No room at the inn
Ok, so this happened maybe 10-15 years ago. I worked at a job where there were 14 people to a shift, 12 hour shifts and open 24/7; office environment. My shift supervisor was a middle aged black woman (yes, race is a factor, just hang on lol) who reconnected with her childhood sweetheart later in life when both of them became eligible, one through divorce and one who was widowed.
Mary was SO excited about inviting us all to the event. The nature of our work tends to build strong bonds and we too were excited about attending. Mary went on and on about how fantastic the sit down dinner would be at the reception. We were all gonna get the true Southern Black Dinner experience and we were gonna LOVE it.
Fast forward to the day of the event. It was held at a small rural church in the middle of nowhere. The service was lovely. Afterwards we all file out into a seperate building they called the fellowship hall. Huge room, think basketball court sized. The work group all sat together as one tends to do at functions where one doesnt know many people. Of course, they take pictures before coming into the hall for the reception/dinner. These pictures take FOREVER!. I mean we were promised a huge sit down dinner, which we can all smell, so we came hungry. Those two little Hersey Kisses at each place setting had a lot of baggage to tote. It was close to a two hour wait. Finally, they are done and the wedding party starts to enter the hall. This is when a lady gets up to make an announcement. They have run out of seating room and there isnt room for the entire wedding party to have seats. So she asks anyone who isnt a family member or closely connected to the bride and groom to leave. Everyone starts looking at each other and it quickly became apparent that everyone is looking at us, the mostly white group of coworkers in this otherwise all black assembly. 100+ people are now waiting to see who will respond to this request, so we all quietly and quite uncomfortably I might add, left. We are starving at this point so we all agreed to drive back to town and go have lunch together.
When Mary found out what happened she was mortified! Turns out the annoucement was supposed to say we ran out of room in the main hall so we set up tables and chairs in an additonal room and ask for volunteers to move to that room not to leave the event entirely. Apparently the talk of the dinner was "Can you believe they asked all the white folks to leave?" Her husband wound up having a huge BBQ dinner catered to us at work one day to at least fulfill the promise of feeding us. Guess I will never find out what that true Southern Black Dinner was all about lol.