Bad Bridesmaid (15 page)

A couple of months after the wedding, another bridesmaid e-mailed me the happy couples online photo album, and I spent two hours at work clicking my way through it, praying that I wouldn’t be in any of the shots and wishing The Bride didn’t look so damn good in all of them. I stopped only briefly on the one of me, in which I sit hunched over, my black dress a blight against the fresh summer scene. I have since tried to expel thoughts of the photo’s content from my mind, along with all memories of regrettable hookups and the fact that I wore overalls past the age of twenty. In the picture, I look like an angel of doom, an evil apparition sent to harvest the souls of unsuspecting wedding guests as they nibbled their shrimp from paper napkins—the Grim Reaper of Romanticism. I am sitting with my boyfriend and a bridesmaid, resplendent in her green silk dress, a cigarette in one of my hands and a drink in front of me, my mouth open in what appears to be mid-slur. I’m pretty sure it was the exact moment I was offering them money to let me go home.

I doubt the photo made it into the real album—unless they had a bloopers page—and in the long run I am proud of the fact that ultimately I did minimal damage to my former friend’s wedding day. Let’s face it, if I had succeeded in serving my full term as bridesmaid, I’d have giggled during the vows and almost certainly made an off-color remark during the bridesmaid speech, although she’d told me from the beginning there was no way I
was getting my hands on a microphone. Who knows how many bridal party poses I would have tarnished with my half-closed eyes or haphazardly shaved legs? In the end, I ruined only one photograph at her wedding. Other women, I would like to point out, have done way more damage.

Sherri L. was posing for one last photograph with the bridal party when she left an indelible mark on her friend’s wedding day. They were in the bridal room of the synagogue waiting to do the processional when the photographer declared he wanted one more premarital shot. There was a chaise longue in the corner, and he directed The Bride to recline on it with her dress and her bridesmaids arrayed at her side—a sort of Last Supper for the Single Girl. As the other women perched awkwardly on the edge of the furniture or crouched low in the foreground, Sherri was told to position herself behind the chair, crammed between it and the wall and hidden among layers of puffy white fabric.

“I kneeled down and I don’t know what I did, but I sat on her veil,” the five-timer remembered.

Somehow she became tangled in the long piece of gauzy material and caused it to rip our of the headpiece that attached to The Bride’s hair. The netting was too fine to repair and The Bride ended up walking down the aisle with a large hole running down the back of her veil and an even larger tear in the fabric of her mental health.

“She was distraught,” Sherri said. “It was awful. I felt so bad.”

There are a million tiny things that can go wrong with any wedding and in the organized chaos of bringing together a church
full of tradition, tulle, personalities, and perfectionists. Every participant runs the risk of screwing up her individual role, but the bridesmaids face the additional pressure of having to move en masse on the big day, pulling off their duties in tandem like so many Russian synchronized swimmers, minus the nose plugs and testosterone-induced facial hair. And if bridesmaids think their aesthetic calisthenics during the engagement period are grueling, the day of the ceremony is like an obstacle course that they must execute perfectly or risk sullying their friend’s dream day.

Fiona H. had missed the rehearsal for her sister’s wedding when she got stuck in traffic, and was unprepared for the elaborate Catholic service that had been organized to satisfy the wishes of the groom’s family. The sisters had not grown up religious and did not know their way around a church, so Fiona was told to simply follow her sister through each part of the service, straightening her train and taking whatever was handed to her. Everything was going alright until the couple headed up to light the unity candle halfway through the ceremony. Fiona missed her cue and stumbled, dropping the train and almost causing her sister to trip, and loudly whispered, “Shit,” as she recovered.

“No,” said the priest. “It’s ‘Holy shit.’”

The Bride laughed at the time, as did the first few pews of guests who had heard the exchange, but the new couple’s extended family was less than impressed when they discovered that the wedding video had recorded the obscenity for posterity.

At Lauren B.’s wedding, one of her attendants realized immediately before the ceremony that she had forgotten to bring her bouquet. Another quick-thinking bridesmaid came to her rescue by taking a few stems from each of the young flower girls’
bouquets and fashioning them into an ad hoc bunch for the bridesmaid.

