THE WEDDING RINGERS

     My friend, Ramona, posted this article on Facebook the other day and I found it pretty interesting since I'd just watched that Kevin Hart movie, The Wedding Ringer. If you haven't seen it; when Josh Gad's character is about to get married, he realizes he has no friends to be in his wedding party. So, he hires Kevin Hart, who is a professional "Best Man" and gets hired to be a Best Man when the Groom doesn't have one. Little did he know, he would need to hire the whole wedding party. Being a newlywed of eight months with a big family and lots of friends, I didn't quite have this problem and neither did my wife. According to the article Ramona posted, though, this seems to be a "thing" in South Korea. 

     Weddings and baby showers are considered real-life milestones to spend with your actual loved ones. In South Korea, however, a cottage industry exists to help people find fake friends to fill seats at such life rituals. That is so sad. Just keep it a small wedding, right? 

     At a June wedding, a woman named Kim Seyeon showed up as a guest even though she was a total stranger to the bride and groom. She makes about $20 per wedding she attends as a pretend friend. She says, "When it's the peak wedding season in Korea, sometimes I do two or three acts a day every weekend." As a role player, she's part of an agency that casts her to attend weddings all over Korea. At this wedding, at least 30 of the guests are getting paid to fill the seats. That is nuts! I remember when we were wedding planning, we were happy if people couldn't make it because that was one less head we had to account for. Kim continued, "It's a lot of fun. A lot of the times, couples need these guests because they want to save face. They're conscious of what others think, and they need more friends. So Brides are very thankful for my presence."

     "Wedding guest rentals started in the late 1990s and in the early 2000s, broader role-playing rentals began," says Lee Hyun-su, who runs a South Korean casting agency called Role Rental 1-1-9. He keeps a database of 20,000 actors, ages 21 to 70, whom he places to work in real-life situations like fake bosses, fake parents, fake mistresses, you get the idea. 

     I bet it will be just a matter of time before this practice starts happening here in America. Then again, we think differently here in America also. Like I said earlier, one less person is one less person you have to pay for. I'm guessing these actors also don't have to bring a gift since they technically don't even know the couple getting married. If this did happen in America though, I highly doubt that $20 would be a sufficient payment for any actors. That price would have to get jacked up, but then again, they're getting a free dinner out of it and a free night out. This could work! Just saying!