Broken engagement leads to reception-turned-fundraiser

What do you do if your wedding engagement falls apart? Do you cry, turn to despair or retreat?

If you ask a Pittsburgh would-be groom, the answer is none of the above. In fact, he's about to celebrate - and all of you are invited to join in.

Phil Laboon was getting married Saturday, WTAE-TV reports.

"Things just didn't work out for one reason or another," he said. "So I called off the wedding, pretty last minute."

He'd booked The Priory for his reception and paid for all the food and booze. So -- now what?

Laboon decided to squeeze the sour taste of his break up into something sweet.

"So we were talking about it, me and my friends, and we were talking almost like Farm Aid, like this could be Lemon AID, and it could be used to help these kids. And it could turn the lemons that I got into lemonade," Laboon said.

Those kids he's talking about live in third-world countries, children born with devastating medical problems. So Laboon turned his pre-paid wedding reception into a fund raiser for Surgicore.

"And it just snowballed into this massive event where we're getting tens of thousands of dollars in donations," he said. "We're selling hundreds of tickets."

Once word got out, his phone started ringing.

"Gift baskets, donations... from $50 to, our largest was $12,000," Laboon said. "I imagine this is going to be unlike most charity events out there."

Laboon's sour split quickly sweetened into a labor of love.

"It really makes you feel good that we're going to be changing a massive amount of kids' lives," he said. "It almost makes it feel like it's not the worst thing in the world that you had to cancel a wedding."

One break up may in fact make up to $50,000 for strangers in need.

"I'm really excited to see what the end result of all this is," Laboon said. "And that's all the smiling kids' faces."