Danielle Helyn Toth thought she would never get married. She had always held the belief that she couldn’t be tamed.
When did she have a change of heart? Perhaps it was on her first weekend trip with Julian LeCraw III, while stargazing at Mr. LeCraw’s family’s hunting shack in North East, N.Y., near Mount Riga, an expanse of forest close to where New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts meet. Ms. Toth wept tears of joy, overwhelmed by the sky’s beauty.
“Julian says to me, ‘You’re crying because you think this is the happiest day of your life, but I promise it isn’t,” Ms. Toth said. “You’re going to have more, and they’re going to be with me.’”
At that moment, a shooting star arced across the sky.
“You wouldn’t believe the strings I had to pull to get that shooting star,” Mr. LeCraw said jokingly.
It wasn’t so much that she changed her mind about marriage, she said. She simply came to understand how meaningful it was to Mr. LeCraw.
Mr. LeCraw chimed in: “Oh, you for sure changed your mind.”
He also took up the major undertaking of converting to Conservative Judaism, a commitment that meant a lot to Ms. Toth.
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Ms. Toth, 35, is a global product lead at Google. She was born in New York City and grew up in Marlboro, N.J. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Wellesley College.
Mr. LeCraw, 34, works in wealth management at Wellington Shields. He was born in Atlanta and attended boarding schools in the Northeast. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Babson College, also in Wellesley, Mass.
The couple first met at a party at a mutual friend’s apartment in Wellesley in 2011, when they were both in college.
Ms. Toth said she felt “a magnetic connection instantly.” Mr. LeCraw asked her out for coffee the next day. She didn’t drink coffee, but they wound up getting tea, and the two dated briefly in the spring and fall of 2011.
After they both graduated in 2013, Mr. LeCraw went back to Atlanta, but he still called her whenever he was in New York, where Ms. Toth had relocated for work. One day in the spring of 2016, he landed in New York and asked to see Ms. Toth that night.
Ms. Toth, growing exasperated, told him she would see him only if he had orchestra tickets to “Hamilton” that evening. He had never heard of the play. After hours of calling friends and begging for extra tickets, he finally found a pair. In the only existing photo from the evening, a low-resolution selfie, Ms. Toth is beaming and Mr. LeCraw looks almost in disbelief. The couple didn’t know it at the time, but he would accept a job offer in New York the following year.
On Dec. 30, 2019, the couple decided to give their relationship “a real shot,” and they’ve been together ever since. He proposed to Ms. Toth on July 3, 2025, at her favorite hike — Satulah Mountain in Highlands, N.C.
Ms. Toth had three criteria for the proposal: that it was private, in nature and a surprise. To pull it off, Mr. LeCraw engaged in “a lot of sandbagging, a lot of trickery,” conspiring with friends to throw her off the scent.
If you stand in a particular spot at the Satulah Mountain summit, you’ll get a glimpse of a family residence built by Mr. LeCraw’s grandfather. When Ms. Toth stood there, Mr. LeCraw got down on one knee. He hired a photographer to capture the special moment, but told her to dress as a bird-watcher. Not realizing the woman had been hired, Ms. Toth remarked how nice it was that she would bother to snap photos.
The couple were married Feb. 15 before 90 guests at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Gordon Yaffe, a Conservative rabbi affiliated with Congregation L’Dor V’Dor in Little Neck, N.Y., officiated the ketubah signing and the ceremony. Mr. LeCraw’s cousin, Coles Cotter, had obtained a one-day license to officiate the legal wedding.
A reception followed at Robert, the restaurant on the ninth floor of the museum. The bride wore a custom gold ball gown by Nardos with pink-and-blue Manolo Blahniks and a veil hand-sewn in Italy. The couple incorporated New York touches: coffee cups lettered with “We are happy to serve you” and tables named for the city’s museums. Trays of cigarettes sat on a table next to custom matchbooks designed to look like diner checks. They said, “Wedding cigs don’t count.”
Elie Levine, who normally works on The Times’s Games team, is currently on assignment as a reporter.
The post He Secured Last-Minute ‘Hamilton’ Tickets Just to See Her appeared first on New York Times.
