American customs
In the USA, weddings are much less formal on the whole than they are here, and it's quite common for invited guests to take along friends to the reception. My parents came across this phenomenon when staying with friends in America and were taken along to the wedding of some folk they didn't know. End of background information.

So I was playing in the band at a wedding here in Scotland and an American couple had been invited as evening guests. Unaware of the difference in customs (this didn't quite qualify for last week's QotW!) they brought along the couple with whom they were staying, who did not know the bride and groom and had not been invited. Now this was a problem, as the venue had imposed a limit of 100 people, and the bride would have liked to have invited some other folk but because of the number limit, she'd had to leave them out. So the two innocent interlopers were to be asked to leave.

The bride's mother came up to us, the Scottish ceilidh band who had nothing to do with the wedding except as paid entertainers, and said to our dance caller to ask this couple to leave. Cheeky bugger could have done it herself, but she didn't have the guts. He wasn't too happy about this but did his best to be diplomatic and explain the situation.

Cue two couples (the ones who were asked to leave, and the original guests) walking out of the reception amid much consternation and crying etc. The bride was in floods of tears and it caused a bad feeling among the company all night.

The best of it was that both couples had booked into the hotel for the night, so they were still hanging around in the bar at the end of the reception.

There wasn't a fist fight unfortunately, but I've seen that too.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 15 Jul 2005, 11:36, Reply)