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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!”
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