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The following story was on the Frontier Airlines website soon after our engagement...
Love at 37,000 feet: An Inflight
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Zareen was going to spend the first part of her spring “break” taking over the teaching of a kindergarten class for three days. I briefly thought of some kind of proposal involving the kids holding signs or singing a song (inspired by the opening scene in the movie “Meet the Parents”). But I thought that working with 5-year-olds who mostly spoke Spanish and have a hard time keeping secrets might be problematic. I was already planning a surprise getaway for Zareen when she was done with her teaching, so I thought about popping the question sometime during the holiday. Zareen knew we were going skiing somewhere but assumed we were going locally. Instead, I had booked a flight to Denver to see our friend Jonathon and ski there. |
What if I could get a film about us played on the inflight entertainment system on the plane? Zareen would already be disoriented from the unexpected plane flight, so this would be a perfect time to pounce! I started to wonder how this could be possible. I quickly guessed that just handing a VHS tape to a stewardess was probably not going to work. I decided to call the airline, Frontier, based in Denver.
“Hi, this is an unusual request but I'd like to propose to my girlfriend on one of your flights and show a short movie about us,” I said in my best quirky-and-foreign-but-not-criminally-insane voice.
“Click!” went the receiver as I was disconnected.
I spent five minutes or so rethinking exactly how crazy this suggestion must sound. Did the receptionist have specific instructions to disconnect all calls that sounded even remotely weird? I have to try more than once, I thought, so I called again. I gave the same story, including:
“I just called 5 minutes ago but we must have been disconnected,” and this time I heard, “I'll put you through to Alfy Veretto in Inflight Entertainment.”
I left Alfy a fairly detailed message, and then tried to forget the whole thing. I never really expected him to call me back. I went back to mulling over plans involving the Spanish-speaking 5-year-olds. How would I get access to them when Zareen wasn't around, write a song in Spanish, then make sure none of them spilled the beans before it was time?
To my great surprise, these musings were cut short by a call from Alfy Veretto. He explained that the entire inflight program was normally uploaded digitally to the whole fleet during the previous month. Our outgoing flight was March 30, and it was already March 1.
“I wish you'd called a week ago,” he said, “but send me a copy so I can take a look at it.”
My immediate problem was that I had nothing to send him. I hadn't really expected him to call back, so I hadn't even started on the film. I had a song that I'd written for Valentine's Day, but no recording of it, and the montage of photos that I had envisaged was scattered through photo albums, CDs and hard drives (some of them were only on Zareen's computer, which I had luckily just learned the password to).
That night I had band practice. Under the flimsy ruse of “trying out some recording equipment” I loaded my desktop computer, monitor and stacks of recording equipment into the car and spent three hours in the practice space with our drummer Bennett teaching him the song and recording drums, bass and guitar. When I got back home, I said we had achieved a “nice drum sound” and hoped she wouldn't ask to hear a sample.
The next morning I didn't have any editing clients and Zareen was in class for three hours, so I recorded vocals and acoustic guitar and threw some violins in for good measure. I hoped that if there was still some doubt in her mind while listening to the song the schmaltzy strings in the final chorus would sway her. Then I frantically unscrambled the spaghetti of cords and threw microphones and stands back where they belonged seconds before Zareen walked in the door.
The minute she left the house again I started work on the film, poring through photo albums, scanning photos in, raiding Zareen's computer for images and looking through what seemed like dozens of completely unmarked photo CDs. Mark your photo CDs! Even if you just scrawl the year on them with a permanent marker, you are in so much better shape ... I hurled photos together in no particular order, hoping for a mix of inspiration and the kind of blind luck when music and images come together that fans of “The Dark Side of Oz” know about. It was hard trying to come up with something that would be at least slightly entertaining to an audience of 200 strangers. With time running out, the only thing I was sure I had done right was to begin and end with guinea pigs (Zareen used to keep them as a girl and still has a very soft spot for them). How could anyone object to a movie that was only three minutes long and began and ended with guinea pigs?
Once again, I finished just before Zareen came back. The following morning I e-mailed it to Alfy, who got back to me less than an hour later saying he liked it and asked if I could send a copy on a Beta SP tape. I sneaked into the edit room at Film Arts Foundation where there is a Beta deck, made a copy and FedEx-ed it off.
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On Monday morning, Alfy sent me an e-mail saying that he was encoding the movie to the correct digital format and was going to attempt to get it on our flight. I was ecstatic, and tried not to think too much about his caveat, that usually they allowed at least a month to upload content and so he couldn't absolutely guarantee the video would play. 24 days later, Zareen was somewhat surprised when we drove right by the correct on-ramp for Tahoe and headed towards the airport. She was still in a state of pleasant shock when we settled in to our seats. |
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She wanted to watch a pay-per-view movie, but I wasn't sure she'd want to (or be able to) switch back to the free channel, 26 (on which my film was supposed to play) in the middle of her movie. So I tried to discourage her from this, with flimsy arguments about how bad the image and sound quality were compared to the theater or home. I was telling her how good the programming on channel 26 was. She settled for the “TV” option, and I tried to hide my concern as I casually checked that she could still access channel 26.
