Bad Bridesmaid (11 page)

I had not yet been branded All Bad, so the other bridesmaids felt comfortable assigning me the task of e-mailing the groom. After a mind-numbing brainstorming session, I sent him a list of seemingly innocuous questions ranging from the enlightening
What’s your favorite meal?” to the brain-tickling “Who designed the bride’s dress?”

Feeling like the questions were a little tame, I added, “How many carats is the ring?” It seemed harmless enough. I had heard the answer on at least four different occasions as The Bride showed off her new bauble (referred to as “my precious”) to me and anyone else who happened to find themselves in its glare. When the groom wrote back, he declined to answer the question and typed, “That’s inappropriate,” instead.

When I shared this story at the shower I was met with stares of disbelief. It was as if I had admitted asking him his annual salary or penis size.

“Oh my God!” the other bridesmaids squealed as The Bride rolled her eyes.

I see now that asking the groom about the ring is tacky, while asking a friend to gift-wrap a G-string and present it in front of the groom’s mother is normal and civilized behavior.

But at least at my friend’s shower, both the bride and groom knew the answers to my questions. Barbara D. attended a party where The Bride failed the quiz she was given, surely a bad omen for any marriage.

“We had asked the groom a bunch of questions, and on the day of the shower we asked her the same ones. You know, to imply how well they knew each other,” said Barbara, a five-timer. “She didn’t get a single one of them right. Not one. Every single one was so far off, it was painful.”

The bridesmaids tried to call the game off, but the bride was oblivious to the awkward situation she was creating at her own shower.

“It was so embarrassing. His mother was like, ‘Urn, what’s going on?’” said Barbara. “They just got divorced.”

It can be somewhat funny when brides fail miserably at the games they are given, but pity the bridesmaid who gets a question wrong. Julia D. went to a shower with her fellow wedding attendants and was greeted at the door by $UUber Bridesmaid, a woman who “just makes you want to throw up, she’s so excited.”

The ecstatic organizer handed Julia and two other women ribbons that they were instructed to tie around their wrists. The guests were supposed to collect as many of the ribbons as possible during the course of the shower, and would receive one every time they pointed out a woman crossing her legs. Let us pause for a moment to reflect on how silly this game really is. Is staring into another woman’s lap really the best way to test a person’s skills of observation? Or would it have been just too easy to collect ribbons every time someone checked their watch to see if it was almost time to leave?

“It was supposed to be a bonding thing.” $UUber Bridesmaid explained that the woman who won would receive a prize, and Julia imagined a free facial or perhaps a loot bag stuffed with makeup. The prize was a mug.

That exercise was only the beginning of Julia’s trauma. It seems $UUber Bridesmaid was well versed in the history of wedding shower games, and had planned, so to speak, to kick it old school.

Until the 1970s, bridal showers were as much indoctrination sessions as they were celebrations. The parties were meant to underscore the importance of getting married, especially for the
single gals in attendance. To this end, many games were designed to “give hope” to those who were not yet hooked up, and to encourage them into the marriage fold.

At the shower Julia attended, the bridesmaids and other guests were placed in a circle and asked to take turns giving The Bride advice on how to have a long and happy marriage.

Get a group of women together under normal circumstances and ask them how to have a successful relationship, and inevitably someone will make a blow-job joke, someone else will praise the virtues of separate bank accounts, and another woman will suggest the ingestion of prescription narcotics.

Humor has no place at most bridal showers.

“Nothing about sex ever came up,” Julia said. “Everyone was like, Be supportive, be honest, talk things out, respect one another.’ All of that trite bullshit.”

When it came time for Julia and her two friends to participate, all three of them passed. They were not married, they explained, so couldn’t possibly offer any helpful advice. Julia and one of her friends were graciously allowed to skip their turn, but by the time the third conscientious objector had declined to participate, $UUber Bridesmaid was, to put it mildly, $UUber Pissed. In an effort to defend herself, Julia’s friend informed the group that she had just broken up with a boyfriend and wasn’t dating, so she wasn’t in the best frame of mind to offer relationship advice.

“So this bridesmaid says, ‘Okay, why don’t you give her advice on how not to drive a man away,” Julia remembered. Many of the guests started howling with laughter, but the newly dumped bridesmaid and her friends were stunned.

To make matters worse, $UUber Bridesmaid thought the game was so successful she would go around the circle a second time. “We were all like, don’t you even look at me,” Julia said.

Watching a grown woman tear open gifts and play boring games is considerably—although not completely—less painful when you have a drink in your hand. Sadly, however, the combination of women, booze, and bridal talk does not always fly.

I spent the majority of the night after my friend’s shower lying on my kitchen floor praying for death and calling my boyfriend on my cell phone to come downstairs and pour water on my face. If bridal showers take that kind of toll on me, imagine what they do to the older women in attendance.

Christie B. attended a bridal shower at the house of a betrothed friend who lived with her parents, sister, and grandmother, known as Nana. “It’s also a family that doesn’t drink very much,” Christie explained.

The bridesmaid who was in charge of refreshments was not familiar with her hosts’ teetotaling ways, and when the elderly Nana asked for a dash of sherry, she was given a generous drink.

“The bridesmaid poured Nana a huge wineglass full, and because no one there really drinks, no one realizes you’re not supposed to pour that much sherry,” said Christie. “And Nana’s, like, one foot in the retirement home.”

An hour later, another bridesmaid noticed that Nana’s glass was empty and poured her another drink.

“So we’re in the middle of the shower and The Bride’s unwrapping
her presents, and Nana just slumps over in her chair,” Christie said. “She’s passed out, totally dead drunk.”

