After years of growing friendship at the University of Rhode Island, who knew Theresa Brown ‘21 and Evan McAlice ‘21 would find love working at the Good Five Cent Cigar?
Brown and McAlice met through the writing department in 2020 as office interns in Roosevelt Hall. With differing shift times, they hadn’t met, but their pictures were on the walls of the department, so they knew of each other. Brown recognized McAlice from Rhetoric for Writing Majors and she introduced herself.
McAlice knew Brown was the one after quickly becoming friends while working together. They spent a lot of time together in their classes, and McAlice joined Brown’s social circle at the Cigar. When students were sent home during the pandemic, they found themselves growing even closer as they continued to hang out virtually.
“I think it was probably then, when we had still been spending so much time talking together over the phone and FaceTime and just texting that I knew that Theresa was going to be in my life forever,” McAlice said. “That’s when we officially started dating, and the rest is history.”
Brown was the managing editor for the Cigar at the time, prompting McAlice to run for, and ultimately become the social media coordinator. Brown’s Cigar journey started as a contributing reporter in her first year, moving up to editor-in chief. In her last semester, she went back to writing.
For McAlice, it felt intimidating when everyone was taking articles right away. It took a while to come back, so he tried his hand at social media instead.
“Just from there, I got a lot more confident to start writing articles, contributing to the newscast and anchoring,” McAlice said. “So I ended up really doing quite a few different things for The Cigar, even after that first time, where I felt like I couldn’t hack it.”
After graduating from URI, Brown went to New York University to get her master’s degree in publishing. McAlice lived in Mystic, Conn. to work for a college program at Mystic Seaport Museum. They stayed in touch through FaceTime and took train rides back and forth from Connecticut and New York.
“We’d done it before because when we first started dating, it was during COVID-19,” Brown said. “So we had quite a few months, where we were quarantined in separate places.”
McAlice lived in Mystic for two years, where he had the opportunity to travel to Louisiana and Alaska by sailboat. Afterwards, he moved to Boston to work as an admissions counselor in the graduate program at Lesley University.
“I’ve really loved living in Boston,” McAlice said. “I’m originally from Massachusetts, so it always felt like everything I had done up to that point had been leading to me living in Boston. So now I’m here and I’m living the dream.”
Six days after graduating from NYU, Brown ran Simon & Schuster’s TikTok shop from New York before moving to Boston. She lived with her best friend from high school and then moved in with McAlice last July.
Brown and McAlice will be getting married in November of next year.