“Well, the little flower girls didn’t appreciate it and their mothers certainly didn’t appreciate it,” Lauren said. “She was nearly shot.”

The music had begun and the groomsmen had already taken their positions at the front of the synagogue, but when the women saw their daughters’ bouquets being pillaged, they rushed from the pews and started berating the bridesmaids, screaming at them in full earshot of the congregation for having the gall to disrupt their little girls’ finest moment.

“They started screaming, ‘No, you may not take them,’ and Are you insane, trying to take a flower from a child?’” Lauren said. ‘So one of my bridesmaids walked without flowers.” It appears that “something borrowed” refers only to the money needed to pay for the reception.

Holding up the processional while trying to rob a small child is only a minor inconvenience compared with the drama that can ensue if a bridesmaid gets too caught up in the moment.

Denise T. was in a wedding where one bridesmaid was paired with the grooms best man for the walk down the aisle, and the maid felt that their little stroll was leading somewhere other than just the reception.

“I guess everyone just gets overcome with emotion during weddings,” Denise said. “And going through the motions with this guy convinced her that they were having some sort of connection.”

The bridesmaid in question had a boyfriend of six years whom she’d left at home, and the best man had attended the wedding with his wife—their son was the ring bearer. She was nonetheless so sure they had experienced a romantic vibe during the ceremony—a
belief pickled in white wine as the evening wore on—that she cornered the best man after dinner and propositioned him.

“He was like, ‘Listen, I have a wife, and that’s my kid,’” recounted Denise, who watched in dismay with The Bride as the scene unfolded. “She was like, ‘It’ll be fine. Come on.’”

Shot down, dead drunk, and utterly humiliated, the bridesmaid returned to the reception and screamed nonsense at the other members of the wedding parry, including The Bride’s father. After being asked to leave the reception, she was kicked out of the hotel where it was being held for being unruly in the halls, and was eventually placed in a cab and sent packing.

“The Bride was embarrassed because the girl had just thrown herself at her husband’s married friend,” Denise said. “She was a bit annoyed, but I think she just felt bad for her.”

At the brunch the next day, the disgraced bridesmaid hid inside while the object of her Wedding Goggles ate breakfast with his wife and the other guests on the terrace. “She wouldn’t say anything to anyone, she was so embarrassed,” Denise said. “Then she jumped in a cab to the airport and went back home.”

Being caught up in the romance of a wedding is a bridesmaid’s occupational hazard. You are there, after all, to celebrate the fact that your friend has found the man of her dreams, when perhaps you have not. But there are more humiliating elements of a girl’s character than desperation that can be exposed during a ceremony.

Amy O. attended a wedding where a bridesmaid’s worst fears were realized as her best assets were exposed. The dress she was
wearing had been accidentally delivered a size too small, but The Bride told her there was no time to get a new one and assured her that they would make it fit—or else.

On the day of the ceremony, the other bridesmaids squeezed her into the strapless gown, two of them holding the panels together while a third zipped it up like some fleshy piece of periwinkle blue luggage.

“Halfway through the ceremony, the couple was in the middle of their vows and the zipper just popped,” Amy remembered. “It wasn’t boned or anything, so the dress just flopped down.”

Luckily, the bridesmaid was wearing a strapless bra and had a very large bouquet of flowers that she immediately lifted in front of her chest. She stood there, half naked, as the couple continued their vows, unaware that they were no longer the most interesting pair at the altar. Another bridesmaid tried to lift the woman’s dress back up, but she couldn’t hold it in place with one hand without dropping her own bouquet, an act she must have decided would be too much of a disruption. Ironically, being a good bridesmaid often requires women to leave their humanity at home and their hands firmly at their sides.

“Of course it’s already a big scene because there’s a girl standing on the platform with her tits hanging out,” Amy said. “Nobody’s really listening to the bride and groom anymore. And they’re wondering why everyone’s hysterical with laughter and all the bridesmaids are bright red.”

As the ceremony came to an end, two other bridesmaids lifted the disgraced girl’s dress up and held it in place as they marched her out of the church.