It was quickly determined that Grandma was not actually dead, and The Bride’s father was called in to carry the unconscious old woman upstairs to bed. The bridesmaids consulted one another and realized that the ninety-year-old woman, who weighed approximately ninety-five pounds, had probably consumed the equivalent of about five stiff drinks.

“At the end of the shower she comes back down and says, ‘Are you going to open your presents now, dear?’” Christie remembered. “She thought she had just gone down for a little nap.”

If I were a ninety-year-old woman, I might have chugged that sherry just to get out of watching any more gifts being opened. Sometimes even the Best Bridesmaids require a strong cocktail, usually after the shower’s reigning queen tells them they failed to live up to her expectations.

Chelsea K. had planned to host a couple’s shower at her house in the country. The wedding party had agreed to a date in July and a guest list of about six couples. “The party was going to be a casual day of swimming and BBQ-ing with close friends,” Chelsea remembered. “The Bride said she was thrilled to have a relaxed weekend before the hectic wedding schedule began.”

Two months before the planned shower, Chelsea asked for a list of the names and e-mail addresses of the people The Bride wanted to invite. “When I didn’t receive the list, I asked again, and again and again,” she said. “Finally, The Bride left me a hard-copy
document—nine pages in length—with the name of every wedding guest on it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ve highlighted the ones to contact for the party.’”

The highlighted list included thirty-six couples, ranging from current and former work colleagues to out-of-town relatives. Chelsea freaked out at the prospect of having seventy-two people at her country house, and threatened to cancel the whole thing. The Bride was not about to accept any responsibility for the matter. “She blamed me for pressuring her to produce the list on such ‘short notice,’” the bridesmaid recalled. “She said she had wanted to talk to me about the guest list a month earlier, but that it would have been bad etiquette to give it to me without a formal request.”

It was the bridesmaid who was being bad, apparently, even though The Bride had invited half of her graduating class to a shower meant for twelve.

Bridesmaids rarely escape a shower unscathed by such insults or indignation. I left ours hopelessly drunk from sipping champagne cocktails since noon, all the better to forget the fact that I had spent half of my rent in a single day. But while a regular hangover wears off, the residual pain of Shower Burn can be hard to shake. Even my bride-to-be mentioned, in the days after her own party, that she was dreading attending another woman’s shower in the weeks to come.

“I don’t want to go. I hate wedding showers,” she said, sighing. “Except for mine. Mine was fun.”

H
iring a stripper was never an option for my former friend’s bachelorette party. There had been, you see, a couple of “incidents’ when we were in university, and our group was unanimously scarred by the thought of paying for another glimpse of greased-up male nudity. The first damaging experience occurred at a birthday party that I didn’t attend, where a male snipper had reportedly given a somewhat lackluster performance. We’d gone to school in a small town, which meant occasional public sightings of the decidedly unsexy stripper when we went for coffee or drinks downtown. Once he was spotted, members of his former
audience would grip my arm and avert their eyes, trying hard not to picture him naked, as I imagined this sleazy-looking man in tear-away pants actually tearing away his pants.

The other close encounter of the lurid kind came during a road trip to the city for a friend’s birthday. We went to a male strip club after taking in a performance of
Les Miserables,
a unique blend of high culture and low—Jean Valjean with a chaser of Lance Stallion.

Inside the club, groups of chain-smoking middle-aged women occupied a cluster of small, dirty tables, and our group of rowdy twentysomethings was ushered into a corner beside the bar and instructed to remain behind a wooden partition that separated us from the stage. We drank vodka and sodas inside our holding pen and laughed as a steroid-riddled dancer in a hot pink G-string shook his manhood in the birthday girl’s face; both of her hands were plastered firmly over her eyes. Onstage, a stripper was gyrating inside a glass stall, and women paid to go up and hose him down with a shower nozzle. At one point he flipped himself upside down, the force of gravity overpowering his own obvious excitement. Needless to say, once you’ve seen a naked man doing a handstand, the desire to hire a stripper never returns.

Our friend’s country weekend retreat, therefore, involved no men at all, save those on the pages of the trashy magazines we read poolside during the day. This relaxed, raunch-free take on the bachelorette party is definitely not the norm. Most women believe they are meant to live up to the mythical standard of the male stag party, the much talked-about (but rarely realized) evening of hot nudity, flowing booze, and rock-star partying. In
the 1985 Tom Hanks film
Bachelor Party,
a friend of the shaggy-haired
pre-Philadelphia,
post-
Bosom Buddies
Hanks requests an event filled with “chicks and guns and fire trucks and hookers and booze! All the things that make life worth living.” Despite the fact that Hanks’s evening also involved sex with prostitutes and a donkey overdosing on cocaine and pills, this is the model women strive to achieve (usually minus the guns and whores).

According to Bachelorette.com, only about 20 percent of bachelorette parties hire a stripper, but if the events are organized around the things that make women’s lives worth living, then our gender is seemingly all about stretch limos, blender drinks, tiaras, inappropriately shaped pasta, and LifeSavers candy. And it has fallen to the bridesmaids to transform their love-struck single girl into a raging veil-clad hootchie clutching a penis-shaped straw in her sweaty hands.

Unlike men, most women do not get sexually aroused by watching the opposite sex perform a striptease. Some people say this is because we are turned on by nonvisual stimulants, such as conversation, emotional connection, and money. I believe there is a less cerebral explanation: many male strippers are distinctly unattractive, and the proximity to swinging male genitalia is enough to make even the straightest girl rethink her own sexual preference.