Written by: Danielle Gee

If you have ever been to a restaurant and mispronounced the name of the dish you were ordering, Broadcast and Video Production teacher Edward Corpuz knows how you feel. Corpuz still remembers a time back in his senior year of high school when he made that mistake while on a date.

Corpuz and his now-wife Noelia Sanchez, who were both 17 at the time, were out to dinner at a restaurant in Santa Clara before a Sadie’s dance. ” Noelia asked me to Sadie’s and we were trying to get to know each other,” Corpuz said. ” We went to this restaurant, and I confidently ordered the pollo [chicken] sandwich.” He thought it was pronounced “polo,” as in the sport played on horseback, but the word is pronounced “poy-yo.” “Noelia looked at me with the ‘did you really just say that’ face,” Corpuz said. “I was really confident at the time and it is funny, because she remembers and tells everyone now about how cool I thought I was [with the pronunciation of the sandwich] when I really was

not.”
Corpuz and Noelia met in middle school, went to the same high school,were in marching band together and even attended University of California Santa Barbara together. However, they never dated during their time in school. “We had our separate friend groups, but remained friends all through college,” Corpuz said. They reconnected afer college when they both moved back to their hometown of San Jose. Through mutual friends, they got together,started dating and got married on Dec. 31, 2014 in New York City.
Although their Sadies date can been seen as a failure, Corpuz feels differently. “ The date was not a fail, it is about how you perceive it to be,” he said. To this day, Corpuz and Noelia still joke around about that one time back in high school when he mispronounced a pollo sandwich.