You're the Wedding Planner. Now What Do You Do?

Daniels asked members of the class how they would handle various crises and led a discussion on different religious traditions, then bridal makeup. "The order is: hair before makeup," she said. "Why would that be a good idea?" Students called out: because you could mess up the makeup with a blow dryer or hairspray.

"Some hairspray helps makeup stay on longer," a sophomore volunteered. "At pageants, they tell us to spray our face."

Silence followed as people processed that information.

They broke into groups to work on their final projects, 100- to 150-page papers outlining an exhaustive wedding plan with real vendors, pricing, schedules, evaluation forms and business cards. In another class, they had to create an imaginary client couple and draw a budget number out of a box. In this class, they had to pull out a last-minute crisis written on a slip of paper.

Tobin has had fun planning her group's winter-wonderland-themed wedding, complete with snow-globe favors for the guests and a $2,000 cake dusted with silver snowflakes. "I'm obsessed with wedding cakes," Tobin said. Their crisis was a problem with the linens: The wrong color and amount arrived on the wedding day. Tobin was unfazed. "But if it were the cake falling into the pool, I would be absolutely devastated."

Senior Kristin Discher was just looking for an easy class, but she has loved it so much she now plans to become a wedding planner. Her group got this: The groom's former girlfriend crashes the reception with four friends. "So we're all brainstorming how horrible that would be," Discher said.

Ball didn't care about dresses, rings, flowers. He took on the nuts-and-bolts things he'd need to know if he were running a business, calling vendors and pricing things out on Web sites. The crisis his group drew was a groomsmen stricken with flu. Whatever. Give him Tums, Ball said.

He prefers the crisis they invented themselves: The congressman's son finds out the week before the wedding, when he goes to get the license, that he's still married. He thought his quickie marriage to that bartender in Las Vegas had been annulled.

The most important thing he learned this semester? "How to do an updo," Ball said. "No! Make that: what an updo is."