by Siri Agrell
The next day, The Bride called to say she had bought the dress after all, that once she was away from her friend’s “pressure” she realized it was in fact the one for her. “She asked me to come to the first fitting,” Francine recalled. “1 wholeheartedly declined.”
Not-So-Great Expectations
Until the early twentieth century, wedding preparations were a relatively simple affair, with brides concentrating on their hope chests and whether conjugal bliss would prove all it was cracked up to be, while the menfolk tended to the pesky details such as who would be marrying whom and in exchange for how many chickens.
Like an out-of-control flesh-eating virus, the wedding world has since expanded into a billion-dollar industry that threatens to swallow us all, and new products, services, and standards emerge on an almost daily basis to further complicate the lives of blushing brides and their sweating servants.
Most women inflict unfair demands on their bridesmaids not because they are naturally cruel or unfeeling, but rather because they have been conditioned to believe that their wedding will reflect their personal worth and predict the happiness of their future marriage. It’s not the brides who are crazy, for the most part, but the expectations placed upon them.
One issue of Martha Stewart Weddings, for example, encourages brides to make their own origami boxes as wedding favors and to develop a “signature drink” for their wedding reception. The pages that follow further sing the praises of hiring a calligra-pher to pen the wedding invites or learning to write the cumbersome curlicues oneself.
That ought to be enough to keep a bride and her maids busy for the duration of the engagement, but the magazine has a few more tricks up its cashmere sleeve. There is a recipe for homemade meringue kisses, and for the seaman’s bride, Martha provides four variations of knots to use when hand-tying your own napkin rings. One page shows how to make egg hors d’oeuvres and arrange them in hand-woven basket centerpieces. Another features homemade ribbon boutonnieres, table runners crafted from wrapping paper, and clever save-the-date cards, where the numbers are individually cut out and attached to a ribbon so they tumble to the floor like confetti when the envelope is opened. There are also five pages on how to select your china, and a guide for constructing bouquets entirely out of tissue paper. Amazingly, the magazine stops short of having wedding parties swear blood oaths or carve the happy couple’s likenesses from stone using only their fingernails and a melon-baller—but maybe they are saving that for the next issue.
For those who do not have a degree in home economics and an up-to-date Xanax prescription, these do-it-yourself projects can give a girl that Bad Bridesmaid feeling, even if it’s obvious the bride is simply trying to save money or add a personal touch to her nuptials.
No sooner had Jasmine P. been selected as one of five bridesmaids in a university friend’s wedding than she began receiving weekly e-mails containing The Brides “expectations” for their “services” over the months to come. The group was referred to as The Bride’s “ambassadors” and they were expected to reflect that title with every ounce of their will and every penny in their wallets.
One e-mail was a six-page list of jobs The Bride needed done before, during, and after the wedding, such as taking her dress to the cleaner’s after the ceremony and addressing her thank-you notes while she honeymooned. Subsequent e-mails contained a briefing about “the image” of the wedding, and noted that every detail—along with the bridesmaid who did or did not make it happen—would send a clear message to the guests as to the event’s success. The vein throbbing in The Bride’s forehead would not distract her assembled loved ones, she seemed to believe, but the wedding would be ruined if the seating plan was not immediately spell-checked.
Jasmine said she felt like she was being tested to see how far she would go in the name of friendship and to prove herself worthy of the wedding walk, like a reality show contestant eating pig testicles to earn one more minute of screen time or a shot at dating Flavor Flav.
The Bride would call Jasmine and her cohorts and instruct them to drop everything and rush to help her register, or demand they cancel their weekend plans at the last minute to look over her engagement photos—issuing a stream of orders that were as unrelenting as they were unreasonable.
“In any other situation, there’s no way,” said Jasmine. “But suddenly she has license because she’s getting married.”
