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Members of Glover's Marblehead Regiment stepped off first, tricorn hats and period coats, muskets on their shoulders, leading the wedding party down the narrow streets toward The Landing. Behind them, hand in hand, came James Maroney, grinning, and Michelle Brown in a strapless lace gown and dark sunglasses, carrying white roses shot through with pale blue.
They had married minutes earlier at Crocker Park, on the grass above Marblehead Harbor, in front of about 50 guests in white folding chairs. It was a clear September afternoon, sun on the water and enough wind off the harbor to lift her veil sideways in the photographs. The regiment fired its salute, white smoke drifting across the lawn toward the water, and the couple walked out to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida."
Maroney is normally the one recording a scene like that. As production manager at MHTV, the town's community television station, he has spent more than a decade filming Select Board and School Committee meetings, veterans ceremonies, the town's Pride flag raising and the Festival of Arts. His documentary on the Fraternal Order of Cranks won a national community media award in 2017, and he has an Emmy from his years shooting for CN8.
"Even if we go to Crosby's, people will be like, 'James,'" Brown said, seated next to the couple's Lindsey Street home's beautiful, expansive backyard.
He came to that standing late. Maroney spent 23 years in video production at the Comcast Network and the cable operations that preceded it, and lost the job in a 2009 layoff that he has said took his sense of himself with it. He delivered flowers in Beverly for $10 an hour before working his way back into television. Joan Goloboy, the longtime MHTV executive director, hired him, and he decided to spend his time on the town's stories.
He knew Brown's work before he knew her. Her paintings turned up in galleries around town and he could identify them without checking the label. He interviewed her in 2022, after she won the Marblehead Festival of Arts logo competition with a design built from nautical signal flags.
Brown runs Shipyard Art, the one-woman business she started in 2018 after a corporate layoff pushed her back to painting and then into wearable art, printing her own images onto clothing. Her foster father taught her carpentry, took her to auto body classes and taught her to sail a Herreshoff catboat. She bought one of her own during the pandemic.
Second row, not a date
In the summer of 2023, Maroney had a ticket to see The Revivalists, The Heavy Heavy and Band of Horses at the Seaport in Boston. Ten days out he found two seats in the second row and messaged Brown. She did not answer for days. She was sailing the catboat alone to South Dartmouth and back through the Cape Cod Canal, gone about a week.
When she said yes, he told her it was not a date. He said it more than once. They ate at Legal Sea Foods first and told each other their lives. Her hamburger went to the wrong table and arrived after he had finished eating. Walking to the venue she wanted a selfie, and when he touched her shoulder she jumped.
He was attracted to her that night. Asked later whether she had been attracted to him, Brown said no. "I wasn't attracted to anybody at that point," she said, and they laughed.
That December neither had plans. Maroney had spent years skipping holidays altogether. Brown had eaten Christmas dinner alone at a bar the year before. She invited him for lasagna using an argument she now concedes was strategic: don't leave me alone with the other guest. He arrived, found dishes in the sink and was washing them within five minutes. He stayed talking until nearly midnight, then mailed her a thank-you note.
Brown had foot surgery Jan. 5, the bone cut, rotated and screwed back together. Maroney showed up with violets, snacks and ice, and kept showing up. They watched documentaries. A two-hour film would run five or six hours because they kept stopping it to talk. He is precise about what that was. "I liked Michelle," he said. "I liked her a lot." He believes you have to like someone before you can love them.
On Feb. 29, 2024, an allergic reaction sent Brown to Salem Hospital by ambulance. Maroney was covering a School Committee meeting in the Marblehead High School library. When it ended he shut everything off and drove there. She spent part of that evening in the hospital room, by her own account, checking him out.
Five days later they had dinner upstairs at Maddie's Sail Loft, came back to her kitchen table and sat talking with a live Bee Gees album on. He got up to go and kissed her on the cheek, meaning to be a gentleman. She kissed him on the mouth. He was 65 years old, and he skipped home through Marblehead's winding streets.
"I really did skip that night," he said, "all the way home."
Alone on purpose
Neither had been in a hurry. Maroney had gone roughly 12 years without a relationship, refused online dating and used the stretch deliberately — vacations by himself, holidays by himself, an attempt to work out who he was. Brown had come out of a 10-year relationship and was not looking to start another.
