ANDREW GLUM
Arts Writer

This article is a kind of experiment designed to find out if one writer can attend the biggest party of the school year, get rip-roaring drunk and still write something in time for the midnight cutoff the following day that won’t make the Sheaf’s editors hate him. Here goes nothing.

Mock Wedding was first hatched in 2008 by Ryan Chism and Jeremy Zakresky, the founders of the non-profit organization Prairie Party Planners that also sets up the equally popular Real Irish Riot and Monster Mash events. Chism and Zakresky were originally inspired by the film Wedding Crashers, and proceeded to organize a wedding geared toward the crashers rather than the bride and groom.

Mock Wedding is essentially all of the celebration, spiffy clothes and drinking of a wedding, but as Michelle Elash — current head of publicity for PPP — puts it, “you don’t have to worry about your crazy aunt Ethel tackling you down and pinching your cheeks.”

A few of the classic traditions are involved, though, in order to maintain the theme. There are speeches which, much like at a real wedding, are more roasts than toasts, and the bouquet and garter toss. My personal favourite was the tossing of the bouquet: the flowers smashed some unlucky girl in the face and proceeded to be ripped apart by dozens of husband-hungry hands.

Speaking of hungry hands, there was a disturbing amount of them waiting in line for tickets to the event the morning they went on sale. By the time PPP staff started selling at 8 a.m, people were lined up four-thick from the kiosk in the Arts Tunnel, past Tim Horton’s, up the stairs into the Arts building and all the way down to the entrance of Edward’s School of Business. All 1,500 tickets were sold in under 20 minutes.

Opinions vary on the reason behind Mock Wedding’s popularity. PPP President Trent Blezy sees it as a result of good advertising: “We market it very hard. I think that’s the key to our successful events.”
Together with good publicity is PPP’s already-established reputation among students for throwing a mean shaker.

The third factor in Mock Wedding’s success is perhaps the most important: its uniqueness. There are many things that make Mock Wedding better than the bar/pub crawl experience. One factor is size. I have seen no other dance floor in the city as big or as packed as the one I was thrashing around on at TCU Place. On the downside, I’ve never seen a lineup to get into the men’s washroom before either.

Other than that, the size of the venue and the crowd was just right — big enough that one can flow through the crowd feeling comfortably anonymous, without too many people noticing how much he’s clownin’, yet not so big that one looses track of his friends somewhere along the line and doesn’t see them again for the rest of the night.

The demographics of the crowd also add to the uniqueness of Mock Wedding.

“Everyone’s in a way better attitude than you’d see at a bar,” PPP vice president Patrick Kolla explained. “It’s all young people here. You don’t see anyone over the age of 30.”

The crowd is also almost exclusively university students, most of whom likely started their post-secondary studies with all sorts of ideas influenced by films and TV shows that depict college life as a non-stop party atmosphere.

Mock Wedding does have its similarities to the bar, however. The natural law stating that the chance of falling on one’s ass increases proportionally with inches of heel and drinks consumed applies universally. Also, no matter how civilized everyone’s apparel makes them look — and everyone was decked out — the last hour before closing time always seems to entail at least a few instances of animalistic groping and crude displays.

At the end of the night, though, after all of the hedonistic good fun, everyone can feel righteous knowing that they have contributed to a good cause. Since Blezy joined PPP in 2009, the group has donated over $35,000 to the Children’s Hospital Foundation, and this year’s Mock Wedding will add more to that figure.

“For me, personally, the best feeling is donating the money,” said Blezy. “Handing over thousands of dollars to the Children’s Hospital Foundation, it makes those hours and hours you’ve put in of hard work worth it.”

The hard work that went into the little experiment that is this article was worth it also. There was plenty of fear and loathing along the way, but I emerge victorious: there is still 20 minutes until midnight.

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image: Robby Davis