Celebrating With 150 Guests and Jabba the Hutt

Hayley Michelle Finetti can’t help but feel that the talent show championship she was awarded at age 10 should have gone to someone else.

“You should have won,” Ms. Finetti told her onetime competitor Emilio Lopez days before they were to be married in San Jose, Calif. “It must have been rigged.”

Ms. Finetti and Mr. Lopez met in 2009, when she was a fifth grader and he was a new fourth grader at Discovery Bay Elementary in Discovery Bay, Calif., in the Bay Area. Mr. Lopez had moved to town that year with his mother, Lucy Rodriguez, a single parent.

Ms. Finetti is a native of Discovery Bay. She and her older brother grew up in a theatrical household where their parents, Jennifer and Chris Finetti, were community theater buffs.

“I started singing before I could talk,” she said. A rendition of Christina Aguilera’s “Hurt” won her the 2010 talent show. Mr. Lopez’s talent was speed-drawing — he had set up a projector and asked audience members to name their favorite animals, then combined those animals into mutant monsters. “It was real avant-garde stuff,” he said, jokingly.

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At the after-school care center where both were enrolled that year, they struck up a friendship. In middle school, it withered. But neither was willing to let budding talent die on the vine: In 2016, they reconnected through their high school’s performance of “Gigi.”