Flash-Mob Marriage Proposal At UCLA Campus

Once upon a time in 2003, 20-year-old Trang Vu met 24-year-old Nam Tran on the campus of University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) when she attended a workshop Nam was teaching.  No, it wasn’t love at first sight. They didn’t start dating until 2007.

Fast-forward to 2011… Nam and Trang have been together four and a half years, and Nam has known for more than a year that he wanted to marry Trang, so he had time to start planning.

He decided to propose to his girlfriend on the UCLA campus with the help of a flash-mob. And he then spent four or five months planning the flash-mob marriage proposal.

“We both love musicals, and we both love dancing, and a flash mob is the closest you can get to a real-life musical,” Tran said. “It was also a great way to involve family and friends and have them there celebrating with us. It was something I really wanted to do for her.”

Nam brought Trang back to campus on the pretext that there would be an independent book fair on campus, just like on their first date.

The couple walked through Ackerman Union, and the company that Nam hired to organize the dance, Flash Mob America, sneaked a microphone onto him in the men’s bathroom before the couple headed outside where the surprise was waiting.

Moments after the Frankie Valli song, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” began to play, dancers rushed from all corners of Bruin Plaza. About 100 strangers signed up online to participate, and another 95 were the couple’s friends, co-workers and relatives, many of whom traveled from out of town and even out of state, but still kept the secret.

For a moment, Trang thought it was a back-to-school event, until she spotted her cousins … and her best friends … and then her parents, who live 300 miles away, all dancing to her favorite love song.

“In that moment, I thought, ‘My God, this is for me,’” Tran recalled. “That’s when I knew he was up to something big.”

One minute into the song, Nam jumped into the crowd and joined the dance while Trang watched with a look of overwhelmed delight on her face.

At the end of the song, he pulled Trang into the middle of the crowd.

“I love you so much,” he said, “And, if you’ll let me, I want to make you feel happiness the way you make me feel happy, from now until we grow old together.”

“You’re so cheesy!” Trang said affectionately, drawing laughs from surrounding friends and family.

A few heartfelt pledges later, Nam got down on one knee, and the whole crowd knelt with him. The choreography was developed by Flash Mob America, he explained later, but asking the crowd to kneel with him was his idea.

“I wanted her to feel at the center of it all,” Nam said. “It was a nice moment where she was the center of the world.”

Down on one knee in Bruin Plaza, he pulled out a ring before the teary-eyed onlookers. “It’s always been you, love,” he said, his voice quavering with emotion. “Will you marry me?

Trang appeared to choke back a sob, before replying, “Well, duh!”

Nam put the ring on his fiancée’s finger and leapt up to kiss her.

Trang’s off-beat answer came as no surprise. “She’s definitely one to always crack jokes to lighten the situation, and that’s one of the reasons I love her,” he said later.

After they got engaged, the crowd of friends and family went out to dinner, followed by roller skating at a rink Nam had booked for the occasion.

“We were both ecstatic,” he said. “Happy doesn’t even explain it. We were in a state of euphoria. It was so awesome, just a perfect day from beginning to end.”

“We’ve had permanent smiles on our faces for the last few days,” Trang said. She’s spent part of that time trying to learn the flash mob’s dance. “I told him once, that when the chorus comes in with those horns, I just want to choreograph it and dance to it,” she said. And now she can.

How did the former computer-science major pull off his engagement to the former biology major?

Nam selected the song, but the computer scientist leaned on Flash Mob America to choreograph it. “It would have been horrible if I’d done it,” he said. The company put an instructional video online so that everyone who registered — even complete strangers who wanted to be part of the couple’s big moment — could learn the dance. “Then it was all about mobilizing friends and family,” Tran said. He organized it so that they would be in the front row, where Trang would see all her loved ones.

“Even our dentist showed up,” Nam said. “I just casually mentioned it to him, and he said, ‘Oh, you need more dancers?’ It was so funny to see him there.”

Nam never expected the video to go viral. “He just wanted to have a video,” Trang said he told her. “Something to show at our wedding. Now it’s surreal.” The couple appeared on CNN’s morning show and KTLA.

The video has gone viral, with more than a million views since it was uploaded to YouTube on September 26. The video will absolutely make your day!

Congratulations Nam and Trang!