When we first met Danny and Annie Perasa in 2004, we heard about how their first date unfolded into an on-the-spot marriage proposal. We got a sense of Danny's big personality and his deep love for his wife. And we heard about his daily love notes to her.
To my princess, the weather out today is extremely rainy, I'll call you at 11:20 in the morning. And I love you, I love you, I love you.
But it was hard for Anthony to avoid thinking she might leave him.
"Because a lot of people, they don't want to be seen with someone that was ugly. What was it, like 70-plus surgeries, skin grafts? I really didn't want to leave the house," he says. "I just thought to myself, man, people don't know how to ask questions. They just want to stare and point."
He's thankful his wife stuck by him.
"The crazy thing is I'm still more self-conscious about what I look like than you are," Jessica tells him. "But I have grown so much over the past five years. I didn't ever think that I'd be as strong as I am today and most of it is from you. I can't imagine you not being in my life."
Today, the couple is attending college together.
They've been through "so much in so little time," Anthony says. "There shouldn't be anything that could tear us apart besides death itself."
Audio produced for Weekend Edition by Yasmina Guerda.
When we first heard from Laura Greenberg and her daughter, Rebecca, in 2011, Laura recounted what it was like to grow up in a family that was, as she explained it, "not normal."
"We're yelling, and we're pinching, and we're hugging, and we're cursing, and we peed with the door open," she said about her childhood in Queens, N.Y., in the 1950s. "I didn't know this was not normal behavior. I didn't know people had secrets; you didn't tell your mother everything."
Laura recalled how her father would conduct an imaginary orchestra in front of the stereo in his boxer shorts, and when she met Carl, Rebecca's father.
"He was cute, but very, very quiet and I scared the crap out of him. The first time he kissed me he had a nosebleed all over his face he was so nervous. It was terrible," she laughed — before adding that, 35 years later, they were still married.
Now, Laura and Rebecca are back in a StoryCorps booth in Atlanta. But this time, they're not alone — now it's Carl's turn to share his side of the family story.
"So your first kiss, we heard about how you bled all over Mom," Rebecca asks him. "Do you have any different take on that story?
"That's how it happened," Carl says. "But I do have some Laura stories. We were having people over. She was going to make spaghetti, didn't have enough. So she broke the package of spaghetti in half, so she figured she had twice as much."
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As the NASCAR season climaxes, America's prime motor sport continues to see its popularity in decline. For several years now, revenues and sponsorship have plummeted, leaving an audience that increasingly resembles the stereotype NASCAR so desperately thought it could grow beyond: older white Dixie working class.
Both ESPN and the Turner Broadcasting Co., longtime NASCAR networks, took a look at the down graphs and the down-scale demographics and didn't even bother to bid on the new TV contract.
Economics, of course, are part of the problem. Not as many folks can gas up the big old RV and head off to a long weekend at a track a ways away.
But there may be a couple other more fundamental problems NASCAR should face up to.
Click on the audio link above to hear Deford's take on this issue.