How to get your girlfriend to marry you in four difficult but awesome steps:
1. Luck out and have your girlfriend win tickets to the taping of the last Oprah show.
2. Call Oprah’s producers and arrange a surprise asking.
3. Sweet-talk her mother into pretending she has a headache so she doesn’t go to the taping.
4. Jump up on stage in front of 13,000 people and ask.
Winnipeg nurse Jenna Steinsvik got the surprise of her life when her firefighter boyfriend Alex Babinsky arranged to ask her to marry him on the Oprah show — and it was Oprah’s last show, to boot.
“I knew he’d do something big because he’s like that, he’s big in everything he does,” said Steinsvik from her cell phone on the way home to Winnipeg from Chicago Wednesday. “But no, I never expected this.”
Steinsvik said she won tickets in an online draw about a week and a half ago and arranged for her and her mother to attend the taping. After traveling down to Chicago with Babinsky and her parents, her mother pleaded a migraine so that Babinsky would have to attend the taping with her.
Once there, while in the crowd, a producer called Babinsky up on stage, much to Steinsvik’s shock. “No one even knew he was supposed to be there.”
Babinsky called his girlfriend of a couple years onstage, got down on one knee, and proposed, with “Will You Marry Me, Jenna” flashing on the screens around the United Center in Chicago.
In front of a wildly cheering crowd, Steinsvik said yes.
Steinsvik said she’s still stunned — and that no, the couple hasn’t set a date.
Steinsvik said she isn’t sure if the proposal will be aired, but it was taped.
