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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.

As she created a full bun at the nape of a student's 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, then spun the student around so everyone could see.

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

"How many people have had updos?" Giselle asked the class. "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 students 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.

The students 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 solve last-minute crises.

Tobin enjoyed planning her group's winter-wonderland-themed wedding, complete with snow-globe favors for 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."

The crisis Ball's group drew was a groomsman 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."

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