Destinątion
continued Beach wedding
PHOTO BY MONICA GALLARDO
PHOTOGRAPHY wedding. That includes musicians, photographers, tour compa-
nies, boat captains, hotel managers and caterers.

“I know everyone,” she said. She laughed, adding, “I know who
gets drunk by 5 p.m. and doesn’t return phone calls.”
Goldman has planned more than 100 weddings. In December,
she will coordinate a Jewish wedding for Danielle Rayzberg and
Nathan Brandys. Goldman is bringing in a rabbi for the ceremony.

The event will include a full chuppah and ketubah on the beach
for 91 guests, who are coming from as far away as Sweden, Poland,
Israel and Canada.

Goldman has some people coming in herself. The rabbi is from
Mexico. The wedding photographer is well-known, respected
Philadelphia photographer Rebecca Barger.

For Goldman, who once was a vice president at a Philadelphia
company, there are similarities between her old job and new one.

“I still herd cats,” she said.

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28 OCTOBER 26, 2017
In just 46 years, Goldman has experienced a meteoric corpo-
rate career, small business success, personal tragedy and a new
phase as an expatriate entrepreneur.

Goldman was born in Northeast Philadelphia in 1971. Her
family moved to Bucks County in 1980 as part of what she calls the
“great Jewish migration.” She graduated from Council Rock High
School in 1989 and earned a bachelor’s degree from what is now
Arcadia University in 1993. By 29, she had risen to the position
of vice president of employee relations at large, public company.

Her job got phased out in 2003 when the company was sold
and a new executive team moved in.

“I decided the next idiot I was going to work for was going to
be me,” she said.

Goldman opened an antiques shop, La Tela, in Berwyn. Her
husband, Tom Lennon, pitched in to help. He had been laid off
as an airline pilot following 9/11, and was flying cargo planes. He
helped her make deliveries and supported her around the shop.

The couple had renovated a 1920s Tudor house in Drexel Hill.

Things were going well. Then, on a Friday in 2004, the phone rang.

The MU-2 plane Tom was flying had gone down. He managed to
crash land without hurting anyone on the ground, but he died.

Goldman spent the next 18 months grieving, then trying to fig-
ure out what to do with her life. After a long period, she began to
jokingly ask friends about the cost of moving away to a tropical
island. Finally, her sparring partner at the gym — she had taken
up boxing — took her seriously and talked to her about the low
cost of living in Central American countries such as Costa Rica
and Belize.

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