Two weeks before spring break, junior Matt DeLapp, social chair of Sigma Chi fraternity, received an email from the Thomas Edison Inn.
The new owners of the inn said they recently purchased the building and would not, in fact, be hosting the Sigma Chi spring formal on May 10, despite the verbal agreement DeLapp had made with the previous owners a few weeks prior.
“It’s been pretty crazy,” said DeLapp, who has spent the last few weeks scrambling to find a new venue for his fraternity’s formal.
Such is the life of a Greek social chair in the spring.
Every sorority and two of the four fraternities hold formals in the second semester of every school year. Each Greek house’s social chair is in charge of everything involved with organizing the swanky dinner parties. They do everything from choosing the venue to making sure every student’s allergies don’t prevent them from surviving dinner –– all the while struggling to keep the whole thing under budget.
Kappa Kappa Gamma
Sophomore Katie Frates is Kappa Kappa Gamma’s social chairwoman. She said she started planning Kappa’s spring formal, to be held this Saturday in the Belvedere Room at The Toledo Club in Toledo, Ohio, back in December.
“[The spring formal] is definitely the biggest event I host,” she said, “and I would like to think the funnest of the year.”
Food for the formal is provided by the Toledo Club. To save money, each guest will be eating the same dish – chicken picatta with two sides and a salad – chosen by Frates.
In order to make sure she wasn’t providing party attendees with something they couldn’t eat, Frates had to make sure the party guests weren’t allergic to the dishes she chose. But if they were, she worked with the person to provide a meal they could eat.
After Frates figured out the venue where formal would be, she had to figure out how to get formal to the venue. Kappa will provide buses for the 171 students attending formal.
Frates said she found that food and busing account for about 90 percent of her budget for spring formal.
“I was shocked,” she said.
The busing company was willing to negotiate down on the quote they’d given Frates and while she said the amount saved wasn’t large, she need the mney for decorations.
“Usually they want your business,” she said. “They are not going to turn you away.”
In addition to decorations, the last 10 percent of her budget will be spent on chaperones, security, a disc jockey, gifts for seniors, and, if there is enough left over, party favors.
Frates assessed the Belvedere Room and decided it looked nice enough that the Kappas didn’t have to decorate it too much. Instead, she focused on centerpieces for the tables.
The formal’s theme is “Fire and Ice.”
“We wanted to pick a theme that was really simple and cheap,” Frates said, “but that we could also bedazzle a little bit.”
Alcohol will be served at Kappa’s formal. Rent-a-cops will be there in case, as she put it, “the people who are 21 get a little rowdy.”
Delta Tau Delta
Delta Tau Delta’s spring formal will be held this Friday, the day before Kappa’s, at the Lenawee Country Club in Adrian, Mich. Social chair of the Delts, sophomore Jonathan Moeller, began planning formal about two months ago.
Scheduling a date, he said, was one of the trickiest parts of the party planning process because he had to coordinate not only with the fraternity members, but with the venue, the sororities, events on campus, and parent’s weekend.
“No matter what you do, someone will be unhappy,” Moeller said, “but you gotta just put your foot down and roll with it.”
Like Frates, Moeller’s first order of business was finding a suitable venue. He said he was looking for a place with class, but also a place where “the price was right.”
Costs aside, finding a venue willing to host a fraternity formal can be a problem in it self, Moeller said, simply because of the bad connotations surrounding the name “frat.”
“If they are willing to listen to us that long [to explain they want to host a formal], usually they are happy to have us and invite us to come back,” he said.
All the decorations at the country club will be set up by the time the Delts and their dates arrive.
When Moeller visited the room the formal will be held in, he discovered a purple lace fabric hung over the room from a chandelier. He thought it looked pretty good, so he asked the country club’s management who did the decorations, called the company, and set up a contract for them to do the same thing for the Delt formal – after asking for and receiving “a significant price reduction.”
The bulk of spring formal is paid for by the revenue from ticket purchases. Money drawn from the social events budget is used to subsidize each fraternity member’s ticket.
Without the subsidy, the dance would have cost about $47 a couple, but after the price dropped to $40 – Moeller’s target amount and the historical cost for Delt formal tickets.
Delts drive themselves to formal, rather than use a busing service.
“They cost a lot of money,” Moeller said.
Sigma Chi
So as to not worry about any scheduling conflicts, the Sigma Chi formal won’t be held until after the semester ends.
On May 10, the Sigma Chis and their dates will travel to the Atheneum Suite Hotel in Detroit, Mich., in the part, DeLapp assured The Collegian, “that isn’t falling apart.”
After his plans with the Thomas Edison Inn fell through, DeLapp frantically began searching for a replacement venue. He called “like crazy” to venues all over Detroit before finally deciding on the Atheneum.
DeLapp discovered the same thing Moeller did: a lot of hotels don’t like dealing with fraternities. He began saying he was representing a fraternity from a small Christian school to try and soften the impact “fraternity” made on the imaginations of the venue managers he was talking to.
Even so, DeLapp said he had to put down a $1,000 deposit on the Atheneum room he rented.
A lot of the students attending the Sig Chi formal end up staying the night in the area of the venue. DeLapp said what separates his fraternity’s formal from the others is it is a much more individual event. Rather than returning to Hillsdale, the formal party will leave the Atheneum and disperse into the city of Detroit.
“There are a lot of restaurants, bars, and casinos in the area so it could potentially be a lot of fun for people,” DeLapp said. “As long as they don’t wander down the wrong alley.”
The Pi Beta Phi’s held their formal on March 31, while the Chi Omega’s will have theirs on April 27.
cwhitmer@hillsdale.edu
