Photo credit: Mary Soriano

By Steve Sears

On Easter Sunday 2022, Matt Pizzano was a wee bit concerned. 

“I was a  little nervous at first,” Pizzano says. “You just want to make sure everything goes smoothly, that nothing unexpected happens. I wanted to make sure I didn’t give her the wrong egg, of course, or end up having a kid give it to their parents. That would have been a disaster!” he adds while laughing.

Pizzano was going to ask his girlfriend, Kristen Carrotto, to be his wife, and the stage was set. Easter is her favorite holiday, and an Bunny Breakfast egg hunt was being set up on the grounds of Livingston’s Saint Raphael Parish.

All Carrotto had to do was open the feigned, “hard to crack” egg in the hands of her boyfriend.

Carrotto, 38, is a member of the Parish Pastoral Council, and she and Pizzano, 39, are both choir members and lectors, and both as well volunteer for the Samaritans Always Care parish outreach group. The couple met through a mutual friend in April of 2018. Their first date was actually the Saturday after Easter that year. 

Pizzano had bought the engagement ring late last year, was thinking of a special way to pop the big question, but options were wracking his brain. He first planned of presenting it at the couple’s first date spot, La Strada Nuova Ristorante in Millburn. “I made the reservation, and lo and behold, during the Omicron outbreak – it was around January or February – the owner called up and they said they had an outbreak in the restaurant, and the kitchen staff had to be out of work,” Pizzano says. “They had to shut down the restaurant for a period of time, so that took that option away.” His next thought was a walk around Verona Park, a place the couple had strolled together many times, he hopeful of getting a friend to the same spot that day to take pictures.

Pizzano then had another idea. “It dawned on me that Easter was coming up, and Easter is her favorite holiday. We had our first date right around Easter four years ago, so I said to myself, ‘This might be special.’ I knew we were volunteering to help out with the Easter egg hunt, and we’re always there at the church doing things, and I got an idea that this would really hold a lot of meaning for both of us, so that’s what I decided to do.”

A few minutes prior to the big moment on Sunday April 17, as 10 a.m. Mass was coming to a close, Pizzano pulled aside a fellow parishioner, Mary Soriano, told her of his plan, and asked her to be the on-the-spot photographer to capture the moment. She agreed. A few minutes later, Pizzano was on his knees, placing different colored plastic eggs on the ground for the eager kids, and called Carrotto over. “I said, ‘Kris, can you come over here? I’m just having a hard time with this egg.’ And so she came over and I handed it to her.”

Pizzano told her to be careful with it, and with those words, and with a photographer camera-ready nearby, it started to dawn on Carrotto a little bit that something was going to happen. “My heart was pounding,” she says, describing her emotion as she opened the egg and saw a gorgeous engagement ring. “I was completely overwhelmed. I was not expecting it at all, but I was so overjoyed and so happy because we are so much on the same page. We just kind of have the same mindset about things, and I knew that this is the person I want to spend my life with. I was really excited.”

News traveled fast, and fellow Saint Raphael Parish churchgoers started to offer the couple congratulations. 

The future Mr. and Mrs. Pizzano are planning for their wedding date, but they’re also enjoying the moment. “We’ve kicked around general times that we want to have it (the wedding), and we know we probably don’t want to do it in the winter and have a snowstorm on that day,” Pizzano says. “Fall might be a nice time, but we still have to do the Pre-Cana at church.”

“Everyone from the church was so excited, all of our friends there,” Carrotto says. “I feel like everyone’s been waiting for this moment. Father (Rev. Jose Erlito Ebron) announced it at the end of the (12:00) mass, and everybody was clapping. That was really nice.”

She then adds, “God brought us together.”