New York teens ‘go big or go home’ with over-the-top promposals
Social media is driving an over-the-top trend for graduating high-schoolers — outlandish “promposals’’ featuring everything from a Yankee Stadium marquee to the Empire State Building.
It’s “go big or go home,” John Jay High School senior Cameron Cambareri told The Post.
Cambareri, 18, upped the ante for his peers last week when he asked his girlfriend of seven months to the prom using the fan marquee at Yankee Stadium.
The extravagant public promposal Tuesday cost Cambareri $100, but he said the stunt “was totally worth it, to see her smile like that.
“The most popular promposal is decorating a poster board with a funny pun that kind of relates to the two of you,’’ the teen said.
But he explained that he “thought that it would be really cool’’ to ask his girlfriend to the big day on the stadium screen “because I think it’s less common.’’
The moment is the type that also just happens to make for perfect social media fodder on teen-crazy sites such as TikTok.
Last week, a New Jersey teen also relied on sports for his promposal, recruiting none other than Phillies first baseman Bryce Harper to ask a classmate to the big dance for him.
The Insta-perfect moment quickly went viral.
Businesses are trying to weasel in on the action, too.
The Empire State Building, for example, offers a $250 promposal package between March and May.
The Manhattan landmark’s set-up allows teens to rent large letters that spell out “PROM” and pop the date question in a private area of the 86th floor observatory, its website says.
Some teens resort to other methods.
A student at Brooklyn’s Poly Prep Country Day School, where tuition runs more than 67,000 a year for seniors, rented a U-haul to surprise his prom date with a large sign that read “Will UHAUL my ass to prom?”
The drive-by in front of the school’s entrance was captured on video, which showed dozens of onlookers cheering while the pair hugged.
For less deep-pocketed kids, there have still been plenty of other ways to launch unique prom requests — many of them laden with enough adolescent schmaltz to make John Hughes quiver.
Pun-filled posters are the most common way for teens to pop the prom question.
Several area schools — including John Jay but also private city academies including exclusive Chapin and Nightingale-Bamford — even have Instagram accounts dedicated to documenting promposals.
“I’d be JAZZed if you’d MarGOt with me to PROM?” read one creative sign featured on the Chapin page.
True to its theme, the post also included a video of the proposer asking out her would-be date in the school music room while dozens of classmates looked on.
A poster shared on the Nightingale account read, “Light sabers are red, light sabers are blue, meesa want to go to prom with u!”
Some students at Nightingale-Bamford even took the promposal trend up a notch when they made a poster to ask a math teacher, “Dr. Sharma,” to be the prom chaperone, a video on the account showed.
“Prom will be so much fun COS Dr. Sharma is our chaperone,” the students behind the account captioned the post, which showed the grinning teacher holding an equation-covered poster that read “We cannot function without you.”
Cambareri insisted that the phenomenon is all in good fun, as opposed to one-upmanship.
“I don’t think there’s really any competition,” he said. “I did [my promposal] for my girlfriend, not for anyone else.”
Teachers and administrators said they are more than willing to let the students wallow in the end-of-year fun — as long as they keep the in-class disruption to a minimum.
“Fortunately, we’ve had no instances of any over-the-top promposals causing disruptions in my time here,” John Jay High School Principal Steven Siciliano told The Post, noting that the school does not currently have any rules restricting promposals on campus.
The promposal trend lets teens stretch out the prom milestone as much as possible, Cambareri noted.
“It’s a process as a whole,” he said. “There’s two parts to it: The asking and the actually going.
“Prom night’s great, but I’m really happy with how the promposal turned out. So I can’t pick one or the other.”
