TODAY.COM - It takes a lot of guts for a guy to propose on live TV —
especially when the fiancée-to-be is in the middle of her job, anchoring
the evening newscast.
But that's exactly how Vince Ramos, 26, popped the question on
Saturday night to his girlfriend of six years, Jillian Pavlica, a
weekend anchor for WZDX-TV in Huntsville, Ala.
The best part: Ramos and conspiring producers tricked Pavlica into reading her own proposal off the teleprompter.
To pull off the surprise, Ramos snuck onto Pavlica's phone to get the
number of a co-worker, who in turn connected him with her producer.
Station management also gave the plan the go.
"It was the final segment of the show — my producer gets in my ear,
and tells me there's breaking news," Pavlica told TODAY.com. When
Pavlica asked for even 10 seconds to review the script on the
teleprompter, producer Dana Conley told her there was no time. "I was
kind of freaking out, but I trust her very much, so I read it," Pavlica
said.
And even though their families are out of state, they got to see the
whole thing go down live by watching the Alabama newscast over Slingbox
streaming devices back in Florida. "I wanted our family to be somehow
involved in our engagement — I was thinking maybe a party afterward or
something, but never in wildest dreams did I expect this!" Pavlica said.
The couple, who met while at the University of Central Florida, had
talked about getting engaged for some time, so Pavlica said there was no
reason for her fiancé to be nervous.
Ramos, a sales manager at a local car dealership, insists he did have
butterflies for six or seven hours straight before the proposal, but
said he was actually more nervous after his girlfriend said yes. "I didn't know what camera to look at," he said. "She's the one who's the media pro."
Even though the proposal came at the end of the 9 p.m. show, Pavlica
then had to head over to host the 10 p.m. newscast on another station.
"That," she says, "was definitely hard!"