By Stacy Bubes, Shelby Eggers, Mikayla Farr and Leighton Rowell
I was in Florida with two of my friends during Spring Break in March when, about 9 a.m. one morning, someone knocked on our hotel room door. I answered it and a hotel worker delivered French toast accompanied with a letter addressed to me.
“It must be from my grandparents,” I said to my friends, not noticing that they were both taking pictures on their iPhones.
I opened the letter. It said only “Prom…?” Then I noticed that “Prom” also was inscribed with chocolate on the French toast.
Completely shocked, I immediately called my date and said yes.
But why could he have not just called me on the phone and asked me to prom? It’s the times. Nowadays many boys – inspired by movies, perhaps, or simply by trying to outdo one another — try to be as creative as they can when asking a girl to prom.
Coming up with a way that has not been done before is key. This year, local high school students have used everything from a fish to a foot race to, of course, French toast to ask their dates to prom.
Jake Pearson, a senior at The Marist School, scattered plastic eggs around town in an Easter Egg hunt designed to ask his girlfriend, Natalie Zink, to prom. One Sunday, Natalie’s mom told her to get ready for church, but when Natalie was about to leave, she found a note taped to her door that said, “Are you ready for a scavenger hunt?”
The first clue led Natalie to the place in Atlanta where the two went on their first date. She found a few more eggs and directions that led her to a park. Jake was there, and was holding an egg that said, “Will you go to prom with me?”
“At first I wasn’t really sure how to ask her,” Jake said. “Since we are dating, it’s clear that we’ll be going to prom together, but she wanted to be asked in a fun, creative way.”
Natalie loved it. “It was absolutely perfect and such a surprise,” she said. “He always manages to put a smile on my face and it’s just nice to know how much thought he put into it to make it such a memorable experience for me.”
Fellow Marist senior Logan Duckworth asked Cari Negus to prom while he was running a marathon. When he crossed the finish line, Logan tore off his shirt revealing the question — “prom?” — written on his chest.
“At first I don’t think Cari knew exactly what was happening, but within a few seconds her face lit up with a huge smile (like a little kid in a candy store), and she shouted, “YES!!!” he wrote in an email. “I crossed the finish line, put my medal on, and was greeted with a huge hug from my prom date.”
North Springs Charter High school student Thaddeus Kolwicz knew Olivia Medley liked the Temptations’ “My Girl,” and several of their friends surprised her at Morgan Falls Overlook Park with a rendition of the song. At the end, each handed her a rose.
“I’ve seen plenty of movies where the guy will [find] a crazy way to ask the girl to prom, like Heath Ledger did in Ten Things I Hate About You, so I kind of did my own way of that sort of thing,” Thaddeus said. “Of course, I couldn’t get an entire marching band but I had my best friend Chris Davidson to play guitar and many other friends provided the extra vocals.”
When Cassidy Mckee arrived at her Cobb County home after cheerleading practice at Whitefield Academy recently, she noticed rocks were being thrown at her window. When she went to see what was up, Cassidy saw Dillon Mabrey of Sandy Springs standing beneath her window surrounded by candles that spelled “prom?”
“I was thinking of a creative way that she would probably like,” Dillon said. “No other guys from my school had done something like that yet.”
At Riverwood International Charter High School, Blake Stoner got some help from a fish named Jumanji when he asked his girlfriend, Andrea Anderson, to prom. Next to a fish bowl that contained the fish, Blake wrote a note on a whiteboard asking, “Out of all the fish in the sea, will you go to prom with me?”
She would. “I was surprised, shocked, happy and speechless,” Andrea said. “I felt so happy. I still have Jumanji, my fish, who I keep on my night stand. I am very satisfied and I feel like he could not have asked in a better way. It was exactly what I wanted.”
Fellow Riverwood student Sivan Levy was talking a hike along the Chattahoochee River one Saturday when her prom date, Reid Schweers, wrote out an invitation in plants.
“When I turned the corner, I saw “prom?” written in flowers on the ground,” Sivan said. “Then Reid jumped out of the bushes with flowers and asked me to prom. I was so surprised, but so excited also.
“I, of course, said yes!”
This information in this article was collected by Reporter Newspaper interns Stacy Bubes, Shelby Eggers, Mikayla Farr and Leighton Rowell, and the article was written by Bubes.