They met on a blind date at Sarasota’s historic opera house on Pineapple Street, opening night 1996.

The unexpected romance between Katherine Harris and Anders Ebbeson began while watching Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. The Force of Destiny.

Mutual friends had fixed them up, though at the time they seemed an unlikely match, with vastly different interests and vastly different styles. Harris, then a state legislator, had an oversized personality and a mountain of ambitions. Ebbeson, a Swedish entrepreneur a dozen years her senior, was calm and dignified, with no interest in politics. He couldn’t even vote.

Yet somehow it worked.

Story here.