Halfway through Tuesday's performance of "Beauty and the Beast" at DeVos Hall, the audience witnessed a real-life love story as Ethan Dozeman proposed to Kendra Start.
During intermission, WOOD TV-8's Gerry Barnaby called the couple to a landing on the stairs in the lobby, under the guise of picking a contest winner out of a hat. Instead, Start picked a note that read: "I love you Kendra. I want to spend the rest of my life with you so ..."
When she looked up, Dozeman was on his knees with a bouquet of roses and a ring, popping the question. Hundreds of people gathered in the lobby applauded at her enthusiastic "yes."
"Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this, but I knew he was an incredible person, so it doesn't surprise me that he would set up something like this," Start said later that evening.
Start, who turned 25 Tuesday, looks a bit like the dark-haired beauty in "Beauty and the Beast," and Dozeman is a bit like a prince waking from a beastly spell.
Dozeman suffered a severe closed-head injury Aug. 27, 2000, when he fell off a horse while riding near his Allegan County home. He spent three weeks in coma and three months in therapy learning to walk and talk again.
"Every morning when I wake up, I take a deep breath and thank God for a second chance to live," said Dozeman, 20.
"A year ago, I would not have predicted Ethan would be doing as well as he is," said Dr. Christian VandenBerg, medical director of rehabilitation at Spectrum Health Butterworth and Dozeman's attending physician. "He's on his own, working, driving and now proposing."
Dozeman remembers little of the months after the accident, except what his family told him and showed him in pictures. He was riding with Valentine Bolshava, a Russian exchange student at Grand Valley State University, who had just met the Dozemans, her host family, the day before.
Suddenly, Bolshava saw Dozeman on the ground, unconscious and not breathing. She performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, then ran to a neighbor's house.
"When the horses came back I thought, 'Oh, no. I hope somebody hasn't fallen and broken an arm,'" said Ethan's father, Hap Dozeman. "Later, I was wishing it was a broken arm."
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