You're the Wedding Planner. Now What Do You Do?
After months of working with a difficult and exacting bride, you open the cake box shortly before the reception. The bakery, which is closed, sent a cake for someone named David, in honor of his bar mitzvah. At GMU, Would-Be Consultants Learn Tricks, and Trials, of the Trade

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 3, 2007

George Mason University students waited expectantly as the guest lecturer plugged in her curling iron. The topic on the syllabus: updos.

The stylist attached a mop of shiny fake curls to sophomore Brittney Tobin's long blond hair, swept it up onto her head and pinned on a bridal veil. "Is there a veil on my head?" Tobin squeaked, wide-eyed, fluttering a hand in front of her face.

"It's every girl's dream to have a class about weddings," Tobin said later. "It's a dream!"

Sure, a dream. Until the bride freaks out, the best man gets plastered or the altar boy topples over in the middle of the ceremony. And everyone expects you to fix it.

If there's one thing assistant professor Maggie Daniels wants students to know in her semester-long class on wedding planning -- apparently the first in the country at a four-year college -- it's that this is not just fluff.

Daniels teaches crisis management and event planning for what has become an enormous business, estimated at anywhere from $80 billion to $161 billion a year nationally. Spending on weddings has nearly doubled in the past 15 years. In just four years, almost every expense increased more than 20 percent as people added days of events, gifts for all the guests, elaborate lighting and all sorts of other extras promoted by magazines, TV shows and the rest of the marital-industrial complex. More than a third of couples outspend their wedding budgets.

With that booming industry comes demand for wedding planners who know their peau de soie from their charmeuse, who can coordinate timing and such details as flowers, music and hors d'oeuvres, who can whip recalcitrant groomsmen into shape.

And who can, when the inevitable crisis hits, take the bullet.

"A wedding planner has to be a superhero," Tobin said. "People think of their wedding as the perfect fairy tale. If it's not, someone's going to get the blame. It's probably going to be you."

It wasn't easy to convince college administrators that this was a legitimate course of study, Daniels said. "I fought for this tooth and nail." She produced the event-planning and cultural research to back it up. Once approved, she needed 10 students to enroll. Seventy signed up.

This semester, 100 students are taking it. They're a mix of dreamy fiancees, people looking for a fun elective, tourism-and-events-management majors rounding out their degree and hard-core future wedding consultants.

"What happens very frequently is students come into class doe-eyed," Daniels said. "Part of my objective is to make them understand it can be enjoyable, but the bottom line is, if you want to make a living at this, it is a hard job, a very, very hard job. Your weekends are taken away from you. You're dealing with a lot of different emotions," and it's difficult to launch a lucrative business.

Plus, the disasters.

When the class started in 2005, Daniels taught with wedding planner Carrie Loveless (no, really), and they couldn't find a textbook. So they wrote their own, full of glossy photos of petals and fondant by a sought-after Washington wedding photographer, explanations of traditions in many different cultures, business advice and lots of examples of crises that really happened.

In some cases, the word "crisis" might be a tad overwrought (Omigod! No air conditioning in the limo! Sweaty bride!) Some are funny, if they didn't happen to you, like the time children at an outdoor reception ran past the three-tier wedding cake and knocked it right into the pool. Or the time the priest fell asleep while the quartet was playing and someone had to prod him awake.

Stephen Ball, who grew up working for a family catering business and is one of just two men in the class this semester, has seen it all. Once, while bartending a reception out in the sticks somewhere, he watched a drunk and belligerent guest beat up two groomsmen and wound up taking the guy down in the parking lot. "Most of the guests ended up outside watching me hold this guy down," waiting for police to come, he said.

Sometimes there are actual life-changing disasters. Like the wedding video, viewed by family and friends at the formal brunch the next day, that clearly showed footage of the groom stealing the father of the bride's wallet during the reception.

That wedding was annulled the next day, Daniels said.

Still, it's not organic chemistry in here.

While she teased a girl's hair then smoothed it into a full bun at the nape of the neck, hairstylist Giselle (No need for a last name. Please!) explained that she gets most requests for loose waves, buns and chignons. She recommended extensions and fillers, swaths of real or fake hair, then spun the student around so everyone could see.

"Ohhhhh . . . that's so pretty!" a dozen women gasped.

Students asked lots of questions: Do brides ever just hate the style? What do you do with short hair? How do you time all the styling for an entire wedding party?

"How many people have had updos?" she asked the class, and most raised their hands. "What do you do? Do you bring photos?"

Ball, who's in his first semester at Mason after spending six years in the Army with a shaved head, deadpanned, "I don't. I just feel like, you can be creative with my hair."

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."