Carly Monzo still can’t believe who crashed her prom last weekend to show up as her last-minute date.
Months earlier, the Pennsylvania high school senior filmed a brief video explaining why Olympic gold medalist Shaun White, who never went to his own prom, could fix that by coming to hers. But when he actually did, along with his band, Bad Things — it totally blew her mind.
“I’m like, obsessed with him,” Monzo, 18, told TODAY.com. “So it just started out as a joke at first, when everyone was freaking out about, ‘who are you taking to prom.’ But I started thinking about it more and more, and there were little signs that told me, ‘I need to do this.’”
She filmed the video and tweeted it to White, and so did her friends, but he never responded. Little did she know, he'd already reached out to officials at her school.
White apparently loved the video Monzo made, said Maryellen Anastasio, communications director for Mount Saint Joseph Academy in Flourtown Pa.
“We were asked to keep the event a surprise,” she said.
The school did a great job keeping it under wraps, right up until the moment on Saturday night when Monzo was called to come up to the stage. A curtain then dropped, revealing White and his band.
“I was in disbelief. I was like, that is not them right now. They’re doppelgangers. That’s not them,” Monzo said. “I kept saying, 'This isn’t real right now. This is a dream.' It was so unreal.”
Once on stage, she got to hug White and started playing air guitar with him.
“It was the most amazing experience,” she said.
White documented the entire evening on social media, posting photos as he got ready and as he rocked the night away with Monzo and her friends, including the friend she'd come to the dance with.
“I’ve known him since we were really, really little,” she said of her original prom date. “He was so cool about everything and totally understood.”
White gave Monzo a wrist corsage and the two danced, including to one slow song, “At Last,” by Etta James.
“It was very romantic,” Monzo sighed. “We did the classic prom slow dance, but then the crowd started chanting, ‘kiss, kiss, kiss.’"
White obliged by giving his date a peck on the cheek.
Monzo said she didn’t get to talk to White as much as she would have imagined because people kept trying to grab their attention for photos. She did learn he had just flown in from Austria, where he was on a photo shoot.
“I kept saying, 'This is crazy. I can’t believe you’re here,'" she recalls.
When it was time for him to take off, White left his date on the stairs of the country club.
“It was very Cinderella-esque, but with a little twist,” she said. “I gave him another hug for, like, 10 seconds.”
Monzo said she has been a fan of White's for years.
"He's so zany and cool. I could watch interviews of him all day long and not get bored," she said.
Yet, she found herself at a loss for words for much of Saturday night.
“I was speechless there. I didn’t even have questions prepared because I was so taken off guard. Normally I can talk forever,” she said with a laugh. "But there I was, frozen in the moment. People were like, 'Did you get his number?' I was like, 'No, I didn't think to ask about that!'"
She might want to save that for the next video. Until then, here's the one that got Monzo her dream date:
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