"Will you marry us?"

The rain stopped falling just as Sara Parnell emerged from a converted, sunflower-strewn school bus at her lakeside wedding.

Her 220 guests were already there, stretched out on blankets in tall boots and thick sweaters. Also present for the big day were six touring musical acts, their entourages, a handful of passing kayakers, a half-dozen Port-a-Potties and 750 paying ticket-holders.

Officially, Parnell was marrying Josef Crosby, one member of the Celtic rock band Scythian. Spiritually, she bound herself to all four, and to a way of life affirmed when she enthusiastically agreed to turn her Oct. 10 wedding into an outdoor music festival.

Crosby and Parnell met seven years earlier. He was 22, working as a videographer at a Capitol Hill news service and occasionally playing violin on the side. She was a recent University of Maryland graduate who wanted to be an on-air journalist at the news service but wound up interviewing for a position as a field producer. After taking her out on an assignment, Crosby gave the higher-ups a recommendation: "Don't do it."

"She showed up in these ridiculous high heels," he recalls. "But her job would've been humping the gear up the hill -- tripods and cameras. It was hard. I saw the shoes she was wearing and I was like, 'There's no way she's going to be able to do it.' "

But Crosby did take the cute blonde's audition tape home to show his roommates, and when the position still hadn't been filled a month later, he changed his posture to "whatever -- just hire her." They spent the next six months working 12-hour days together, spending an outsize portion of their paychecks on beer and developing unspoken crushes on each other.

"It was obvious from the beginning," says Alexander Fedoryka, Crosby's former roommate and current band mate. "You could tell -- it was a great chemistry in them giving each other a hard time."

In the back of a cab after a night out in May 2003, Crosby finally kissed his favorite sparring partner. The next month he quit journalism to dedicate himself to the band, formed earlier that spring.

By October, Parnell was officially Crosby's girlfriend, but neither was particularly confident the relationship was meant for the long haul. "We were very different," Crosby says. "There was a lot to hash out."

Parnell was raised in a liberal Jewish household in Connecticut. Crosby's parents in Ohio are conservative Catholics and he was still a regular at Mass. And there was this whole business of him trying to make it with a band.

"I'd been raised to find someone with a 9-to-5 job who would get me a nice house in the suburbs," Parnell says. "And there was always so much pressure -- 'Oh, you have to marry someone who is Jewish.' "

After a trip to Israel in early 2005, Parnell was scheduled to meet Crosby in Key West, Fla., to celebrate her birthday. The day before, she called to say, "I can't do this. I need to raise my kids Jewish. I can't handle this. I'm not coming down."