I took a deep breath, and with the excuse of getting water, I pushed my way past the very quiet-looking guy sitting in the aisle seat, absorbed in his iPod. He stood up politely. I went back to talk to the flight attendants.
“Umm, can I get two glasses of water please?”
One of the attendants was trying to get a cart past me and asked me if I could sit back down.
“No wait, there's something else I need to ask as well.”
“Yes?” said the other attendant.
“I have this movie that's going to play and I'm going to propose to my girlfriend. I'd like you to make an announcement.”
“You can't do that, they're programmed months in advance.”
“I know, look!”
I thrust her an extra copy of Alfy's program.
“What does this mean?”
“My video is going to play, look, after the Daniel Powter video.”
“I don't know what this means,” said the attendant, looking bewildered.
I was starting to give up on this part of the plan, when the other attendant came to my rescue.
“Yes, look, he's got the whole schedule and there's his movie.”
We agreed on a double signal — I would push the attendant call button as I got on my knees in the aisle. When they saw that they were to make an announcement that I had written out for them. One of the attendants was reminded of a funny story about a crazy person on a recent flight. I had to interrupt her quite brusquely to beg for my two glasses of water so I could get back to Zareen without her suspecting anything. She looked a little surprised that it had taken me seven minutes to get two glasses of water, but didn't say anything.
There followed a very anxious 63 minutes in which I furtively followed along with a program Alfy had given me, accounting for every minute of the channel 26 programming. At the sixty-third minute, a Missy Higgins music video would play on every Frontier flight except for this one. Or so I hoped. If it was a Daniel Powter video instead, that meant that my film was coming next. I had already had a couple of near heart attacks over this, watching the Daniel Powter video play twice before the plane took off.
“They can't possibly play this video three times in one flight!” I worried.
To my great joy, Daniel Powter started banging on his piano and crooning a sappy song about a “Bad Day,” while two beautiful people in the video had days that looked moderately annoying at worst.
“Hey Zareen, this is a great song and an awesome video,” I said in a slightly cracked voice.
“Yeah, it's OK, I've seen it before,” said Zareen, continuing to watch Def Leppard Live in Concert.
“No really, I think you should switch to channel 26 and watch this great video.”
“No thanks, I've seen it several times.”
My voice was steadily rising and I was starting to shake. I reached up and stabbed the flight attendant button and thrust Alfy's program at her.
“Look!” I cried as I jabbed my finger at the text that said “Passenger Video” right after Daniel Powter.
“I don't know what this is,” said an understandably confused Zareen.
A flight attendant started shaking my shoulder from behind trying to get my attention, but I tried to ignore her. I suddenly realized what an extremely public thing this was going to be and panicked a little bit.
“You know how you were saying it's funny when I embarrass myself in public sometimes?”
Zareen smiled in a way that said “I love you but you're not making much sense.”
“A movie I just made about us is probably going to play right now in front of everyone on this plane,” I said, trying to smile breezily as I pushed my way into the aisle past the guy in the aisle seat, who had once again politely stood up for me in the aisle.
“Umm, excuse me, I'm about to propose to my girlfriend, so if I could just kneel in the aisle and if you could just … keep standing … for a while.”
He stood there politely smiling and looking uncomfortable, with his iPod buds in his ears. I don't think he heard anything I said. He was standing right in the spot where I needed to kneel. I started to sweat. A helpful flight attendant grabbed him by the shoulders and started dragging him backwards. I got down on my knees as the announcement came:
“Turn to channel 26 for a short film about two passengers on this plane.”
People nearby gazed at channel 26, where the two beautiful people in Daniel Powter's five-million dollar music video were still pouting in gorgeous 35 mm color.
“That's your movie? Wow, it's great!”
“No that's not mine, it's the next one. The next one!” I shouted loud enough for them to hear at the front of the plane.
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An agonizing 20 seconds later, kneeling and pulling out my $15 ring and wondering how to open the emergency doors and throw myself out if my film didn't actually play, the title “A short film about two passengers on this plane” came up, and then the guinea pigs, and then Zareen started laughing, and I started crying. |
I managed to get the question out at the end, Zareen said yes, another announcement was made congratulating us, everyone clapped, and a man came by to complain that his wife was crying and I was making all the guys on the plane look bad. There were congratulations from other passengers. Before we knew it, we had landed. The captain gave us a napkin with the exact altitude and wind-speed at the time of the proposal (37,000 feet, wind 282/70, 575 mph). We drifted into the terminal in a sort of daze as other passengers came up to us to congratulate us having recognized us from the film. We had our 15 minutes of bona fide engagement fame.
Now, how hard can planning a wedding possibly be?