Dan Vicco couldn't keep his mind off Alex Wahl. He'd watch her puzzle over math problems and sprint down the lacrosse field. He admired her blond good looks and relished her sharp mind. They talked easily about their favorite bands, personal problems and college sports.
He started thinking about their future.
He thought about it on a trip to San Francisco as they walked together on a brilliant morning near the Golden Gate Bridge. He considered it when they went to see an Oakland A's baseball game. He even approached stadium authorities that day asking if they would flash his question up on the big screen. Nope, they said. Requests must be submitted in writing well in advance of a game.
That night, he took the plunge. In the ballroom of a Hilton hotel, as hundreds of other couples danced to the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps," he cajoled the deejay into handing him the microphone and popped the question.
"Alex, will you go to prom with me?"
Pity the boys in today's celebrity-driven, over-the-top entertainment culture, where asking a girl to the prom has turned into performance art.
Prom proposals ever more elaborate
Prom proposals, as these humbling exercises are now called, have been more elaborate than ever this spring, according to Promspot.com's associate editor, Kate Wood. Promspot solicited examples this year and received hundreds of responses from teenagers all over the country, "even North Dakota," says Wood. "This is not just an East Coast/West Coast thing."
Clearly, though, it is a big thing. A chat with her girlfriends, a phone call or a quick conversation by the lockers between classes won't do anymore. That's so 2005. In 2006, the request has to be painted on a giant sign parked in front of her house or accompanied by 50 red candles, hundreds of Hershey Kisses and an original poem. Why? For the same reason guys go to prom: because girls want it that way.
Vicco, 18, a videographer for Annandale High School's A-Blast online newspaper, figured he didn't stand a chance with 18-year-old Wahl, a photographer, unless he did something really unusual. He comes from Indonesia and is a former ESL student. She's a Virginian, captain of the school swim team and plays varsity lacrosse. As he put it, "We didn't grow up in the same neighborhoods." As her friends told him, "It will be hard to get her to say yes."
He made his proposal last month at a national conference of student journalists.
How could she refuse?
"Yes," she said that night. And then louder, "Yes!"
"The whole ballroom started cheering," Vicco recalls. "There were lots of cellphone cameras flashing from people we didn't even know."
Michael Medeiros, a senior at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, invited his date at the senior banquet.
Weeks earlier, he had decided to ask Ashley Grimaldi, who was "just a friend. We weren't going out. But I liked her, I guess." Trouble was, he didn't have a clue how to impress her.
One guy he knew had asked a girl over dinner in a restaurant, persuading a waiter to write the question in icing on a piece of cake. Another had painted a huge sign and held it outside the intended's bedroom window. "Guys have made this into a competition," Medeiros says, "and I didn't have any creative ideas."
Luckily for Medeiros, his pals did. A couple of them were putting together a slide show for the banquet and suggested he make a slide asking Grimaldi to prom. Medeiros loved the idea. The afternoon of the event, he and a buddy pulled an outdated poster off a school wall. On the back, they scrawled in large letters, "Prom?" They shot a digital photo of Medeiros holding up the sign. Later they printed Grimaldi's name across the top of the slide.
That night, Medeiros sat one table over from his crush. As the moment for his slide approached, he couldn't look at her. "There was always the possibility that she'd say no," he remembers, "but I was more afraid she'd be totally embarrassed." When the slide appeared and Grimaldi's friends started shrieking, he sneaked a peek. Grimaldi was smiling. Somehow — he doesn't remember how — the two of them came together and started hugging to the loud applause of fellow students. Medeiros says he still hears from girls who lament, I wish my boyfriend had done that.
Lily Boleyn, a senior at Centennial High School in Ellicott City, says the proposal idea caught on at her school after an episode of MTV's "Laguna Beach," a high-school reality show. The first Centennial student to try something was a senior who, during a school fashion show, walked onstage with a rose in his mouth and stopped in front of a girl in the front row. Preceded by two guys with a sign reading "Will you go to?" he carried another sign that said, "Prom?"
A few weeks later, Boleyn's boyfriend, Kris Albornoz, spray-painted an 8-by-4-foot plywood board and stood in the rain to plant his gigantic prom invitation in his girlfriend's front lawn so she would see it when she returned from a rock concert. After that, Centennial girls started dropping hints as big as boulders to guys they knew were interested in them. Maybe if you asked me in a good way, they said, even to boyfriends of some months, I'll go to prom with you.
Crossing over into 'Hollywood lifestyle'
Promspot's Wood says one of her favorite examples of a proposal was one that came from a young man returning from Mexico with his church youth group. On the flight home, he and a friend persuaded the flight attendant to ask a certain girl in a certain seat if she would accompany him to prom.
"Prom goes in and out of vogue," says Wood. "Right now, it is really prominent again." The "Laguna Beach" show has something to do with it, she figures, as does media hype surrounding the engagement of hotties like Katie Holmes, Jennifer Garner and Kimberly Stewart. "Teens can't get enough of what celebrities are doing, the minutiae of celebrity lives. Prom is one night where they can cross over into that Hollywood lifestyle."
Madison Kantzer certainly feels that way. "The romance is gone from everything else," the 17-year-old says. "All we do is go to parties and hook up. Prom is like a real date."
The Churchill senior remembers dreaming about prom in elementary school. Over spring break this year, she went to Disney World and returned home to buy a floor-length ball gown in what she calls "Cinderella blue."
A month before the big night, she still didn't have a date. She had been hoping for an invitation from classmate Brendan Lahr, but he appeared so oblivious that Kantzer panicked and asked a junior to take her. He agreed.
"Dude, she asked me to prom," the junior promptly reported to Lahr, knowing that the latter did, in fact, want to ask Kantzer but hadn't worked up the nerve.
"I was like, 'Really? That's cool for you,' " Lahr recalls. "I'm pretty good at hiding things, but he noticed that my stomach kind of dropped. 'What's the matter?' he asked. I told him I was planning on calling her."
Lahr is the kind of guy who is terrified by the idea talking to a girl on the phone. "I'll be in my room, staring at a name on my cellphone, wondering whether I should call. The whole social thing is totally nerve-wracking," he says.
The prom invite had him rattled big-time. All his guy friends had been pushing him to do something truly different. Confronted with the possibility that Kantzer might go with someone else, he realized he was out of time.
Diplomatic negotiations
The high school equivalent of diplomatic negotiations ensued. A friend of Kantzer's called Lahr and said Kantzer realized she had made a mistake, that she really wanted to go with him. The junior safety date gave Lahr his blessing to try for a comeback.
Lahr decided to make pancakes. On a Saturday morning he telephoned Kantzer and invited her over for breakfast. She said she was on her way to practice for the musical revue that evening. Why didn't he bring the pancakes to her there?
He had wanted it to be a private affair but she left him little choice. He pulled an old can of pancake mix out of the pantry and poured what was left — a scant half-cup — into a bowl. No room for error, he thought. Then he added some water and grabbed a bag of chocolate chips.
An hour later, he arrived at the school auditorium. He asked Kantzer to sit beside him and set five individually wrapped paper plates on their laps. Chocolate chips spelled out "PROM?" on five pancakes.
The entire stage crew hovered, watching. The faculty adviser stood a few feet away, snickering. Lahr just wanted to get it over with.
"Oh my gosh, I can't believe you did this! The answer is yes," Kantzer gushed.
"There are some guys who are retarded and still ask over the phone," she said later. "I was really flattered."