Two tickets to paradise?

EDITORIAL: So this kid proposes to his girlfriend at the Port Authority bus terminal in midtown, and romantics everywhere go ga-ga. Nothing against Adam Frohlinger, who, at all of 21 years, said he chose to propose on an NJ Transit bus because it was the last place his 20-year-old soulmate from Teaneck would expect to find him bearing flowers, balloons and an engagement ring.

Jerry DeMarco

03/19/2010 6:16 p.m.

CLIFFVIEW PILOT Photo Illustration

But the last place she’d think of? What about the public toilet there? Or a crib in the south Bronx? How about the Blowhole in the Village? CitiField?

So where’s the honeymoon, kids? Bayonne?

(And before you even think it: If he has the right to propose in a bus station, I have the right to kid him about it. He obviously put a lot of thought into this.)

Funny how a North Jersey newspaper photographer just happened to be there. And how it happened at a time when commuters are all but ready to tar and feather the NJ Transit braintrust who are threatening major bus and rail increases.

As The Bergen Record’s Joseph Ax wrote: “Port Authority and New Jersey Transit officials were in on the fix, helping Frohlinger and some co-conspiring friends get to the bus without being spotted.”

(It doesn’t say whether they had to pay the fare.)

Ah, the roar of the engines. The fumes of the exhaust. The faint odor of what might be either urine or an industrial cleaner; I can’t tell which. The “brive a dus” stomach butterflies of a man popping the question.

Jerry DeMarco (Publisher/Editor)

Sorry, Romeo, but the bus station is where you meet a fellow misfit, where you promise things will be different this time — where you eventually sit with your flaccid pride in your hands, hoping that she’ll turn around, but doesn’t, as she heads toward the door that last time, leaving you mindlessly stirring your tepid coffee, your feet stuck to the floor in a patch of dried soda. Kinda like Paul Newman in “The Hustler.”

It’s no place to be on your knees, that’s for sure — unless, of course, you’re there for a different reason. And it’s no cause for a media event, not when the state is goin’ to hell in a handbasket, building projects have mysteriously been suspended, and the quality of drinking water is extremely suspect.

But who wants to worry about such matters when you have the fairy-tale-cum-true of Adam and Miss Teaneck — soon to become Mrs. Somewhere on Long Island?

Our intrepid reporter reveals that the couple met two summers ago at a Yeshiva University summer camp, and that they’re planning an August wedding. Kinda quick, if you ask me.

I hope Gray’s Papaya isn’t already booked that day.

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