Hometown Madison - January & February 2017

When
Adam Panetta
took his girlfriend
out on their boat
one sunny summer day,
she didn’t
suspect a thing.
“It was a
normal day,”
Kristen Panetta
recalls.
“We went out about three or four
in the afternoon, and after about
an hour, he took me to a secluded
area at the Reservoir and told
me to go the front of the boat.
Then he asked if he could blindfold
me.” Kristen didn’t think
anything of it because Adam was
such a kidder by nature. “I just
thought if he threw me off the
boat, I’d be really mad!” While
she was blindfolded, Adam
quickly rolled out a red “carpet”
made of paper, sprinkled it with
rose petals, put on a button-down
shirt and put a sign around their
rescue dog’s neck. “He told me to
take off the blindfold, and there
was Stella, our dog, with a sign
that said, ‘Will you marry my
daddy?’ It was perfect.”
When they returned to the
dock, their families were there to
greet them. “We had a party right
there at our condo’s clubhouse,”
says Kristen. “It was so much fun,
and so special.” That was on July
12, 2015. The wedding planning
began right away.
Kristen and Adam met in
high school, but they weren’t high
school sweethearts. “I was in the
ninth grade at Madison Central,
and he was in the tenth. We met
over the Christmas break when
we were both hanging out at the
same friend’s house.” They did go
to his junior prom together, but
Kristen said he made her nervous,
so she wouldn’t date him. “Yet, we
would talk and talk all the time.
We were just great friends.”
Adam went to Ole Miss, and
a year later, Kristen went to Mississippi
State. Her senior year, he
moved to Chicago to work. “We
talked on the phone a good bit,
and one night we made a bet on
who would win American Idol. If
he lost, he’d have to come see me.
If I lost, I had to travel to Chicago
to see him.” Adam’s contestant
won, and Kristen announced to
her sorority sisters that she was
going to see Adam in Chicago.
“They were shocked. They really
didn’t know anything about him,
and they knew I wasn’t the spontaneous
type.” Once she went
to see Adam in Chicago that
summer, Kristen said they have
been inseparable ever since.
Kristen has always enjoyed
doing side projects on her own,
and liked the idea of being her
own boss. “Adam encouraged me
to find something I wanted to
do and to write a business plan,”
she said. “I worked with Kendall
Poole, a local wedding planner,
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