On Sept. 20, Maroney will be 29 years sober. Apart from Brown, he calls that the best decision he has made, and he credits the films he has made since to it. What the relationship added was something else: Evidence, he said, that he was "likable and lovable."
Brown, who grew up in foster care and has spent most of her life working things out herself, put it shorter. "We've earned each other," she said.
Once they were a couple, Maroney issued a warning. He was not a hand-holder, he told her, and he wanted that clear before they walked downtown. They got about as far as the corner. They have not stopped since.
The wedding was assembled to be a Marblehead one. By June 2025 they had booked Crocker Park, the back room at The Landing and rooms at the Harbor Light Inn — three stops inside a few hundred yards, so guests would spend the weekend walking the town rather than driving to it. They held the list at 50 on purpose. "We didn't want to have 100 people and not be able to spend quality time," Brown said.
Guests came from London, Toronto, Chicago, California and Florida. The couple ordered a Crocker Park-scented candle for each of them, from a Marblehead candle maker. Robert Simonelli, who runs The Landing, is a friend of Maroney's. Two members of Glover's Marblehead Regiment he has filmed for years, Larry Sands and Bryan Rucco, were part of the day.
"Everybody that's coming has something to do with our love affair," Maroney said beforehand — family, friends, neighbors, the regiment.
He was blunter about why the town itself was on the invitation. "We both fell in love with Marblehead before we fell in love with each other," he said.
Maroney's version of Marblehead is a convert's. He arrived a dozen years ago after the layoff and the flower deliveries, took the MHTV job and, as he tells it, looked around at the culture, the history, the seaside and decided that would be the work. "I'm going to go out there," he said, "and tell the stories of this beautiful place."
He can name the people who made it stick: Goloboy, who hired him; the Marblehead Museum and the Marblehead Arts Association; the regiment, for keeping the history alive. Two of those names still stop him — not that he knows them, but that they know him. Bette Hunt, the town historian emeritus, picked him out from the back of one of her tours when he was still new here and said his name aloud to the group. Dan Dixey, the photographer and historian whose family line in Marblehead runs back generations, corrected him once when he introduced him as someone he admired: they were friends, Dixey said, and said it twice to be sure it took. Maroney repeats that with disbelief. Before Brown, when he was alone, he would sit at the Hooper Mansion and take in the town, or drive to Crocker Park and stay.
What he wanted from the wedding weekend was for the out-of-towners to get some of that. "This is our home. We welcome you here," he said. "We want you to experience this beautiful seaside town that is so special to us and so special to the history of our nation."
The bench and the swing
Crocker Park was not a venue to him. When he first came to town he would sit on the bench there for hours looking at the harbor, and swing on the swing alone. After they started dating, the two of them walked down and sat on the swing together. He recorded a song playing while they swung.
Saturday they stood under a birch arbor wound with greenery, white fabric and pale blue ribbon, an American flag behind it and the harbor behind that, thick with moored boats. The Fenway String Quartet played. Brown walked down the aisle by herself, to Lana Del Rey's "Video Games." Her son, Otto Kirley, 24, stood up as best man, with Brenda Kelley Kim, the Marblehead Weekly News columnist, as bridesmaid. The Rev. Jim Bixby, officiating, told them the town was "the crucible in which both of you have found and formed yourselves."
Her brother, Peter Lawrence, remembered the third floor she claimed as a teenager, ceiling papered with Rolling Stone, off limits to him because he wasn't cool enough. Lawrence mentioned the Karmann Ghia she restored. "You've always been someone who has lived life on your own terms," he said.
Lori Booker-Jorge, the maid of honor, met Brown in high school, where Brown sat behind her and drew pictures of her during math class. They lost touch, found each other again on Facebook, and when Booker-Jorge's son was in intensive care with a traumatic brain injury, Brown came and stayed. She admitted she had worried about losing her best friend to a boy, and said she now has two.
John Burke flew from London, where he is a barrister, to stand as groomsman. He met Maroney at 14 and said what he learned from him was troubleshooting: keep trying the next thing until it works.
For more than a year, Maroney read Brown the countdown every morning off a day calendar that started somewhere past 400. Saturday it ran out.
Monday they fly out for eight days. He has spent their years He has spent their years together springing surprises on her — the second-row seats she knew nothing about until they were walking down to them, the ring he carried into Dale's Spa on Washington Street and produced on one knee while she was getting her nails done. This one is hers. Brown booked the whole trip and has told him nothing about it except what to pack.
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