Chicken and Mushroom Thursday

My friends who I sit with for most meals, and I, decided we wanted to do something random. We had one meal where we were just off the wall, and then decided "we should plan a meal where we plan to be serious and have serious conversation" which led to, "let's dress up...like formal dress up". A note to those of you who don't already know this, dinner is our casual meal (by which I mean pants, no sweats or pjs allowed), after we ladies have been in skirts all day, and the gents have been in dress pants and a collared shirt. So this was no normal dress-up-as-class-dress, we were going all out in dress-up-like-in-suits-and-formal-dresses type thing. We spent the rest of dinner time cracking jokes on different things we could do, and hamming the event up just about as much as it could be. We scheduled it for Thursday evening, and everyone at the table, remembered to remind everyone else at the table to dress up formally for dinner that night. We tried to come up with something to say we were celebrating, but the 'official' 'holiday' of the day was something about nakedness, so we opted out of celebrating that and instead decided to make up our own holiday. We asked the cooks what Thursday's dinner would be, and they informed us "chicken with swiss and mushrooms on top", so we designated our cause for celebration as "Chicken and Mushroom Thursday"!

Melissa and I had class until 5:30, and then a class at 6:30, trying to fit an eventful dinner in between the two. We hurried back and all of us girls got ready together, and all exited at the same time to see the gents waiting in their fine suits. I was impressed that the guys went along with it so well. Some guys were wearing bow ties (I am not a big fan, but I will say they do fit the occasion of 'formal'), some vests, and some those things they wear on their waist (the official title is slipping my mind). We took several pictures in front of the notorious fireplace, and then headed down to dinner, to all walk in together. We got many looks, and many laughs, but we were having fun. Andrea had gotten Suzie to put a "Reserved" sign on 'our' table, and then she volunteered to put a table cloth and full setting on it too, so that was fun, and welcomed us into the dining hall quite nicely.

Once we got to our table, we drew names for 'king and queen', and the queen then got to wear a tiara (which she actually didn't, because she said it didn't fit right [haha]). We made sure to ham it up just about as much as possible, as we 'snapped' our napkins all at the same time, drank cranberry juice, and made what felt like a million toasts (someone even tried hitting his plastic cafeteria cup with a fork. doesn't work so well with nasty cafeteria cups). Most people talked in a British accent about the oil rigs, and stock market. That was our attempt at 'being serious'. The funny part about this too, is that we planned it before we had really thought through that this was previewer weekend, so we had a few previewers. I guess we will figure out next year how badly we scared them off.

Here are a few pictures from the fun evening. You can check out more on facebook (Melissa's (sorry to those who can't view her's) or Rebekah's).