The Bride and Groom Transformed Their Backyard for This Jazz Age-Inspired Wedding
Actress Ito Aghayere and director, writer, and producer Leon Hendrix III both went to graduate school at Columbia University. “I was studying acting, and he was studying film, and we both had strong opinions about our respective programs,” Ito says. They met at a dean’s luncheon to discuss issues within the School of the Arts. “We didn’t know each other at the time, but we eventually noticed that we were the only graduate students who ignored the free food and spent the hour offering our feedback to our dean, each with a notebook and pen in hand. We drove the conversation, kicking ideas back and forth between the two of us about diversity and representation at the school. I’m not sure how much impact we made on the program that day, but in the end, we made an impact on each other...and he walked away with my number.”
The two went on to date, and after making his intentions clear to Ito’s family at the end of 2019, Leon arranged for her siblings and parents, along with his brother and sister, to fly to Rome, where he and Ito were vacationing, for a surprise proposal. “Ito and I were finishing a holiday trip in Italy and traveling down to Florence,” Leon remembers. “I hired a photographer and musicians to meet us at Giardino degli Aranci, also known as the Orange Garden, a beautiful park overlooking Rome and Vatican City, where she thought we were meeting friends for New Year’s Eve.”
The musicians pretended at first to be buskers, but as the couple approached they started singing “Something” by The Beatles. “It’s one of our favorites,” Leon says. “I had rewritten the lyrics to make the song about her. When they sang ‘Ito, it’s the way you move…’ she laughed, thinking I had just paid them to sing about her.”
Then both of their families came out of hiding, led by Leon’s niece. At that point, Leon got down on one knee and proposed. “She says yes, and the crowd of family, tourists, and strangers went crazy as the sun set behind us,” Leon remembers.
“When we started talking about our wedding, we both realized we had carried around the same dream for a while,” Ito says. “We wanted our wedding to be more than one moment, we wanted it to be about building and expanding our family legacy from day one. As African American people, it was very important to us, culturally and historically, to get married on our own land. In hindsight, it was always going to be in North Carolina, a state near and dear to our hearts. I went to Duke for undergrad and Leon’s family lived in Charlotte. We both fell in love with the community and the natural wonder of the state. His ancestors had actually migrated from the Carolinas as freed men and women after the Civil War. For us, this place was bound up in our past and future. We wanted to redefine our family legacy—moving from oppression to opportunity. So, in the middle of 2020, we found it—a perfect sunny spot with a little creek and a lot of trees. We fell in love with it, and with what it stood for. We were determined to build on the foundation of bravery and hope inherited from our ancestors. So, it’s where we were married on October 30, 2021 on the 10 acres of land we purchased near Durham, North Carolina.”
While the location was set from the start, the date was a bit of a moving target. At the end of 2020, Ito and Leon had to reschedule from the spring to the fall of 2021 due to the pandemic. “After we got vaccinated, we had hoped, like everyone, that we’d be done with COVID,” Ito admits. “However, with the rise of the variants, we had to come up with a comprehensive safety plan which included requiring all our guests to be tested within 72 hours of our wedding. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it to us to be able to gather all the people we love safely.”
Once they’d come up with a plan, it was time to get creative. “We often switch roles, one person dreaming up something unique or exciting and the other having to temper it with the realities and restrictions of bringing ideas to life,” Ito notes. “[Planning during the pandemic] required us to dance between what we hoped for and what was possible against the backdrop of so much uncertainty. We knew we wanted something epic and unforgettable, so that was our North Star, but we had to stay open to new possibilities.”
The couple worked with Grace Beason of Grace Leisure Events. “She has become forever family to us,” Ito says. “In the ups and downs of 2020, she remained a constant source of guidance, perspective, and joy.”
The virus hit just after the couple got engaged, and they left Italy right before they shut down the country. “We had this grand, epic adventure in this ancient place and then the world had to cloister off," Ito remembers. "After all that, we wanted to expand. We wanted something that felt timeless and opulent and memorable. When I asked Leon what he wanted out of our wedding, he said two things: First, he wanted to throw the best party our relatives had ever attended, and second, he wanted it to be like The Great Gatsby. Curiously enough, considering he is a writer, I don’t think the themes of the book landed as hard on him as the general grand party vibes!”
Those two directives served as their starting point. The couple looked at New York City’s Jazz Age Lawn Party on Governor’s Island and watched a lot of Boardwalk Empire for inspiration. “The world was struggling for a lot of reasons, and we wanted to celebrate hope—and the power of possibility, opportunity, growth, and success,” Ito says. “We wanted to evoke the optimism and energy of the Roaring Twenties.”