Cassidy B. was asked to fill in for a bridesmaid who’d had the nerve to get pregnant during the engagement period and could not fulfill her duties, creating the need for a bridesmaid ringer. The Bride was a cousin by marriage, and Cassidy hardly knew her, but she still wound up taking orders from various members of The Bride’s family, including her domineering mother.
“She gave me a list,” the three-time bridesmaid said. “Go out and get this shower invitation, and this is what the invitation should say. Go and order these chairs from this person. Pick them up here and take them over there.”
For four months, Cassidy obeyed commands, couriered furniture and family, and generally acted as a go-between and gofer, financing her tasks personally and cursing her bad luck.
“I spent about seven hundred dollars just doing errands,” she said.
And, as Martha might say, that’s not a good thing.
Disappearing Sister Act
Spending the early months of wedding prep attached at the hip to your former friend turned professional bride is tricky enough, but taking orders from your own flesh and blood can be doubly hard to bear. When Holly J. was a bridesmaid in her early twenties—in the years before e-mail (BE 1995)—she received a letter from her sister The Bride a week before the wedding, expressing disappointment that Holly had not been more helpful in the months that had passed since the engagement.
Holly was still in her last year of university, a virgin attendant who had not yet developed a keen interest in garter belts or garden parties, but even so had been named the Maid of Honor, a role that puts the “horrific” in honorific. Today the MOH is the bride’s second-in-command, and as such is expected to be only slightly less obsessed with the wedding than if it were her own. To put the icing on the proverbial wedding cake, Holly’s sister is a hyperorganized Type-A personality who had a two-year engagement and a penchant for color-coding each task.
“It was just spreadsheet after spreadsheet,” Holly said. “We got maybe three a week, and there were constant updates.”
As MOH, she had been assigned the color code blue, and her duties were highlighted accordingly; those of the best man were in orange, and so on. Unfortunately, being in receipt of three dozen PowerPoint presentations did not fundamentally alter Holly’s brain chemistry such that she was actually willing to execute all of her Code Blue ball-breaking duties. The Bride wanted a series of showers: a “Jack and Jill” party, where friends of both the bride and groom would gather to contribute money to the wedding; an engagement party; and a bachelorette. Holly did not know the protocol for any of these events, nor did she have the cash to finance them. Her sister also wanted the same people invited to each party, a gift-giving bonanza Holly was unwilling to inflict on friends or strangers.
The peculiar lunacy of brides is much like that of sheltered big-name celebrities—everyone knows they’re bonkers, but no one is supposed to point it out. “Yes, you look much thinner in that,Ms Alley.” “Of course you should get another round of Botox, Ms Kidman.” “I think you two are perfect for each other, Miss Holmes.” The built-in sympathy of siblings explains why so many movie stars hire their sisters as publicists: a family member is much less likely to max out on your madness or out you to the tabloids.
But Holly was not prepared to take orders from anyone, especially her big sis. “I said, ‘No, I’m not going to throw you another shower,” she recounted. “You’ve already had five, and that’s enough.”
Speaking the words that’s enough into the ear of a bride is much like blowing a high-pitched dog whistle in a room full of senior citizens
—it just doesn’t register. The letter The Bride sent Holly the week before the wedding made no reference to her own over-the-top expectations, but said that she and her fiance were very disappointed that Holly hadn’t done more to accommodate them and that she was being punished accordingly.
“They said, ‘We don’t want you to be a part of our day, and we feel it’s best that you just attend the wedding and not be a part of the wedding party,’” Holly remembered. “If they had ripped out my heart and stomped on it, I wouldn’t have felt as bad as I did when I read this thing.”
Fortunately for Holly, the two women reconciled before the wedding day, and now that she is getting married herself, she claims to have found a new appreciation for the MOH role. Let’s just say her sister’s color-coded spreadsheets are looking pretty handy right about now.
Elaine W., on the other hand, said she was thrilled from the start to have been asked to stand up in her younger sister Melanie’s wedding. Elaine was a three-timer and a self-professed lover of all things wedding, but toward the end of the year-long engagement period, the two women were barely on speaking terms.
