Sunday September 1, 1996

Lisa Grosso of West Palm Beach holds up a photo of her kissing her on-line beau Andrew Hunt.

On-line couple spans cybergap, to wed on Web
By STEPHANIE ARTERO
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

Andrew Hunt had romanced women over the Internet before, but this was different.
After just a week of electronic exchanges in may with Lisa Grosso, 40, of suburban West Palm Beach, he longed to meet face to face. Hunt, 33, couldn't wait until August, when Grosso planned to visit his country, England.
By then, he predicted, they would "be building each other into gods and goddesses, and we don't want to be disappointed in each other."

Not to worry.
Hunt, a laboratory supervisor at a mattress company, offered to send an airplane ticket to Grosso, an out-of-work interior designer. Her friends said she was crazy, but Grosso went - all the way to Hunt's home in Wellington, which is about 120 miles west of London. Seven weeks later, they got engaged.
If she hadn't been unemployed and had the time to start exploring the Internet in March, they never would have met, Grosso said. And then, even their Internet names seemed compatible: hers was Starr, his, Cloud9.
"I was not looking for someone on-line. It just happened," Grosso said Saturday as she took a break from packing for her upcoming move to England. "If we met in person first, it probably wouldn't have happened because people put up barriers," she said. "When your're talking on-line, you're talking soul to soul."
The cyber couple plans to marry in England Nov. 1. After a civil ceremony, they'll hold a reception at the Taunton Cyber Cafe, where they'll receive an Internet-borne blessing from a British minister and then exchange computerized vows in a third ceremony led by a Seattle-area pastor.
"We're going to be so married," Grosso said with a grin. To sign the couple's guest book or check on the yet-to-be-set electronic location of the wedding, go to the couple's home page at: http://www.u-net.com/~andyhunt/.

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