The Romantic.com

Back in college, I had a large group of friends that all got along wonderfully. Spring of 2003 brought a series of pranks where a small gathering (2-3 friends) within our group would pick someone and  “trash” that persons room (in a nice way). For example, my friend Michelle enlisted the help of 2 roommates who bought a large pack of yellow paper, cut it all up into moon shapes and covered the guys dorm with random notes that said, “You’ve been mooned!”

I had been hanging out a lot more with one of the guys in our group , and wanted to let him know about my developing feelings for him, but I wanted to do it in an original and fun way.

There is a cute children’s song called “Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree”, that I knew he knew, and since it was April it seemed to fit. So one day he was out of town and wouldn’t be back ’til late so me and my friend, Michelle, got to work.

We popped a garbage bag full of air popped popcorn (no butter!), bought a package of balloons and one helium one shaped like a big yellow butterfly ( my “trademark”), a couple pots of yellow daisies, and a stuffed green frog. (The object of this trashing of a room is to leave the person with some kind of keepsake – not just to make a mess!) It all cost about $15 (dollar store, baby!)

We streamed yellow and green steamers all over the ceiling, hung a yellow balloon with yellow streamers radiating from it for an indoor sun, left the butterfly hovering over his bed, with the stuffed frog and a pot of flowers underneath, and put the other pots of flowers on shelves and the dresser around the room. It was the picture of a bright spring day!

Then we took our package of blown up balloons and 30 gallon garbage bag of popcorn and dumped piles everywhere! The bed, the floor, the dresser, and shelves- everything was covered in it. On bright paper we wrote the lyrics to the song, changed into subtle clues about the motive behind the mess!

The sign on the outside of his door read, ” I looked in my bedroom, and what did I see…”. Upon opening the door a streamer tied from the door knob to the dresser, led to the next poster of lyrics- ” Popcorn popping over EVERYTHING! Spring has brought me such a nice surprise…” and another streamer leading to the hand made sun, “A-ray of sunshine, has come into my life… ” (my name is Arae- subtle huh?!) “I could take her out for a really fun date, She would prob’ly like that, I shouldn’t make her wait!” was found on the next sign-(the power of suggestion!) -“This song is almost done; I can ponder on it’s meaning-‘” were the lyrics posted with the pile of gifts found on the bed.

And the last note read “Popcorn popping over everything!” placed atop a mound of popcorn on the floor. Well, apparently the clue wasn’t obvious enough-  he knew someone had a thing for him but he never guessed it was me, until I came over at the end of the weekend to help him clean it all up. It was great though- the whole place smelled like popcorn by this time and, cleaning up was the first time we had got to get to know each other outside of “The Group”. It was the beginning of one of my favorite relationships to look back on!