The Champagne chilled on ice. The Mylar balloons — including one that looked like a big pink engagement ring — blew in the breeze. Hopeful party signs reading “She Said Yes!” and “Hooray!” decorated a table set up in the grass near the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.
But would Operation Roundabout pan out? That was the name Kevin Dublin, a 33-year-old poet, gave to Saturday’s shenanigans to surprise his girlfriend, Katie Lewin, with a marriage proposal at the top of the park’s SkyStar Observation Wheel. It’s finally spinning after months of being stuck in place — kind of like San Francisco itself.
But nothing else this year has gone as planned, and nobody took a happy ending for granted.
“It’s 2020,” said Madison Sink, a spokeswoman for the Recreation and Park Department, who stood among a dozen masked family members and friends of the couple. “It’s a little risky.”
Sink received a delightful email from Dublin on Oct. 7, divulging his proposal plans and asking when the wheel would spin. He and Lewin have been in love since meeting nearly four years ago at Rye, a cocktail bar in Lower Nob Hill. They’re both in love with San Francisco and with Golden Gate Park where she Rollerblades and he skateboards. Dublin even wrote a poem for the occasion entitled “Such Great Heights,” which he planned to read as the gondola rose up, popping the question at the very top.
Of course I’d fall in love in a city that has survived large earthquakes and days on fire. Of course the one who lifts me beyond who I am and brings me down to earth would be a lover of stars, oceans and poetry, mountains and daydreams, clouds and pink jelly beans and romance.
And Ferris wheels.
Dublin and Lewin, a 28-year-old first-grade teacher at Alta Vista School, have had many laughs while reading her old, hot pink diaries. In one of them, she wrote that she dreamed of being kissed by a boy on a Ferris wheel.
Dublin has tried to make Lewin’s Ferris wheel dreams come true, but it never worked out. A Ferris wheel line was too long. Or the ride ended for the night as soon as they got to the front. Or family was with them — like Lewin’s parents or Dublin’s kids from a previous marriage, Darien, 12, and River, 8 — and that would just be awkward.
And then, his plan to propose at the top of the Golden Gate Park Ferris wheel had to wait, too. The wheel was erected for an April bash celebrating the park’s 150th birthday. But then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the party went virtual and the gondolas were never attached to the wheel. Instead, it stood there, a huge, motionless, metal circle, taunting the city that loves fun and whimsy and celebrations and is short on all of that this year.
Now that San Francisco’s coronavirus transmission rate is so low and the city is opening up, the Ferris wheel was supposed to start spinning. But this being 2020, even the big VIP debut last week went awry. A safety inspector said the wheel wasn’t ready for prime time, and Mayor London Breed had to stay firmly planted on the ground.
So Dublin waited some more, and finally the wheel was ready. He told Lewin on Saturday he was taking her to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the de Young Museum, but he’d really bought tickets for a ride. The Recreation and Park Department was there to record sound for a podcast and take photos.
I want to walk all of our city’s hills, Excelsior Heights, Turtle Hill, Russian Hill, Twin Peaks. I want your hand in my hand, my hand in your back pocket, my hand around your waist.
The couple finally got seats inside Gondola No. 27. That’s when family and friends left their far-off spot in the grass to stand below the wheel in hopes of greeting the happy couple as they disembarked. That was also — no kidding — exactly when a cold, foggy day turned warm and sunny, the clouds parting as the couple spun around and around.
“I’m very nervous,” Katherine Lewin, Katie’s mom, confessed from ground level. “But I think they’ve found their soulmates. My daughter always told me she wanted to marry a poet. I thought, ‘How is that going to happen?’ He’s a romantic, and so is she. He always wants her to be happy.”
For the record, he’s also a teacher and coder at Kickstart Coding, a coding bootcamp in Oakland.
I want to make memories like a kiss behind Coit Tower. Open houses in lofts with projector walls we can’t afford yet. I want to continue to form collectives with you — writers, teachers, seekers.
Lewin’s parents craned their necks, trying to see inside the couple’s gondola to get an idea of whether he’d asked yet. And whether she’d said yes.
“Can we have Champagne in the park?” her anxious mom asked. “Is it legal?”
I told her San Francisco looks the other way at a whole lot worse than Champagne in the park.
Accept this pink tourmaline, a gem once a part of a California mine made beautiful, beautiful like you. A kiss on a Ferris wheel, a childhood desire in a lust-filled diary made destiny. Mary Katherine Lewin, will you marry me?
As the gondola came back down, it became obvious what had happened. The couple was definitely fulfilling Lewin’s girlhood dream, and she kept holding out her left hand, gazing at it.
“She’s got eyes for no one but Kevin right now,” Sink said.
Finally, as the gondola spun back up for its final rotation, she spotted her family and friends, and her screams of “What?” and “Oh my God!” could be heard through the gondola and all the way down below.
The couple got off the wheel and rushed toward friends and family.
“Thank you, Operation Roundabout!” Dublin exclaimed, adding he managed to go down on one knee, but he didn’t take in any of the scenery because he only had eyes for his future bride.
Lewin was confused about why staff members from the Recreation and Park Department and The Chronicle were there.
“I wish I had something to offer you,” Lewin said.
“This is all we need,” Sink assured her. “One happy story.”
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf Instagram: @heatherknightsf
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October 27, 2020 at 06:00PM
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’One happy story’: S.F. poet spins magic with his Golden Gate Park Ferris wheel marriage proposal - San Francisco Chronicle
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