It began innocently enough, with shopping trips to find the dress and phone calls for advice on everything from flowers to ribbon and how to design the place cards. And then Elaine’s boyfriend, Chris, volunteered to get into the mix, designing and producing the couple’s wedding invitations. It was then that family relations began to unravel.
Though Chris worked diligently in the evenings and over weekends, it wasn’t enough to sate the eager Bride. She’d originally said she needed the invites by early July, to mail out for the late-September wedding, yet by the beginning of June she was already harassing her sister about why they weren’t finished.
“They were saving tons of cash, because if they had bought these it would have cost a thousand dollars at least,” Elaine said. “But she started being rude to him over e-mail.”
At the end of June, Melanie came to Elaine’s apartment for a day of wedding-related shopping. She was an hour early, and her sister was not ready; her hair was a mess and she was still wearing her pajamas. “She looks at me and says, ‘Nice hair,’ and basically lectures me for being late,” Elaine said, having missed the all-important “Shopping Begins an Hour Earlier than Scheduled” chapter in Being a Bridesmaid for Dummies.
When The Bride moved on from her sister and started pestering Chris about the invitations, Elaine could take it no more.
“I just freaked. I looked at her and said, ‘You are so unappreciative. You’re a goddamn bridezilla,’” she remembered. “Now that’s obviously the biggest insult you can give a woman getting married. And the look on her face was pure hurt.”
Elaine felt awful about what she had said, and called her sister into her bedroom to apologize. Before she could say “I’m sorry” and admit she should have been more sympathetic to her sister’s stress, Melanie started screaming and flinging her Maid of Honor around by the arm. The women fought like professional wrestlers and trash-talked each other with vocabulary usually reserved for Tourette’s patients. Eventually, the beleaguered Chris had to come in and separate them.
“I just became mean because of her,” Elaine said, still obviously confused about the spell that came over her and her sister, who had also turned over an uncharacteristically freaky new leaf. “After that, I said she could call me if she needed something, but I’m not calling her.”
All was not forgiven, and when her invitation came, the envelope was addressed to “Ms Elaine Wilson and Guest”—conspicuously devoid of her boyfriend’s name.
“First of all, we’ve been dating for four years,” Elaine said. “Second of all, he designed your fucking invitations!”
There’s No “I” in Sweatshop
Wedding planning today is about more than passive-aggressive decision making and bottled-up rage—it requires the nimble fingers of a Keebler elf and the creativity of a Bush administration spin doctor.
In the lead-up to two different weddings in which she served as a bridesmaid, Rita S. found herself enrolled in a bridal craft boot camp, required to channel her creative energy into strictly supervised artistic assignments. One bride, a friend she’d met in France during a high school exchange program, was an artist who wanted to customize her wedding by sending guests home with a handcrafted memento of her talents as a painter. Unfortunately, it was not actually her hands that would craft said keepsakes. More than 150 paperweight-size rocks were collected for the bridesmaids to paint with each guest’s name and a design of The Bride’s creation.
“They all had to be different—every single one,” Rita said.
In the week leading up to the wedding, the bridesmaids were corralled into The Bride’s backyard and outfitted with a pile of rocks and a small paintbrush. Each was given a list of names and specific instructions for design and color palettes. For hours on end, the women worked without so much as a cocktail to get their creative juices flowing. As the sun beat down on their outdoor workshop, they bent over heaps of stones that grew hot in their hands, the paint running off into their laps and passersby stopping to gawk at this twisted work-release program for female felons.
“Thirty-five-degree heat in her backyard with a little paintbrush,” Rita said ruefully. “There was liquor at the wedding but not at the rock painting, which was clearly when we needed it.”
After customizing a sackful of souvenir stones, Rita thought she had completed the most painstaking activity she would face as a bridesmaid. The next summer, however, in service to yet another bride, she found herself bent over an equally grueling task—this time involving the dexterous creation of bows and knots.
