A red Jeep pulled up beside Fisher Theater on Friday. A dark-haired guy stepped out, walked around to the other side, opened the door and helped a blindfolded, blonde-haired woman out.

With one arm around her and the other holding a CD player, he led her up the stairs onto the catwalk connecting the Iowa State Center buildings. Then he told her to wait a second and set the CD player down, cuing up their song, Neal Diamond’s “Hello Again.”

He took the blindfold off, handed her glasses to her and pointed across Lincoln Way, telling her to look.

Lights in the windows of the eighth floor of Larch Hall spelled out, “Marry me Jill.”

She laughed and called him a nerd.

Then he got down on one knee and placed the diamond ring on her finger.

She didn’t need to answer. He knew it was yes.

Kyle Beaird, a senior in finance management information systems, had been friends with Jill Beyer, a criminal justice and political science major at Simpson College, for about four years since their high-school years in Des Moines, although they went to different high schools.

“I tried to date her [during high school], but she had better things to do,” Beaird said.

“I thought he was a nerd,” Beyer said. “He and his best friend were immature.”

Beaird and his best friend fought each other for Beyer’s attention during high school. “We both lost,” Beaird said.

Then about nine months ago, “something just happened” Beaird said.

Beyer was seeing someone at the time, but he couldn’t go with her to a formal dance, so she asked Beaird if he would go with her as a friend.

Beaird did not know she was seeing someone else, he said.

After that evening, March 31, “I all of a sudden realized that I loved her, and I had to tell her that,” Beaird said.

He called her up the day after the formal and told her. Beyer had her sorority sisters coaching her but at one point in the phone conversation things became too serious for her and she left the room, she said.

“It took me a little bit longer [to realize I loved him too], but not too much longer,” Beyer said.

In May, the two were sitting on the porch talking. “That’s when I told her I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and then she laughed,” Beaird said.

“I always laugh,” Beyer said.

“I thought when the moment came [for him to propose], I would cry, but I guess I was too excited to cry and mad,” Beyer said.

Beyer doesn’t like surprises or situations when she feels she doesn’t have any control, she said.

“I told him, ‘When we get engaged I want it to be something really private,'” Beyer said. “Once he put that silly bandana on me, I knew something was up. … I can’t believe he was so creative.”

“I was sitting there one day trying to think of creative ways to propose to her and this just popped into my head,” Beaird said. If Beyer ever dreamed of seeing her name in lights, Beaird certainly made that dream come true.

“I used to live up there [in Larch Hall], and my buddies helped me out,” he said.

The two said they will probably get married next December because Beyer wants a Christmas wedding and Beaird wants to graduate first. Beyer plans on attending Drake University in Des Moines next year for law school.