Issue 16.10
Tall, dark handsome, recently returned missionary, not engaged and he was a dancer—should have been a perfect match! We met in the spring as I was working on my field project for my master’s degree in Dance. He volunteered to dance in my project, but we didn’t start dating until the following fall. I was impressed by his good looks and availability. We were both 22, more mature than many dating couples at BYU. I was a graduate dance “teacher” and he was “a student.” Perhaps that why it took awhile before we started dating.
In the fall, he asked me for a first date to see a Portuguese foreign language film about Carnival as he had been a missionary to Brazil. After our first date, we dated every night or saw each other daily at dance practices. Being a poor undergraduate student at BYU, there was no money for an engagement ring but that didn’t stop us from getting engaged at Christmastime. He would design and make our rings so they were very creative and unique. That was my first disappointment after so many years of waiting to be engaged. Without a ring, it’s a little strange to go around saying “I’m engaged” and then hiding your ring finger, but I was happy and in love.
He would finish our homemade rings just before the wedding. They were made in the Art Department then housed in BYU Academy’s building on lower campus. Carved out of wax, then dentist’s silver was centrifuged into the ring’s form in a plaster filled tuna fish can. A zircon gem was glued in to make an unusual engagement ring. It was very creative as our relationship and life together would be. Not what I had expected, but I had never been engaged before. I had now achieved almost all my goals: college graduation, new career as a dance teacher, and I was engaged to be married at the end of summer. Perfect or so it seemed.
A busy summer awaited both of us as I toured Europe with a folk dance tour. He worked in a summer playhouse in Michigan then choreographed the Hill Cumorah Pageant. We were able to meet up in New York City for the World’s Fair before returning home to Utah together for our wedding in August and a new life together as man and wife living happily forever after.