Video: Couples battle it out in Nearlyweds game
If your boyfriend was lost in a foreign city, what would he do?
Dan Viola posed that question to the four female contestants in the Nearlyweds Show 2008 last Wednesday at Brockport High School. Brittany Williams, Melinda Koop, Nicole Hill and Hilary Warren were given four choices.
Would their sweethearts: "Stop for directions, look on a map, pretend not to be lost, or find a way to blame you?" asked Viola.
Warren said her boyfriend, Kacie Jones, would find a way to blame her. Koop said her boyfriend, Marcus Dixon, would pretend not to be lost. Williams' boyfriend, Corey Goodridge, would look at a map. Hill took a second to think about her response.
"Well, I don't think Christian can read a map, so he'd probably stop and ask for directions," she said of her boyfriend, Christian Boley.
Boley might not have agreed with his girlfriend's reasoning, but when it came time for the men to guess the females' responses, Boley agreed: He would stop and ask for directions.
It was one of many answers that Hill and Boley got right on their way to becoming Brockport High School's 2008 Nearlyweds Game champions.
The event took place in the Brockport High School auditorium. In addition to plenty of fodder for laughs, more than a dozen prizes were raffled off to audience members. Science teacher - and standup comedian on the side - Viola provided the laughs, many at the expense of his wife, who made a surprise appearance by phone after intermission.
"What are you saying about me?" she asked him over the loudspeaker for the entire audience to hear. Apparently, one of Viola's six children, a student at Brockport High, was controlling the sound at the show and decided to turn the tables on his father, to the delight of the audience.
In the end, Hill and Boley took first place with 75 points. Williams and Goodridge took second with 70 points. Warren and Jones took third place with 35 points, and Koop and Dixon took last place with 20 points.
The girls tried to think like their boyfriends in coming up with answers to a bevy of questions: "If your boyfriend were a car, what kind of car would he be?" "What television show best sums up your relationship?" "What quality originally attracted you to your boyfriend?"
After the men returned to see how well the ladies guessed, there was an intermission with a performance by a local rock band. And then it was the boys' turn to put themselves in their girlfriends' shoes, and mind-set.
src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KUEM_NWLHAkrel=1" width="425" height="355" scale="ShowAll" loop="loop" menu="menu" wmode="transparent" quality="1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed> Viola posed four questions: "If your girlfriend were a flower, what kind of flower would she be?" "How long does it take your girlfriend to get ready?" "What song best sums up your relationship?" "Which of your girlfriend's family members is she most like?" There was also the big 25-point bonus question - "What was the first movie you two saw together in the theater?" In addition to being entertaining, the Nearlyweds Game is meant to be educational for those students who organized it. The members of the Brockport Business Club and the Entrepreneurship Class spent several months planning the game, coming up with raffle prizes and pulling together couples, among the other details. "Everyone chipped in, and it came together just perfectly," said Kylee Jones, president of the club. Club and class members also sell a homecoming T-shirt in the fall to raise money. Teacher and adviser Ryan Egan said the Nearlyweds Game is more about having fun and learning than making money. Last year, the game raised $1.76, which is a lesson in just how hard it is to make an event profitable. For Hill and Boley, the game show was a chance to celebrate Valentine's Day together. "We basically knew we would win so we thought we should play," said Hill. The couple celebrated their year-and-a-half anniversary Friday, Feb. 15. "I think the reason why we had the confidence is because we just like to have fun, and we know each other," said Boley. Seeing as though the two started out as "best friends," it's no surprise they were good at guessing how the other thinks. "I'm just excited because that means we're the best couple, which I already knew," Hill said. <em>Amy Cavalier can be reached at (585) 394-0770, Ext. 243, or at acavalier@mpnewspapers.com.