Cool Ways To Ask To Prom

The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter

We had this idea, some friends and I, for a small public art project in New Orleans last year. The problem was, it involved some professional printing that would cost a few thousand dollars, which none of us had. Usually that’s where such conversations end: it would be cool if we could do X, but we’re not going to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, even if we knew how to pursue such a thing. So let’s get another round of beers.

But this time something occurred to me: What about that Kickstarter thing? Kickstarter has been around online for just over two years, and various artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers and designers have used the site to raise more than $75 million for 10,626 “creative projects,” to use Kickstarter’s preferred term. That money has come from 813,205 “backers” — individuals making mostly modest contributions (the most common is $25) to support specific efforts. The selling point of “crowd-funding,” as this phenomenon has come to be called, is that it is an alternative to the wealthy patron or the grant-giving foundation. Kickstarter has become the most talked-about example of this democratizing technology: an arts organization for the post-gatekeeper era.

So what kind of “creative projects” does Kickstarter enable? Well, a couple of artists raised $2,181 to send funny handwritten letters to every household in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood; someone pulled in $8,441 to help finance the creation of “a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 hip-hop songs”; a couple of people got $30,030 to publish a version of “Huckleberry Finn” that replaces Mark Twain’s use of a notorious racial epithet with the word “robot.” At times the sums have been a good bit larger: $67,436 to build a statue of Robocop in Detroit; $161,744 to make a computer-animated adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story; and nearly $1 million in pledges to finance a band to wear iPod Nanos as wristwatches. Clearly, the crowd had some spare cash, and if it paid for all those other ideas, why not ours? (It involved artists creating signs advertising absurd hypothetical uses for neglected buildings in New Orleans.) We decided to give it a try. We’d turn to Kickstarter: the people’s N.E.A.!

It wasn’t until much later that I met the people who created the company and figured out how it works. I had imagined Kickstarter as a neutral mechanism for liberating creativity, as bias-free as the Internet itself. With no profit-driven executives or credential-obsessed curators, the site could allow creators to raise cash for any idea, however unlikely, eccentric or even foolish. But that is not the case. The founders suspect that if they had taken a purely values-neutral approach, they would have failed. It may be hard to believe, navigating the unruly mob of idiosyncratic ideas cataloged on Kickstarter, but the reason it works is that somebody is in charge.

Creative Prom Proposals An Apparent Trend In Connecticut

By now, who hasn't heard about Shelton High School student James Tate's creative but problematic prom proposal: Twelve-inch cardboard letters taped on the side of the school building that read "Sonali Rodrigues, will you go to prom with me? HMU Tate."

But Tate's isn't the only who has come up with a unique way to get a date to the prom. Across the nation, students have accepted the challenge, including several teens in Connecticut.

Conard High School student Kyle Rodriguez asked his date, Delaney, to prom over the school's intercom during the announcements.

The idea came in English class earlier this year. Rodriguez and his classmates were discussing ways to ask someone to the dance when someone mentioned the announcements.

"Everybody wrote it off because we said you'd get in trouble for that. It was a joke to them, but I took it a little seriously," he says. "I just really wanted to do something original."

Delaney, of course, said yes.

"My friends were clapping me on the back because they were shocked," Rodriguez says. "Nobody thought someone would go through with something that bold."

Like Tate, Rodriguez's gesture didn't go unpunished. He received a detention for his actions.

"But it was worth it," he says.

Eddie Melendey, a senior at Wethersfield High School, asked his girlfriend, Corinne Balesano, to prom using a JumboTron at a Connecticut Whale game.

"She was surprised. She didn't expect it at that time," Melendey says. "She's my girlfriend, so it wasn't like I wasn't going to ask her, but she didn't know how or when I was going to do it. She was really excited that I did it in a cool way like that."

Melendey's friend Ben asked his girlfriend to prom by taking her to the beach, where his friends had written the question it in the sand for him.

As for how Melendey came up with the JumboTron idea, he says, "I know people have done it for marriages. I'm guessing people had done it for proms, too. I just felt like it'd be cool. I didn't really have another way and I thought that'd be different."

A senior at Hebron's RHAM High School reported finding a fake parking ticket tucked under her windshield with the question written on it.

Other tales include a Connecticut student who, during a school trip, asked his girlfriend atop the Eiffel Tower, and another RHAM student who poked plastic cups through the wire fence to spell out "Prom?" so that his crush would see the invitation during track practice.

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