“They safety-pinned her into the dress for the dinner because she had to make a speech,” Amy said. “She didn’t stay for the dance, though—she was too mortified.”

Think about the celebrities you have seen on the pages of magazines in red-carpet don’ts or blunders. Their outfits are baggy or way too tight, their hair looks terrible, or they accidentally flash a shot of their crotch at the paparazzi and around the world. And these people travel with stylists, publicists, and bodyguards to ensure that nothing goes wrong during their public outings. So what chance does a bridesmaid stand of pulling it all off gracefully?

For her friend’s nuptials, Emily R. was wearing a pair of heels that matched her champagne-colored bridesmaid dress and made her feet feel like they were slowly being gnawed from her body by tiny razor-toothed animals.

“They really, really hurt,” said the three-time bridesmaid. “So in the middle of the ceremony, because my dress was floor-length, I took them off and stood in my bare feet.”

The church full of flowers may have masked the odor of the bridesmaid’s sweaty tootsies, but at the end of the ceremony, Emily suddenly realized she would have to put the shoes back on before she could walk back down the aisle. She began moving her feet around under the train of her dress, desperately trying to locate the sandals, shuffling and swaying like a drunken uncle on the dance floor. As the rest of the bridal party stood calmly, trying not to react to Emily’s contortionist vibrating, she ignored the “I dos” and the “You may kiss the bride” and focused on her slingbacks.

“I had flicked them sort of behind me, and they were wrapped in the back of my dress,” she said.

There is something about weddings that shuts down the logical part of every woman’s brain, so poor Emily did not realize that she could just as easily have walked out of the church barefoot, the way organized religion intended her to be. Instead, she stood there convulsing in her efforts to cram her feet into the shoes.

Like the brides themselves, wedding attendants can easily fall prey to nerves, cold feet, and the peculiar psychological ailments that are brought on by wedding ceremonies. The fear of looking bad—or worse, stupid—in a bridesmaid dress is enough to drive a lot of women to extreme behavior. Many attendants join the gym and put themselves through strict wedding-ready diets to ensure that if the dress looks awful, it is the garment’s fault and not their figure’s. Toilet-paper falsies, double-sided tape, and grim determination are all employed for maximum effect. And some simply stop eating altogether.

This was the case in one elaborate wedding that featured, among other things, a performer who was hired to be wheeled into the reception wearing the fruit table around her waist—a rolling, servile Carmen Miranda offering bunches of grapes and intricately carved kiwi fruit to the guests with her outstretched arms.

Before that could happen, though, the fourteen bridesmaids were determined to make a dazzling entrance in their own custom-designed gowns. Remember the bridal attendants who were told they could design their own dresses, setting off a battle of bitchi-ness? Well, they were also told to come ready at 8:00 a.m. even though the wedding didn’t begin until 5:00 p.m., and most of them decided not to eat anything before the ceremony began, so as to look their anorexic best. By the time the bride and groom were ready to wed, they weren’t the only ones feeling weak in the knees.

“Two of the bridesmaids fainted because they were hungry,” said bridesmaid Jenny T. “The first girl went down before the glass was about to be shattered and the other one went down just before the bride and groom were about to walk down the aisle when the ceremony was over.”

The wedding had stretched on for forty-five minutes, and the bridesmaids were standing on a raised platform in a very hot room. After the first girl fainted, Jenny remembered a prolonged pause as the bridal party and guests tried to decide whether to call an ambulance or finish the vows.

“There’s this girl next to me on the floor in convulsions and I’m just standing there with my bouquet, trying to be calm, like everything’s fine,” she said. Being a Good Bridesmaid can be confusing, and unfortunately there is no etiquette book that specifies whether, in this situation, attendants are expected to check for a pulse or nudge their friend’s body under the nearest pew with a delicately extended leg.

As Jenny waged an internal battle between being Good and doing CPR, people seated in the back started standing up to see what was going on. For about ten or fifteen seconds no one moved. Everyone just stopped and stared at the unconscious young woman lying at The Bride’s feet.