It may be just a photo, but it tells a love story.
The photo of Megan Pagado being dipped by her now-fiancé Donald Wells at Glen Echo Park’s Spanish Ballroom is a reminder of how their relationship began—at a swing dancing class in January 2010.
Pagado said that before she met Wells, he was attending a swing dancing class at the park. A mutual friend invited Wells to a Zumba class the friend and Pagado attended, which is where they first met. At the class, Wells suggested the friends get a group together to go swing dancing and they did.
“I like to say Glen Echo Park is where the spark happened in our relationship,” Pagado said, remembering that first class. “I was standing in the corner of the room, minding my own business, and then saw someone I didn’t know coming toward me to ask me to dance. Then all of a sudden Donald came and swooped in and grabbed my hand before the other guy did.
“It kind of sounds like a romantic comedy, but I swear it actually happened,” Pagado said. “I was secretly hoping he would ask me, but I don’t think I could admit it then.”
She said after that class, they started hanging out frequently and now they’re engaged with a wedding scheduled for April in Los Angeles, where Pagado is from. The two currently live in North Bethesda.
The photo of the couple swing dancing and the story Pagado shared was one of five creative submissions ranging from poetry to videos that were chosen as winners from 5,400 submissions as part of a national contest to celebrate the National Park Service’s centennial anniversary.
The photo was taken by Wells’ childhood friend, James Jollay, who took it while the three of them were hanging out at the Spanish Ballroom. Pagado said the photo is a fun way to share the couple’s story.
“It’s cool that our love story started in a national park that you really wouldn’t think is a national park,” Pagado said. “It offers pottery, puppetry, art studios, glass blowing and dance. It’s not one of the huge ones like Yosemite—it’s literally in our backyard and I think people kind of miss that there are national parks right in our backyard.”
The park is managed through a partnership of the National Parks Service and Montgomery County.
Pagado, who works at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park, and Wells, a government contractor, will receive two annual Federal Recreational Lands passes, a weekend getaway for two at a national park and a bevy of camping equipment for winning one of the five grand prizes in the Find Your Park contest.
Pagado said entering the contest wasn’t as much about winning as showing the importance of national parks in the couple’s lives. She said Donald proposed to her at the National Mall, which is also a national park.
“Parks are just a part of our lives that we didn’t realize until the Find Your Park movement,” Pagado said. “It made us realize that national parks are part of our daily life.”
