Fairy-tale promposals: Rite of passage gets modern twist.
The saga of the promposal.
Anyone with teens knows it’s prom season, and long gowns and tuxedos are still part of the ritual. But in recent years, with the rise of social media, there’s another accessory in the mix — the “promposal,” which is turning a staid rite of passage into a way for kids to turn themselves into YouTube, Twitter and Instagram sensations.
These orchestrated invitations to prom are geared toward producing photos and videos of the spectacle to post on social media, and the surprise lies not in being asked to prom, since most couples have already decided to attend, but in how and when someone is asked.
In 2014, a Milpitas boy trotted up to school on a horse with a sign asking if his girlfriend would “ride to prom” with him. Last year, a San Francisco high schooler built a castle and penned a Shakespearean-style play to propose to a friend. The same year, in Berkeley, a teenage boy choreographed a hip-hop dance routine with a group of schoolmates and performed it for his date in front of 200 classmates in a hallway, who chanted “kiss, kiss, kiss!” at the end.
Leah Abramson, now an 18year-old senior at Berkeley High, was on the receiving end of that performance, and said she had no clue what to expect when a friend approached her at the end of sixth period and guided her down a hallway lined with rose petals.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, is this for me?’ ” she recalled of the promposal by Davion Moore, who has since graduated from Berkeley High. “I felt really nervous, and then I saw Davion, and two good friends next to him. They were holding up letters that said ‘PROM,’ and then the music turns on, they had a whole routine for me. I really enjoyed it. Everybody’s looking at you, saying, ‘Whoa!’ ”
It was light-years ago, by Internet standards — 2001, to be exact — that the term promposal was reportedly coined by the Dallas Morning News. It was another decade before the promposal as cultural phenomenon would take off. Promposal posts bolted from 17 on Twitter in 2009 to a whopping 764,000 in 2015, with the trend still going strong. As of April 19, 2017, teens had already posted 314,000 promposal Tweets, figures provided by Jenn Deering Davis, editor in chief of Union Metrics, a social media intelligence company in San Francisco.
On YouTube, the number of promposal videos doubled from 56,000 in 2009 to 114,000 in 2010, and has hovered between 170,000 and 180,000 every year since 2011. Instagram, in contrast, is where teens go to post pictures about prom itself, with more than 8 million posts bearing the #prom hashtag and 563,000 bearing the #prom2016 hashtag. There is no searchable archive for Snapchat.
Like all fads and trends, it’s hard to know how long the promposal sensation will last. Some Bay Area school officials say they’ve noticed a bit of a dropoff in promposal enthusiasm on campus this year.
At Bishop O’Dowd High in Oakland, student activities director Starr Saunders said there were fewer elaborate promposals this year after a banner year last year that included flash mobs and (supervised) promposals from the school roof.
“This year, it has been really super tame,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s that they’ve seen so much now? Last year there was so much more pressure. If you were dating, you still had to do a big deal and surprise the person with a promposal.”
Ditto for Berkeley High Student Activities Director John Villavicencio.
“It seems like there’s all this pressure to do the most extravagant thing people can do, but in a way, it’s unnecessary.” Carly Knudson, Woodside senior, 17
“I kind of feel like it has died a little bit, at least at our school,” he said. “Maybe it’s a thing that sweeps through each grade and they’ve seen it. It’s kind of lost its spark.”
Then there’s the distraction from studies. “Teachers are really frustrated,” he said, “because kids spend more time out of class preparing.”
Some teens may be daunted by trying to top the elaborate routines of others. Look no further than Arizona teen Jacob Staudenmaier’s slickly produced video riff on YouTube titled “Emma, Prom?” which parodies the Hollywood film “La La Land.” Staudenmaier appears in Ryan Gosling’s role, singing the opening number with modified lyrics asking the film’s female lead, Emma Stone, to prom. (The 28-year-old starlet said no.)
And splashy promposals may compound an already stressful event that calls for tickets (about $70 each), tuxedo rentals, gowns, hairdo and makeup services — even as some schools endorse promposal contests to generate enthusiasm and ticket sales for the event. (Winners get a pair of free tickets to prom.)
Bay Area kids — who are immersed in Silicon Valley technology and have “been there, done that” long before other parts of the country — may also be tired of oversharing, favoring gestures that are more personal.
Chelsea Gilliland, 18, a senior at Piedmont High, promposed to her friend, Jonathan Dinetz, 16, a junior, during a school trip to Tijuana, Mexico, in which 385 students helped to build housing for the needy. During a nighttime campfire, as students watched a slideshow of photos of the day’s activities projected from a teacher’s laptop onto the side of a van, a picture popped up: It was Chelsea, holding a piece of wood used for homebuilding with the words “Tijuana go to prom?” painted in purple, a play on “D’ya wanna go to prom?”
“I love puns,” she said, “and the guy I was asking hates puns. I thought it was kind of funny.”
Woodside High School senior Tim Goode, 17, of Menlo Park, said one of his friends promposed to a girl at lunchtime in the school quad last year. The boy was hoisted up on his friends’ shoulders and managed to display a 30-foot sign that read, “Every prince needs his princess.” As the girl approached, the boy handed his date a tiara in front of hundreds of cheering students.
“I was talking to him today,” Goode said in March, “and he had some ideas for this year but they didn’t work out, and he said anything bigger than last year would be too big for him to execute.”
Woodside senior Carly Knudson, 17, who watched the big public promposal, said that is not something she would want for herself.
“It seems like there’s all this pressure to do the most extravagant thing people can do, but in a way, it’s unnecessary,” Knudson said. “It could be just as special just getting flowers and asking her. ”
Goode’s girlfriend, Rachel Knoop, an 18-year-old senior at Wilcox High in Santa Clara, took the smaller, more personal route in issuing her promposal to him for her school’s prom in early April.
Knoop invited him to her house after his baseball practice one Thursday night, and burst out from behind a car in her driveway wearing a posterboard strung around her neck. On the poster, she had painted a waffle, his favorite breakfast food. A sign in her hands read, “I like you a waffle lot — So will you make prom butter?”
Goode gave her a hug as he accepted her invitation and said the lack of a polished production did not matter in the least. “I like waffles more than anyone should,” he said with a sheepish grin. “It’s an A-1 effort.”