Falling in love at Casa Bonita: When a gift shop attendee met a mariachi performer

This story is one in a series featuring trips down memory lane with longtime Casa Bonita fans and former employees who shared their fondest tales with The Denver Post. The restaurant and entertainment venue in Lakewood is expected to reopen in May.

Not long after Annette Enzaldo started working at the Casa Bonita gift shop in 1974, the year the Lakewood restaurant and entertainment venue opened, she caught the eye of a mariachi band member.

Annette, formerly Schumaker, always admired the musicians as they tuned up their instruments near the gift shop. “When the band would make their grand entrance into Casa Bonita, it made my heart flutter to hear that music,” she said.

One day, a 5-foot-4-inch violin player from the band named Valente Enzaldo approached the 23-year-old Schummaker, who was wearing a white blouse with puffy sleeves and a colorful printed skirt for the gift shop’s uniform, and said hello with a thick Mexican accent.

“I thought, ‘Well here’s my chance to practice my Spanish,’ and I said, ‘¡Hola! Como estas?’” Annette, who studied Spanish all four years of college, said. “And that kept on for probably two or three weeks, and one day I was taking my break, and he joined me.”

The smell of sopapillas, burnt cheese, chlorine wafting from the waterfalls — and love — was in the air.

For a while, the two kept enjoying breaks together, sometimes tucked quietly behind Casa Bonita’s waterfalls or even in the caves for some peace and quiet. Valente, a 27-year-old Puebla, Mexico, native, would practice his English on Annette and she’d practice her Spanish.

“It was the funniest thing because we could hardly understand each other, but I thought he was so handsome with tanned skin and this big head of black hair,” Annette said. “And he was quite intrigued with this blue-eyed, fair, light brown-haired girl that spoke some Spanish. We just kind of pulled together like fireflies in a fire.”

Valente got up the nerve to ask her out for a drink during one of their breaks, and she quickly said yes.

Annette had moved to Denver from Aberdeen, South Dakota, after college because she said she didn’t want to become a farmer’s wife. She first got a job working in a real estate office, but as the youngest one there, she wasn’t making many friends. So when she heard Casa Bonita was opening, she thought the new sparkly restaurant and entertainment venue would be the perfect opportunity to meet other people her age, and she did just that.

After a year and a half of dating, Annette and Valente got engaged and then married in September 1976. The two still worked at Casa Bonita, but Annette moved up from the gift shop to the puppet theater, until 1977. Valente even saw The Jackson 5 band come in for lunch one day while he was working.