The last time I attended a wedding was just this side of the memory void that is my life before age three. I was a flower girl and I performed admirably, for those of you thinking about including me in your wedding party. Of course, the main point of the flower girl is to be cute. While it’s hard not to be cute when you’re four years old and wearing a hoop skirt, I like to think that I had that extra little sparkle that clinched the position. The fact that I’m four years older than my cousins, and thus probably the only one who was capable of walking of her own volition and/or surviving outside of a uterus hadn’t occurred to me until a few minutes ago. Huh. Nevertheless, I was dang cute. Yet after this charming (I’m told) performance, I was to embark upon a seventeen-year wedding dry-spell that would only end this summer. Speaking of which, I’d like to congratulate two people in particular. We’ll call them Theresa and Jonathan, because those are their names. Congratulations on your upcoming wedding and I hope you don’t mind if I write about it!
But let’s get back to business. It is my intention to debunk the wedding, beginning with the few preliminary events of someone else’s that I’ve attended. Probably not so much ‘debunk’ as ‘comment snarkily on them for a thousand words or so.’
I was asked to be a reader at the upcoming ceremony, most likely because of my mah-velous speaking voice. Ahem. But I’ll be reading someone else’s work. Uh, God’s. Cuz it’s the Bible and all. I suppose I could add my own flair to it. Say, an interpretive mime act, or a complicated shadow puppet show. Whee! Just kidding, guys. I’ll be good and learn all the big words beforehand. I didn’t buy Hooked on Phonics for nothin’! Just as long as you’re sure you don’t want it in Pig Latin. Okay! Inefay. Ebay atthay ayway.
Just last weekend I attended the bridal shower. From my tv- and movie-gleaned knowledge of such things, it was basically a G-rated bachelorette party, what with the extended family and impressionable young minds present. It got off to a good start as I walked through the door and was immediately proclaimed the ‘guest who traveled the furthest to attend’ prize winner. How great is that? I could be enticed to go lots of places with a song in my heart if I were presented with a spurious award as soon as I set foot in the door. The dentist and work spring to mind. I exchanged the gift I had brought for a drink and a seat on the couch in front of assorted snack foods. This party just kept getting better and better!
Pleasantly idle chitchat was followed by party games. I LOVE party games. With a judicious word addition and a quick case change, we learn that more specifically, I love WINNING party games. The first game, if I may be so bold as to whimsically title it using a serious learning disability and a copyright-protected name, was Dyslexic Scattergories. The couple’s names were written vertically on a piece of paper, and each guest was charged with coming up with a word for each letter that related to love and marriage. Hmm. The family friendly restriction and my burning desire to be perceived as funny made this an appealing challenge. Unfortunately, as soon as the phrase ‘love and marriage’ was uttered, the theme from ‘Married with Children’ began flouncing through my head, thoroughly disrupting any free-association creativity I once had. So aside from a few laughs at my more ‘racy’ answers (seriously… I may as well have used graphic anatomical terms for all the shocked laughs I got when I read ‘hanky-panky’) no awards would be forthcoming from my participation in Dyslexic Scattergories.
Next came a round of brandy slushes, which I suspect were served to give the under-twenty-one crowd an edge in the next game. Or maybe not. Either way, who cares? They were really good.
On to gift bingo, my son! Er- daughter, rather, seeing as all the men folk were banished upstairs to watch baseball and smoke cigars or equally manly activities. And now that I’ve shot the opening of this paragraph al to hell, lets talk about gift bingo. We received blank bingo cards and were told to fill in each square with a gift we thought she’d get, to be crossed out if it were opened. And so it became a race to remember what had been checked off of the gift registry I had looked at when I went shopping. Or, to find out what the people on either side of me had bought and, utilizing the free space, been one spot away from a guaranteed bingo. I can see your point how that might’ve been construed as cheating. And I don’t cheat at bridal shower games! At least not well enough to win more than second place, apparently. Guaranteed bingo… yeah right. My plot had not accounted for gift order. Perhaps next time a carefully drawn gift pile schematic would be in order, and my victory would be assured… Or I could begin my mental chant of ‘It’s just a game. It’s just a game,' like my psychiatrist suggested.
During the present opening, I noticed an almost rabid insistence that the ribbons on each gift remain intact. “Don’t break the ribbons!” they cried vehemently, as I sat on the couch wondering silently, “Why? What’s up with the ribbons?” As it turns out, what was up with the ribbons was an age-old tradition, according to resident wedding expert Kathy. By resident, I mean sitting next to me. And by expert I mean knows more about weddings than me, which could be anything more than the alternate lyrics à la second grade to the wedding march. Anyway, supposedly for every ribbon you break, that’s a baby you’ll have. Much like the ‘for every candle you don’t blow out, that’s how many boyfriends you have!’ thing we used to do at birthday parties. Or was that just my friends and me? Except since we’ve matured, the threat of cooties has been replaced with painful childbirth. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
After the party, all the ribbon is saved as used as a bouquet during the rehearsal dinner. Who knew? I’d never heard of this before, which kinda makes me wonder what other traditions I haven’t heard of. And also what’s stopping me from just making up some of my own. They gotta start somewhere, am I right? “Wait – if you break the ribbon on someone’s gift, you gotta give that person fifty bucks.” Or, “The ‘traveled furthest award’ is a day at the spa to relieve any road-rage tension. Come on. That one dates back to the 14th century. You wanna break tradition?”
So that’s what I’ve learned about the wedding process thus far. Maybe this will be but part one of this wedding exposition, seeing as I haven’t actually given any insight on or even been to one yet. Next time, we’ll delve into the mysteries of ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.’ Speaking of what to wear, maybe I should get shopping. I’m pretty sure I’ve outgrown that hoopskirt.
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