By Monica Sheffield
While BYU is known for its dating frenzy, some students use Preference to take group dating to the extreme - even by Mormon standards.
A group of 25 girls in Helaman Hall have created an example of this 'extreme dating' for the Friday Nov. 8 Preference Dance.
They call it 'Project Preference.'
Allison Weiler, 18, a freshman from Waukee, Iowa, majoring in elementary education, is known as the 'brain' of the project.
Weiler got a group of 25 girls from her dorm to ask 25 guys to this weekend''s Preference dance, using all possible means.
The freshman girls rented out an entire Movies 8 theater as the capstone of their evening-which also includes a candlelit picnic and a night of dancing on the Heber Creeper.
'We even thought of renting a charter bus to take us down there,' Weiler said.
A majority of the girls combined forces to ask out their potential dates-mostly freshman guys in their ward.
After weeks of planning, the girls formatted a scavenger hunt to send their boys running all over campus in the October cold to find out who their dates were.
At one point the guys had to look under every chair in the Cougareat to find one of the clues, Weiler said.
The boys ended up back at their own bathroom doors, where they finally found their dates'' names
'For once, the tables have turned,' said Taylor Mildenhall, 18, a freshman from Marietta, Ga., majoring in biochemistry and one of the men on the Project Preference date list.
Mindenhall said he has never gone to a girl-ask-guy dance before and is excited.
Mindenhall responded to his potential date by filling her bathroom sink with six pounds of gold fish crackers. Y-E-S was spelled out on three of the fish buried somewhere in the pile.
'The boys think our meetings we have about this are ridiculous,' said Lindsey Trimble, 18, a freshman from Laguna Hills, Calif., majoring in neuroscience. 'But at least we plan things and don''t just end up at Denny''s at two in the morning.'
The boys have no idea what tonight''s activities will entail.
'We''re freshmen, this is what we''re supposed to do,' said Lauren Erickson, 18, a freshman from Ventura, Calif., majoring in social work.
And the extreme dating isn''t just limited to freshmen.
'I haven''t been to Preference since my freshman year, but my friends and I decided we should go this year,' said Shersti Montague, 20, a junior from Issaquah, Wash., majoring in humanities.
She displayed her edge in extreme dating by wrapping up her potential date''s car in more than 350 feet of tin foil. 'Aluminate my night!' she wrote on a sign for him.
'It kind of looked like a giant space ship,' she said.
To answer her, her date pretended to be the Provo City Police Department calling to confront her about vehicle vandalism.
Mandy Johnston, executive director of Preference, said the girl-ask-guy dance is more likely to breed creativity than traditional dances.
'Girls like that kind of thing, so they''re more apt to ask creatively,' she said.
Creativity included or not, girls are asking this year. Tickets have sold out at every venue except the Games Center and the Heber Creeper.
Tickets for those sites are available at the Wilkinson Information Desk. Prices range from $16 to $20.