A DAY IN THE LIFE: THE POPCORN PROPOSAL: PART I

Possibly the hardest thing a man ever has to do in his whole life is propose. And when he's finally decided to give up all of his freedom in exchange for hot meals and clean socks, he racks his brains to come up with the best way to pop the question.

My fiance, Lori, and I had already known we were going to get married, so I didn't have the added stress of not even knowing if she would say yes or not when I proposed.

One night we had discussed possibly getting married someday. I said, sure, who knows? The very next day she had booked a church. But then that's Lori for you.

Despite our knowing that we were going to get married, I still wanted the moment I slid that engagement ring on her finger to be special.

She expected to get the ring at Christmas but I had managed to squirrel away enough money to get it earlier. She was home from school for a couple days and I decided this would be the perfect time to surprise her.

But how could I do it?

I didn't just want to hand it to her in the car at a red light like an unsentimental idiot without a romantic bone in his body. "Oh, I almost forgot, here's your ring."

I wanted to make it one of the most memorable moments of our lives. I wanted her to be able to tell our children and grandchildren about it.

I wanted it to be romantic, sentimental, creative and, uh, relatively inexpensive. (She'd call it cheap -- I'll call it economical.)

So how could I attain such a special moment and still keep a few bucks in my wallet?

Well, I polled everyone I knew. Everyone has ideas about how they would like to propose or get proposed to.

"Take her out to a nice restaurant," one person told me. "Have the ring put on a stem of a rose and placed on her dessert plate."

Well, that sounded great, but I'm a bit suspicious (some might say petty) and I couldn't imagine trusting some zit-faced thug holding a menu with an expensive diamond ring, even for just the few seconds it would take to get it from the kitchen to our table.

So I scratched that idea.

Another person told me to actually put it in her dessert. I considered it for a long moment, but couldn't escape the image of her swallowing it in a huge bite of chocolate mousse.

If she didn't choke to death on it, getting the ring back then -- no matter how you did it -- would be no fun.

Then I was told that any women would love to have her proposal written across the sky.

I checked into it and, while it seemed pretty romantic, it was also pretty expensive. We're still trying to save up enough money to pay for our wedding, so I nixed this idea, too.

So what I finally settled on was taking her to a movie and placing the ring (still in its box) in the bucket of popcorn.

It was the simplicity of the idea that impressed me most. And how cheap -- I mean economical -- it would be.

I could almost imagine it. She reaches in for another handful of popcorn with fingers moist with butter and she feels something.

"What?" she mutters, pulling out the box. Curious, she opens it and -- there's the ring with that big, fat rock on it! (Well, a pretty big rock, anyway.)

"Oh, Scott! You're the greatest!" she'd say, laying a big smooch on me.

The other people in the theater would stand up and begin to applaud. "What a great guy," they'd be saying amongst themselves. I'd have to stand up and take a bow, maybe even make a speech.

Anyway, that's how I imagined it. Isn't it funny how things never quite go the way you plan?