He’s Got Big Plans for Love

Readers know this newspaper has a heart as big as all outdoors, so, of course, we take it seriously when we get an e-mail from someone who just broke up with his girlfriend and needs help.

Especially when the writer is as imaginative and love-struck as Steve Wright seems to be. Two years and eight months ago, on the dance floor at his Mission Viejo High School senior prom, Wright found his soul mate, a life’s partner, the perfect match ... and then the darn fool went and broke up with her last week.

“While this may mean nothing to you,” Wright says, “please keep in mind that I am only 20 years old. A relationship that long with someone as young as we are is very rare today. What we had was also very rare.”

Before revealing Wright’s plan, let me flesh out his story. I ask if he considers the whole thing a bit irrational. “This is very rational,” he says, then adds, “I guess we can start from the beginning.”

That would be his senior year, when he needed a prom date. “Dances have never been very good for me,” he says, and already I feel his pain. A friend lined him up with a blind date, touting her as good company. Wright and the girl, a sophomore, met at a doughnut shop two days before the prom. “I turned her into a mute,” Wright says. “She said maybe three words the entire time. I thought I blew it right there.”

They didn’t talk again until prom night. But then, as poets and pawns and previously luckless losers had discovered throughout history, sometimes it just clicks. A pre-dance dinner stretched on, because Wright and his date couldn’t stop talking long enough to order.

“The only way I can describe it, it was a Cinderella sort of night,” Wright says. “We hit the dance floor, and it seemed like every song was a slow song for us. We kept dancing in each other’s arms, it just seemed so perfect. The next thing I know we were looking in each other’s eyes and we were kissing. It was amazing. I thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m connecting with this girl like this.’ ”

That was the summer of 2001, says Wright, a second-year history major at Saddleback Community College, and “it just sort of blossomed from there.” Until a week or so ago, when they broke up.

“I know she’s the girl for me,” Wright says. “I feel it in my heart and soul. She complements my life so perfectly.” And because desperate men do desperate things, he came to us.

Here’s his plan: His ex-girlfriend is going to the March 8 Britney Spears concert at Staples Center, but Wright isn’t. Thinking The Times is a partner with Staples (which it isn’t), Wright’s e-mail asks: “Please help me get on stage for just two minutes so that I can publicly confess how much she means to me and just how madly in love with her I am. I am begging you, as I lack the connections to pull off something of this magnitude.”

Why not just give her a call?

“I have to show her,” he says, “how much she really means to me. I can’t think of a bigger gesture than letting thousands of people know how I feel about one girl.”

Sadly, we can’t help. And a Staples Center spokesman says Wright’s best hope is to contact Spears’ management team.

Someday, maybe Wright and his now ex-girlfriend will be celebrating their wedding anniversary and laughing about his Britney Spears plan. Most likely, though, as hard as it may be for Wright to understand, he’ll be telling the story someday to a wife he hasn’t yet met.

Knowing how painful love’s misfires can be, I hate to break it to Wright. He assures me this isn’t a ploy to see the concert, and I believe him. He’s just a schlub in love, although he says friends have told him, “Dude, there are other girls out there.”

Easy for them to say.

“I know she’ll always be the one for me,” Wright says. “And when she’s ready, I’ll be there.”

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.