Couple adds a little extra drama to Baker Shake’s ‘The Tempest’

A proposal for the ages
Couple adds a little extra drama to Baker Shake’s ‘The Tempest’

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

J. Cameron Cooper may have felt curs’d in his perpetual wooing of the Lady Haley, but all’s well now.

Cooper, a Rice alumnus and an actor in Baker College’s production of “The Tempest,” won the heart of his intended, Haley Richardson, when he proposed at the conclusion of the penultimate rehearsal of the play.

	J. Cameron Cooper ’02 proposed to Haley Richardson ’08 at the end of the rehearsal for Baker Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

That was on St. Patrick’s Day, the one-year anniversary of their relationship, and it was not the first time Cooper had asked Richardson to marry him. The first time, she said “No.” And the second, and the third …

“We were in Baker Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ a few years ago,” recalled Cooper ’02, who leads the company as Prospero in the current Baker production, which concludes March 26-28. “She was Beatrice, the lead, and I was Don Pedro, the prince. Everyone in the play is trying to get Benedick and Beatrice to marry, but she’s not terribly interested. At one point, Don Pedro makes a different suggestion: ‘Lady, will you have me?’

“So I proposed to her every night, on stage, and she turned me down.”

“It was always heartbreaking, because we decided to play the proposal very seriously,” said Richardson ’08, who is studying for her master’s in history at the University of Wisconsin. “I’ve seen productions of ‘Much Ado’ where the proposal is a joke, but we decided to make it an earnest moment in the show. It was a very hard scene to do.”

The real proposal took the young woman quite by surprise.

“I had no clue,” she said. “Cameron took the day off from work to celebrate our anniversary. I was there for spring break, and he acted completely normally. I didn’t expect anything until the show ended and he called me up on stage.”

Few knew what the groom-to-be had planned. “The woman at the ring shop, she knew,” said Cooper, who works as systems architect at Connexions, Rice’s online repository for educational materials. “I had conspired with our light operator to make sure not to leave us in the dark at the end of the show. And I told a friend in the cast I would be making a special announcement, gave him my camera and said, ‘Please photograph this.'” Cooper, with the ring in his costume pocket, called Richardson’s parents during a break in Act II to ask for their blessing.

“Cameron is a very romantic person, so I thought he was making an announcement about our anniversary,” said Richardson. “He started talking about ‘Much Ado,’ and that’s when it dawned on me where he was going with this. I’m glad I finally got to answer with my own words, instead of Shakespeare’s.”

The couple will maintain their long-distance relationship with frequent visits over the next year or so while Richardson finishes her master’s degree, and possibly a doctorate. Though Richardson is a Dallas native, when they set a date, the wedding will probably be in Houston. “That’s where all of our friends are,” she said.

They hope to continue acting together, though Richardson’s “got the directing bug,” said Cooper, who traveled to Wisconsin recently to see her as a nun in “The Sound of Music.” Cooper found himself waiting tables so he could view the sold-out dinner theater show.

“Theater is going to be a lifelong hobby,” she said. “We hope to someday settle down with a company where we can continue our passion for theater.”