“She was that white unicorn for me,” Matt Shannon recounts the chase that was Ashley.
The two met while working at Abuelo’s together. Matt was immediately interested in the cute girl with the “fitted black uniform.” However, it wasn’t hard for Ashley to control herself around the stringy-haired rocker.
“He had just gotten off tour and had this awful dyed, jet-black hair, tattoos and painted fingernails,” she remembers. “He wasn’t someone I wanted to waste my time on.”
Matt, unaccustomed to being ignored by the ladies, became intrigued. After about a month of trying to impress his white unicorn, he mustered up the nerve to ask her out. His invitation ended with embarrassing results.
“I said, ‘Why don’t we go out out sometime?’ And she just looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t we not go out sometime?’”
It wasn’t until the bartender at Abuelo’s brokered a deal with Ashley on Matt’s behalf: she would consent to see him outside of work. She invited him to the Celebrity Club, her second job, where she was a lounge singer.
Leaving nothing to chance, Matt cut off his sable locks and chose the classiest outfit at hand.
“I used my great-grandfather’s 1980’s Sear’s suit that was three inches too short in the arms and four inches too long in the pants,” he remembers. “I was a string pole in a suit.”
The effort Matt put into his appearance was worth it. Ashley consented to drinks at Kilkenny’s after her performance, but not without hesitation.
“I kept my coat on the whole time,” Ashley laughs.
Matt didn’t care about the obvious body language and was smitten.
“She looked like Vanna White. She had on a blue spaghetti strap dress and her big fur coat,” Matt remembers. “She looked like a movie star.”
But, music and life got in the way of a fluid relationship, causing the duo to date off and on for about a year. One fall day, Matt finally decided that the white unicorn he had been pursuing was the only one he ever wanted to chase.
Blindfolding Ashley and driving her to the Tulsa’s Center of the Universe, he got down on one knee and asked her to be his wife.
The Shannons were married at the Dresser Mansion in Tulsa, Ok and are proud parents to one lively little rocker, Jonas.