By Kathryn Green
Secret-agents running through the dorms? Candy bags with hidden notes inside? Is Halloween coming early this year?
Not quite.
Carrying on the tradition of finding the most bizarre way to woo the date of their dreams, students look forward to the Homecoming dances this weekend.
Such was the case with Oliver Brown, 18, a freshman from Boise, Idaho with an undeclared major.
Brown picked up a toilet from a friend''s house who was moving and dropped it off in the parking lot at Helaman Halls.
Under the lid he wrote 'When I see you I get all flushed! Please go to homecoming with me or my heart will turn to mush!' and had a friend call his date to come outside.
'I needed some way to really wow her,' Brown said.
Crude? Maybe, but Brown got the answer he was looking for.
'She returned the toilet later with alphabet cereal inside,' Brown said. 'The letters were all Y''s, E''s, and S''s.'
Creative dating takes a leap of ingenuity, Brown said.
'The funnest thing is getting a challenging object and trying to invent a fun way to use it,' Brown said.
'When your date can return that object to you in a different way than before, it sets your heart a-flutter.'
Other students such as Rob Taber take the scavenger-hunt approach, sending their hopefuls on a chase to find the mysterious asker.
Taber, 17, a freshman from Delaware, majoring in history, said he and five of his friends wrote messages in secret transmission from Charlie Brown to his angels.
'It ended with a chain of belts outside the window of our dorms,' Taber said. 'We attached little notes to the belts that the girls had to check yes or no if they wanted to go with us.'
Taber said the girl he asked checked 'yes, of course!'
But not all students think creativity is a cute BYU idiosyncrasy.
Liberty Winchester, 19, a sophomore from Kuna, Idaho, majoring in physics said the whole thing reminds her of high school.
'It''s lame,' Winchester said. 'If a guy wants to ask me to Homecoming he should just ask me and forget all this craziness.'
The most annoying part about the creative invitation is to have to be creative in answering back, Winchester said.
Matthew Waldrip, 19, a freshman from Villa Park, Calif., an undeclared major said he agreed.
'Creative dating is a waste of time and a waste of money,' Waldrip said. 'A date to me is the dollar theater, Del Taco and having a talk at the park.'
Waldrip has yet to answer a girl who creatively asked him to a Homecoming dance this weekend.
Either way, creative invitations to dances continue to pop up each year as freshmen carry on the tradition of creativity.