Real-Life Wedding Crashers Return the Favor

Dec. 30, 2005 — -- Before Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, there were Angus MacLane and Tashana Landray.

The couple crashed a wedding on their second date, and when they married four years later, they invited the "crashees" to their own nuptials.

MacLane and Landray met in August 2001, and on their first date, MacLane mentioned a failed wedding-crash attempt. Landray made an offhanded comment that now that engaged couples had such detailed wedding Web sites, it would be easy to read up on an unsuspecting couple and talk themselves into the wedding.

That's when the two hatched a plan. MacLane and Landray used Google.com to find weddings in the San Francisco area, carefully read couples' Web sites, and invented a back story as to how they knew the happy couple.

On Sept. 1, 2001, MacLane and Landray crashed the wedding of Marc and Tara Runyan. The crashers chatted with guests, ate at the bride's family table, and brought a gift -- a pair of light-switch covers shaped like a cowboy and cowgirl. The crashers even had their photo snapped by the wedding photographer.

"When we got our pictures back. … Then we were like, we really don't know these people," Tara Runyan said.

MacLane and Landray always joked that if they got married, they would invite the Runyans. So when they got engaged, they did, signing the invitation "Todd and Liz" -- the pseudonyms they used as crashers. Even though the Runyans declined the invitation, MacLane and Landray left two extra places at their reception, complete with name cards inscribed with "Wedding Crasher #1" and "Wedding Crasher #2."

Although no one claimed the name cards, there were wedding crashers at their reception. One of them even danced with Landray's stepmother, who asked the gentleman how he knew the couple, to which he replied: "I don't."