Fordham alumni Mike Noel and Mary Shouvli, both FCRH ’07, have recently become engaged after Mike and the Fordham a capella group Satin Dolls performed a flash mob performance at the Olympic Flame Diner.

Noel and Shouvli met through mutual friends during their senior year at a party where guests were randomly handcuffed to one another. “We worked it out ahead of time that we would be handcuffed to each other and ended up spending the whole night talking,” Noel said. “We just hit it off so well that we regularly planned adventures around the city.”

And the two have been together ever since.

After three and half years, Noel finally decided to propose. They had just attended a series of weddings and family events together, and one friend’s recent proposal particularly inspired Noel.

“He took his girlfriend to all the important spots in their relationship and then threw a surprise engagement party for her,” Noel said. “That got me thinking about doing something more ambitious for the proposal.  I mean, you only get to propose once, right?”

Noel eventually decided to ask the Satin Dolls to help him stage an a capella flash mob. “The idea was to do something completely ridiculous and unexpected.  I liked the idea of a flash mob, but having it be an organized group would be even more funny, plus the whole Fordham connection was important.” Noel said.

When Noel emailed Satin Dolls musical director Nicole Holm, FCRH ’15, for help in early August, a week before the proposal, she and the other 13 current members of the Satin Dolls were excited to participate. “Turning this down was not an option,” treasurer Rebecca Brown, FCRH ’14, said.

“Yeah,” assistant musical director Alexa Esposito, FCRH ’14, agreed. “We were like, ‘Of course we’re doing it!’”

The Satin Dolls were particularly excited since this was their first time doing a flash mob proposal. The group once performed for an older couple’s anniversary, but was accompanied by The Ramblers. “This is the first thing that we were asked to do alone, which is kind of cool,” Brown stated.

“It’s something different,” President Caitlin Beck, FCRH ’14, said. “We don’t get asked to do stuff like that all the time.”

Since Shouvli likes Michael Jackson, Noel asked if the Satin Dolls could perform “ABC,” a song that Holm was fortunately already familiar with. “I had actually done ‘ABC’ a capella maybe a few years ago and remembered some of it, so I used a little bit of what I remembered and just added all the other parts in and I think cut the song a little bit for time purposes, but it was a lot like the original,” Holm said.

“It took a long time and it wasn’t an easy song to arrange,” Brown said. “It happened to be more complicated than we thought it was going to be. The song sounds simple, but there’s actually a lot to it.”

The Satin Dolls dedicated a block of their rehearsal time to learning the song. “We incorporated it into our normal rehearsal,” Esposito recalled. “It was just one week dedicated to Mike and Mary.”

Mike also sang with the Satin Dolls. “He was very hands-on,” Brown recalled. Mike said it was hilarious. “I’m not a singer at all, and they were spot on.”

Noel scheduled the performance for 7:30 p.m. at the Olympic Flame Diner near Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus, where he and Shouvli had their first date. “We went there one Friday after class at Lincoln Center and just ended up talking for about eight hours. It had sentimental value,” Noel said, “and I thought it would be funny because it is not a very romantic location.”

“It’s such a random place,” Beck agreed. “Just at a diner? You wouldn’t expect it.”

The Satin Dolls took the Ram Van there and slowly snuck into the restaurant in groups of four to escape notice. “We had to pretend we were eating at a diner, just like regular people,” Holm recalled. “We had girls sitting at the diner bar and then just at different booths. That way it would just look really random when we stood up one-by-one and started singing.”

When the Satin Dolls started, Shouvli had what was truly happening. “Mary was initially annoyed that these random girls were interrupting her dinner!” Noel remembered. “She actually rolled her eyes with the guy next to us since he wasn’t liking it either.  She tried to keep eating as if it would go away.”

“[Mary] had no idea!” Holm recalled. “And he was so good at acting too. He looked at her and was, like, ‘What’s going on?’”

However, Shouvli eventually warmed up to the sudden performance. “A random woman at the counter had a huge smile and was clapping along. Once Mary saw that her mood kind of changed and she liked it a little more,” Noel said. “It wasn’t until we all started a snap-and-dance routine and moving a little closer to her that she knew something was up.”

When the song finally ended, Mike got down on one knee and proposed, and Shouvli said yes.

“We all cried,” Holm stated. “When we finished, we didn’t know what he was going to say to her. It was just so sweet and so sentimental.”

“Everyone in the diner was so shocked,” Beck recalled. “There were a couple of ladies in the back, and they came running over like, ‘It’s a proposal!’”

Beck remembered a woman crying, and Esposito remembered one of the waitresses saying, “Such a New York moment!”

“It’s true, though,” Esposito said. “Those kind of crazy things only happen in the city all the time.”

Holm certainly did not think Noel’s proposal to Shouvli was any exception. “She went from eating French fries to being engaged,” Holm said.

“I think we laughed for the next five hours,” Noel added.

Noel and Shouvli do not have any definite wedding or honeymoon plans right now, but Noel joked about keeping similar performances in mind for the future. “Since this one went over so well I’m planning on arranging flash mobs for all the major life events coming up: job promotions, my son’s baptism, etc.,” he said.

“We loved it,” Holm said, and Beck even joked that it “might be our new thing.”

“We just had a lot of fun doing it too,” Beck added.

The Satin Dolls may not have any further proposals in store, but they are more than happy that they had this opportunity anyway. “It’s always a nice experience to see two people in love,” Brown said, “and especially if they have a connection to Fordham, because it’s our home too.”

To see a video of the proposal, check the Satin Dolls’ Facebook page.