Performers Adam and Lisanna Vasquez met in 2011, and have had rendezvous in some of the most romantic cities on earth. But the coronavirus pandemic brought them home, together.
Performers Adam and Lisanna Vasquez met in 2011, and have had rendezvous in some of the most romantic cities on earth. But the coronavirus pandemic brought them home, together.
Adam Vazquez sits on the piano bench next to his wife, Lisanna Vazquez, as she plays his favorite song from the movie “Man on Wire.“
“It’s like I get to live everything I love in my life twice,” Adam Vazquez said, “because she’s there, and she gets to share it with me.”
The piano was a gift from Adam Vazquez to his wife to welcome her home after four years of being on tour with her job. Like most of the items in their Las Vegas, Nevada, home, the piano holds a lot of significance for the couple. Though the two bought the house three years ago, they are only now beginning to settle in.
The amount of travel and time demanded of them by their respective careers as performing circus artists has kept them apart. The shelter-at-home order under COVID-19 has brought them together.
“All these years that we’ve been together, we haven’t been physically together for more than two or three weeks at a time since we met,” Adam Vazquez said. “We’ve been really working hard on trying to spend the time together, and now, we really accept this as a blessing to be able to come home right now and be together.”
Love at first sight
Adam Vazquez and his wife met in the summer of 2011, when they were both performers in the “Cirque de la Mer” show at SeaWorld San Diego. “It was love at first sight,” he said.
“He was the first person who had ever truly wanted to support me in any way he could, and wanted to help me make my dreams come true, and cared about my dreams,” Lisanna Vazquez said. “No one had ever asked me, ‘What do you want in life? What do you want to do? How are you going to get there? What can I do? How can I help you?’ Those were questions that kind of blew my mind. No one had ever stopped to ask me that, and maybe I didn’t even ask myself that before. So, when we met that summer, he just became my rock from then on and we couldn’t stay away from each other. We just always wanted to be together…it was truly a connection and truly something special that we still have today.”
When the summer ended, Adam Vazquez left to work as a performing hand-balancer on a cruise ship, while Lisanna Vazquez remained in San Diego, performing in SeaWorld’s dolphin show, “Blue Horizons.“ Their relationship was now officially long-distance.
The following decade saw each of them reaching new heights in their respective careers. Adam Vazquez, whose family history with the circus goes back to the 1800s, began performing a hand-balancing act with partner Anton Makukin. Their popular act, “Duo A&A,“ took them all over Europe and other parts of the world.
Meanwhile, Lisanna Vazquez moved to Las Vegas and began working with Cirque du Soleil, first as a performer at LIGHT nightclub in Mandalay Bay resort and casino, and then as a cast member of the traveling show “Toruk.“ In the show, she was one of the principal acrobatic characters, performing on the corde lisse — a vertically hanging rope for acrobatics, doing harness work, hand-balancing, floor acrobatics and acting. The tour took her to 37 countries and 108 cities around the globe, and the couple found themselves reuniting in various cities abroad whenever their work brought them near each other.
Global rendezvous
They met in Milan on Valentine’s Day one year, walking the city and wining and dining while enjoying the sights. One Christmas saw the couple meet in Zürich, enjoying a train ride, Christmas hike and romantic dinner. Another year, Adam Vazquez surprised his wife in Paris by arriving a week earlier than expected for a visit. He accompanied her to all of her performances, and they celebrated her birthday at a rooftop restaurant, enjoying wine and cheese and a view of the Eiffel Tower.
“In the Austrian Alps, at one of the most famous ski resorts, Serfaus, Adam befriended a local restaurant owner who invited us to have dinner, serving the very best Austrian tomahawk steak, complete with a live accordion musician and a local singer, who we sang along with all night,” Lisanna Vazquez said.
No place quite like home
Despite all of their globe-trotting rendezvous, there’s no place these two would rather be than at home, together. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought their work to a halt, but that’s just fine with them.
“What I did was—for the last four years—prayed really, really hard for us to be able to spend more time together, and I think God really heard me because I came home 16 March, and I haven’t been able to leave so far,” said Adam Vazquez. “We’ve been able to spend this whole time together, live day-to-day at the home that we never get to be in…we never even unpacked our bags into the home for many years. We were really blessed with a beautiful home here in Vegas, and we’ve just been trying to put it all together and make a house a home. Putting pictures up and talking about all our stories, spending time with the family.
“We haven’t gotten sick of each other yet, and we’re literally spending 24 hours together,” he said. “We’re very happy about that.”
(Edited by Joanna Lewis and Judy Isacoff)
