Feed Your Wedding Guests Before You Hire Mickey Mouse, Please
Pinkies up, people, because we’ve got a brand new etiquette discussion that’s taking the internet by storm, thanks to what is basically the millennials’ version of a Miss Manners column, Reddit’s AITA, or Am I The Asshole subreddit. It’s not hard to see why the post in question has taken off, seeing as it combines multiple things that are prime complaint vectors, including weddings and Disney adults. Below you can find a screenshot of the full brief, but here’s the TL;DR: this couple really wanted Mickey and Minnie, the famous media mice, to show up at their wedding. To accomplish this, they used the money that was intended for a catering budget. Resulting in some hungry, disgruntled guests with autographs they couldn’t eat, I guess.
Now, the inclusion of Disney into this is definitely what sent people’s blood pressure into the stratosphere, but I think that the real problem here isn’t Disney’s inclusion, but the fact that it’s a round-eared insult added to the injury of a greater disrespect for your guests. Weddings are incredibly expensive, not only for the family and couple that are hosting, but for guests as well. For anyone that has to travel, you can easily expect the cost of flights, hotel, and whatever Crate & Barrel bull#&$% is left on their registry to approach a grand. Especially these days, asking people to cough up a month’s rent isn’t the easiest proposition in the world, but people do it, and it’s a testament to human connection, love, and how much people love to get drunk in a suit or a sundress.
As guests, we don’t ask for much. We ask for a short-ish ceremony, not to be seated at the table with your weird cousins, good food, and access to alcohol, preferably free alcohol. The discussion of the obligation of an open bar at weddings is one that at least holds a LITTLE more merit, but I’m of the firm belief that you should at least have a keg of cheap beer behind the bar for the degens if you don’t want to pay for your uncle to slosh his way through a bunch of top-shelf scotch on your dime. Asking for guests to pay for their own food, however, is a bridge too far.
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When your guests, jetlagged and frustrated from fighting with a hotel ironing board, are informed that their food intake for the evening is entirely unsubsidized, here’s what will immediately happen: they will start scanning your wedding like a Raytheon targeting system, looking for the things that swallowed up the budget for the sea bass (the official fish of weddings) that they were expecting. Expensive looking centerpieces, fireworks, these things will be judged for their budget, and in my opinion, fairly so.
The reason that people react this way is that they are looking at a collection of things that you have perhaps unintentionally admitted are more important than feeding them. Now, if you were in dire financial straits for the wedding in general, know I’m not talking about you–your guests, at least the good ones, will understand. But we’re talking about a wedding that had hired, costumed mice, so I think we can quiet that slightly.
So, when people are looking around, in search of a scapegoat that is why they have to go get takeout during your reception, (or vending machines, which is truly insane) the Mickey and Minnie Mouse impersonators waving at everyone with their big, dumb hands are going to have a target painted squarely on their big, dumb head. You have just made the Disney characters that you hold so close to your heart public enemy number one. Snarky facebook posts are the best you can hope for. You’re lucky that some guest, zooted out of their mind off off prosecco on the empty stomach you caused, didn’t form-tackle one of the mice in question into a floral arrangement like a s**tfaced Ed Reed.
This rage is only going to multiply when Mickey and Minnie say their goodbyes after THIRTY MINUTES. The realization will wash over your guests that the reason they’re eating Kind Bars out of their purse is so that two cartoon mice could spend LESS THAN AN HOUR at your wedding. Again, the fact that it’s Disney is infuriating, but not central here. It could be any pop-culture obsession, you’re just creating a living, breathing demonstration of a poorly budgeted reception to dance in the face of your guests. I don’t care if it’s a guy in a Boba Fett suit breakdancing in the middle of the dance floor, or a Gandalf walking around doing magic tricks for the kids, or a hologram of your dead grandma giving her blessing. These are things that are luxuries.
I understand the idea of a “dream wedding” and I wish you the very best in making it happen. But most people’s dream wedding doesn’t include everyone they hold dear, sitting at tables, talking s**t about them. Feed your guests. And if you insist on telling them “let them eat the appearance of beloved characters Mickey and Minnie Mouse,” you’re lucky if nobody brings a guillotine to the reception.
