A Surprise Marriage Proposal at TEDxSanAntonio!
Recently, I had the honor of emceeing the official TEDxSanAntonio event, held at the RackSpace Theater, featuring 16 of the most remarkable speakers you will ever experience.
(TEDx is an international community that organizes TED-style events anywhere and everywhere — celebrating locally-driven ideas and elevating them to a global stage.) There are over 4,000 such events held yearly around the world and San Antonio boasts one of the largest and best organized.
As I took to the stage, one last time to close out the day-long conference, I explained that an event like this, (the most attended in TEDxSanAntonio history) was made possible by over 100 volunteers who worked tirelessly for months leading up to the big day.
Then came something the audience wasn’t expecting.
I asked volunteer Amy Zhang to join me on stage and explain what inspired her to volunteer her design talents to TEDxSanAntonio. She had no idea why I had picked her and gave a heartfelt answer, saying it was her boyfriend, Lu, (also a volunteer), who urged her to sign up.
I asked if Lu was in the audience. When she pointed him out, I invited him to also join us on stage.
It was then that I had to level with Amy, saying, “Amy, I haven’t been completely honest with you…”
Before I could finish my sentence, Lu was down on one knee asking, a very surprised Amy, for her hand in marriage!
“My beautiful girl, my dear baby
You light up my world with joy
Give me your hand, take my heart
Till death do us part
Amy Zhang, Will you marry me?”
The audience was stunned, overjoyed and overcome with emotion.
I fought back my own tears, as I held the microphone to get Amy’s response over the, now, cheering crowd.
“What did you say, Amy?”
“Yes, I do!”
Then, Lu, turned to the camera and spoke directly to Amy’s family who was watching via our live webcast in Nanjing (Jiangsu province of China), 7,530 miles away, telling them, in his native language, that he would, “..take care of her in my lifetime.”
TEDxSanAntonio has always been about big ideas in Technology, Entertainment and Design. These are topics that connect us all.
But, there is one more element that was evident in every one of our extraordinary and passionate speakers.
Lu and Amy’s spontaneous engagement and display of affection was a living punctuation mark on what brought all the volunteers, organizers, speakers and audience together in the first place: