There is a peculiar tradition among single people at Brigham Young University, wherein if you want to ask a girl to a formal dance, you can't just call her up and ask her. Instead you must find some creative way to ask. In the past, I once made a pumpkin out of rice-crispie treats with the invitation wrapped in tin foil inside. Once a girl asked me out by encoding the invitation in musical notation. And I responded by baking her a cheesecake with a miniature flag in the middle, with a reference to a hymn on it. For further examples of this sort of thing, I commend the reader to a humorous column that appeared in BYU's school newspaper on 17 October 1997.

Interestingly, Dallin H. Oaks, a former president of BYU and currently an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has spoken against this sort of thing, saying that it makes dating too complicated. It's better just to call up someone and ask them out. I was relieved to hear someone of high authority say that.

Anyway, the dance was called "The D.T. Invitational" and I wanted to ask a girl named Bethany to it. So I drew this comic strip in which I depict a cowboy-version of myself asking a homespun-maiden version of Bethany to the dance. The gimmick was that she had to fill in the final speech bubble of the cartoon and return it to me at my workplace. I was then employed as a dishwasher at a campus cafeteria. Fortunately for my fragile ego, she responded the same day and wrote the word "YES" in the final frame.

The dance was fun, but our relationship never really went anywhere after that. But that's okay; about a year later I met Maria, the girl who was to become my wife, and everything's been wonderful since then.