ ” Farr said with a laugh.
Asking guests to donate to charity in lieu of purchasing gifts from a traditional registry is rising in popularity as the average age of couples getting married for the first time rises, wedding planners have noted.
The donations to the shelter are much needed. San Francisco Animal Care and Control takes in about 10,000 animals of all kinds annually — dogs, cats, rabbits and guinea pigs — and feeding them can be expensive, totaling about $120,000 a year, according to Deb Campbell, the shelter’s spokeswoman.
For the past several years, a corporate sponsor had paid for the shelter’s food, but that arrangement recently
ended abruptly.
“It was an unexpected expense for us this year,” Campbell said.
“We’re the city animal shelter, so we belong to the community,” she added. “It’s always nice when the community reaches out and helps us back. We’re grateful.”
As for Farr and Nicole, they’re grateful to have found each other through their volunteer work at the shelter.
“I feel like I’ve been waiting forever for this,” said Farr of finding his future wife.
He said he fell in love twice when he met Nicole — with her and with her dog.
“My dog, Dino, had passed away after 18 years, and there was definitely this emptiness in my heart. I wasn’t ready to adopt another animal just yet, but I fell in love with Enzo, her dog,” he said. “I really took to him, and we became a family.”
The family grew over the years as Farr and Nicole moved in together and adopted two more dogs, Rocco and Luna, from a Central California shelter with a high kill rate.
All three dogs came from a rough background. Enzo had a broken leg and was dumped on the side of a road. Rocco and Luna were malnourished.
But now, they are thriving and all the more lovable because of their imperfections, Nicole said.
“I love that about shelter dogs — they always have something a little wrong with them. Rocco has one crooked ear, one straight ear. Luna has a broken tail that healed on its own,” she said.
Farr’s marriage proposal, too, was endearingly imperfect. He planned an evening proposal in Big Sur, but those plans went awry when the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge collapsed in February and forced them to evacuate the area.
“It was kind of a crazy thing — we had crossed this bridge going to Esalen, and we found out that night the bridge had closed because it had a crack in it, and they were evacuating Big Sur,” Nicole said.
“He had to change everything, had to propose in the day,” Nicole said. “It makes for a good story.”