The Bride had chosen to save money by creating her own wedding invitations, and asked her bridesmaids over to help. Each invitation had two separate layers, and the sheets of delicate paper were to be tied together with thin silky ribbons. The Bride wanted each invite tied in an identical manner (naturally), with the ribbon strung through punched holes, twisted and turned, and then tied with a decorative flourish.
“I was terrible at it,” said Rita. “It was incredibly torturous because we’re sitting there in this, like, sweatshop with pieces of ribbon everywhere. And it was billed as a fun night. ‘Come over for pizza and help me tie my invitations!’”
It took six women five hours to complete the job, and to this day Rita can’t look at a wedding invitation without a pang of sympathy for the poor people in the Hallmark factory.
Forced Labor of Love
Most bridesmaids will find themselves faced with at least one ridiculous, random, or tiresome task before their friend’s wedding. When Yvonne S., a Toronto-based creative director, was asked to be a bridesmaid for the third time, she suddenly found herself single-handedly responsible for the aesthetic vibe of her friend’s entire wedding. In her day job, Yvonne oversees the interior design of restaurants and nightclubs and creates the backdrops for award shows and other large-scale media events. The Bride (and her mother) believed that such creative talent should not go unexploited in their own wedding extravaganza, and they elected Yvonne as their BITCH (Bridesmaid In Total Ceremonial Hell). She was expected not only to create the wedding invitations but also to arrange the flowers and decorate the event space, accompanied by a crew of helpers conscripted into service like child soldiers in Sierra Leone, armed with glue guns instead of Kalashnikovs.
Thus, Yvonne’s “bridesmaid” tasks spanned literally the entire engagement period and encompassed every possible permutation of research, planning, decision-making, arts and crafts, and other minor atrocities endured by the lucky ladies in this chapter.
“E-mails, books, meetings, dinners—I was out with them a million times,” she said. “Phone calls for days. It was crazy.”
At one point early on in the planning, the Mother of the Bride summoned Yvonne to a meeting to show her sixteen amber vases she had bought at Costco, having made an executive decision before actually asking Yvonne, “Can we work with this?”
The glass cylinders were the centerpiece of the whole show, and the MOB wanted Yvonne to construct a theme, color scheme, and flower installation centered around their presence. The bridesmaid had no idea how she would build a wedding around maple-syrup-colored containers, no matter how “exquisite” they were said to be.
“I felt like she was going to bite my head off if I said it wasn’t okay, so I just went with ‘yes,’” Yvonne said.
For the next few months, she searched high and low to find amber-hued ribbon to use as a runner on the tables at the reception. Eventually she gave up and settled on a pure white theme, with the amber vase anchors as a splash of color. This was not the end of her creative challenges. The family of the bride regularly entertained in their home, and at one point, they invited Yvonne over and ushered her into the basement, where she found stacks of leftover dried flower arrangements, more vases, and seasonal decor.
“They said, ‘You can use this, can’t you?” she aped.
The creative director suddenly found herself charged with incorporating into a summer wedding millions of silver twigs with fake berries—the stuff of sitcom Christmas specials and Pottery Barn clearance sales. She picked through the family’s vase collection, discarding anything too brightly colored or ornate, better suited to an old folks’ home, or seemingly once used as a bong by The Bride’s younger brother.
The flowers themselves were another problem. Yvonne’s arrangements were completely white, except for a single blue hydrangea in each one, meant to pick up on the blue tuxedo shirts the groomsmen had selected to add a dash of hipster irony to their attire. When Yvonne went to the reception hall for one last check on her creation, the blue blooms had already wilted in the summer heat, limp brown smudges in the otherwise pristine white room. Decked out in her bridesmaid dress, Yvonne ran around the event hall pulling hydrangeas from each bouquet like a deranged florist, doing her best not to destroy their arrangement or draw too much attention to her actions.
