Couple gets engaged with a ‘Frog and Toad’-inspired book at Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul
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Lily Tschudi-Campbell and Cassidy Foust’s love story follows the tropes of many books you may pick up in a romance store — “friends to lovers,” “only one bed” and “mutual pining.”
The two weaved in and out of each other's lives for over a decade, but there was always one constant: the Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul.
Tschudi-Campbell and Foust met at freshman orientation at Macalester College in 2011. They were friends, then not friends, friends again, best friends and then platonic roommates. Everyone knew they were in love with one another — besides them.
“We both knew we liked the other person, we just didn’t think the other person liked us. So we were mutually pining for each other, which is the dumbest trope in romance novels yet we were living,” Tschudi-Campbell said.
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Through this, they both worked at Red Balloon — but at different times. Foust started part-time in 2015 as she was studying children’s literature. Tschudi-Campbell started two months after Foust left, as they were working on their master’s degree in children’s literature.
They both still attend a weekly writing group at the shop. They moved to Los Angeles as friends during the COVID-19 pandemic, but returned after they realized they were “too Midwestern” for the city and they both missed the shop. Tschudi-Campbell returned to their position.
In 2023, they admitted their feelings for one another and began dating. They were excited to tell the employees of Red Balloon, but the response was not what they expected.
“We’re just ridiculous, we should have figured it out a lot sooner,” Tschudi-Campbell said. “When we told them they were like, ‘yeah, is that new?’ and we were like ‘yeah,’ and they were like ‘oh, yeah, congrats, but we are not surprised.”
On Dec. 18, the couple took their next step and got engaged. Of course, the proposal was at Red Balloon. Foust got a blank book from Michaels arts and crafts store and traced on drawings of the children’s book series “Frog and Toad” to use as a prop to pop the question.
“We are big Frog and Toad fans,” Foust said. “Arnold Lobel was kind of an underground queer icon. His daughter says she suspects that frog and toad was an allegory for the life he could not openly live when he was alive. And we really relate to the Frog and Toad lifestyle.”
Arnold Lobel, the author and illustrator of the Frog and Toad book series, came out as gay to his wife and children in the 1970s but never publicly discussed his sexuality, according to his daughter Adrianne. He died from AIDS in 1987.
“He was only fifty-four,” Adrianne said in an interview with the New Yorker. “Think of all the stories we missed.”
Foust brought in the Red Balloon team to help hide the Frog and Toad book she made. Tschudi-Campbell was called in early to work to “organize the game shelf.”
“I was incredibly oblivious,” Tschudi-Campbell said. “It turns out everyone was behaving out of character and I just kept being like, that’s weird. Why are you being so weird? I did not notice anything.”
After 20 minutes of cleaning, Tschudi-Campbell finally discovered the homemade Frog and Toad book on the bottom shelf.
Inside the book titled, “Frog and Toad get Engaged,” read:
“Toad,” Frog said one day, when they had spent every hour together, “what if we could do this every day for the rest of forever?”
“That would be very nice,” Toad said.
Frog pulled something out of his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Toad asked.
“Toad,” Frog said, bending down on one knee, “will you marry me?”
Then, Foust got down on one knee and proposed to Tschudi-Campbell — starting their new chapter and lifelong love story all because of a little shop on Grand Avenue.
“The qualities that we love in each other are also qualities that Red Balloon tries to uplift, which is really lovely,” Tschudi-Campbell said.
The couple plans to get married in the fall of 2026, exactly 15 years after they met.
