Dating

LOS ANGELES -- It was on a smoking patio in L.A.'s Echo Park that an older woman named Annie shattered my illusions about finding a suitable boyfriend in my 30s.

"Tell them, 'If you don't have jack, don't call back,'" she said, while I fiddled guiltily with an American Spirit (I had "quit" two weeks earlier). I nodded, thinking I understood.

"J.A.C.," she said again, holding up three fingers. "Job, apartment or car."

LOS ANGELES -- For weeks, South Pasadena High School senior Alex Hom knew he wanted to ask freshman Brooke Drury to winter formal. But it wouldn't do to just pop the question -- too boring -- or, even worse, to text it.

So he rounded up more than 20 friends, supplied them with red roses, choreographed a dance routine and wrote out his plea on signs. Then he had a friend bring Brooke, blindfolded, to a spot on campus for the big production.

"I thought, this is my senior year and I gotta go out with a bang," Alex said.

He's not the only student elevating the art of the school dance invitation.

Students are folding the question into homemade fortune cookies, tucking it into pinatas, knitting it into scarves, spelling it out with pepperoni on pizza and orange chicken on fried rice.