Bad Bridesmaid

by Siri Agrell

  “I guess you’re supposed to be wild and crazy for your bachelo-rette, but it’s peer pressure,” she said. “I don’t want to be forced into this kind of a situation.”

  Instead of grinning and bearing it, the Bad Bridesmaid complained about the plan on a personal Web log, one that The Bride would read on a regular basis. The posting was met with anger and plenty of choice words for Hailey, who received a phone call from The Bride immediately and was berated for being close-minded and judgmental. The two eventually sorted things out, but this Bad Bridesmaid was unprepared for the other angry responses she received, flung at her through cyberspace from people not even involved in the wedding party.

  “I got some really nasty replies from pole-dancing instructors,” she said. “I have no idea how they found my blog.”

  Drunk and Disorderly

  The most dangerous aspect of the modern bachelorette party—besides the likelihood of choking on one of the phallic hors d’oeuvres or party favors—is the fact that booze flows at these things like sweat off an old stripper’s back. Bridesmaids have to maintain an attitude of happy obedience during the engagement period, and nothing gets the pent-up complaints flowing like a few shots of Sex on the Beach and a six-pack of wine coolers.

  At a friend’s bachelorette party, Jacqueline K. was told to show up wearing an awful bridesmaid dress bought from a secondhand store or vintage shop. Normally a woman with exquisite taste, Jacqueline found a hideous dress of layered tulle with an unflattering bustline. On the night of the bachelorette, the guests showed up in an array of ugly outfits and howled with laughter at each other’s picks. Until, that is, one of the bridesmaids informed them they were going out in public. Jacqueline had assumed they were staying at the host’s apartment and would only be made fun of by one another. Faced with the prospect of being seen by perfect strangers wearing a dress that should have been destroyed on principle, Jacqueline drowned her inhibitions in alcohol, getting so drunk that The Bride herself eventually had to escort her out of the bar.

  Five-timer Helena L. got so wasted at another bachelorette party that she actually told The Bride off for her “unladylike” behavior. The bridal party had hired a bus to drive them around town from bar to bar, drinking all the way. They wore matching tank tops that read BRIDESMAIDS GONE WILD and were having a great time, but all that alcohol fueled a confrontational streak Helena didn’t know she had.

  When they stumbled home from their night on the town, The Bride immediately headed upstairs to vomit, and Helena thought it would be a good time to inform her that a surprise shower was planned for the next day. She walked into the bathroom where The Bride was crouched over the toilet and began shaking her, slurring that her shower was in just a few hours and that her mother and in-laws would be in attendance.

  “I told her to shape up and that basically she was a disgrace for getting that drunk,” Helena remembered.

  The next day, however, it was the bridesmaids who suffered for their crime of exceptionally bad bachelorette party planning, running to the bathroom every time a gift was unwrapped.

  “We were basically just lying on the couch waiting for it to be over,” she said. “She was opening her presents, and we were all taking turns throwing up.”

  Luckily for Helena, though, The Bride wasn’t angry that her bachelorette party had ended with one of her bridesmaids telling her off.

  She didn’t remember a thing.

  Extreme Makeover

  The first rule of eye makeup is that you can never wear enough blue eye shadow.

  Shelley DeVoto, My Girl

  There are a lot of things for which I will pay a hundred dollars. Ten martinis, for example, although I will pay for those in more ways than one. I will shell out twice that for shoes, and currently throw down six times that price for rent each month. I have spent more on birthday gifts for friends and a whole lot more on spur-of-the-moment presents for myself.

  I would not normally put down a hundred dollars to have my hair blow-dried, but when weddings are involved, price limits are strained further than control-top pantyhose. Hair accessories that usually cost fifty cents are suddenly fifty dollars, and a process that involves nothing more than hot air and a round brush is priced at the same hourly rate charged by shrinks and criminal lawyers.

  Before I was dismissed from my friend’s bridal party, she had already settled on the stylist who would perfect her gorgeous tresses on the wedding day, and the hairdresser had graciously offered to take care of the bridesmaids’ as well—for the reasonable fee of a hundred dollars. Each.

  In real life, if I gave a hairdresser that much money, I’d expect to walk out with Elle McPherson’s locks grafted to my scalp or fifty-five dollars’ worth of change in my pocket. During wedding prep, though, you are not paying for the service so much as the experience of being fussed over en masse while you sip champagne and count down the final moments of your friend’s single life.

  In order to preserve the harmony of those last few hours, it is inadvisable to say no to the group makeover, even when the “over” part applies to how you are being charged. So, for several hours and sometimes several days before weddings, bridesmaids are subjected to the will, whim, and pricing chart of makeup artists who act like they are peddling powdered gold and pedicurists who soak your feet while fleecing your finances. Each bridesmaid is treated like a human art exhibit that must be sculpted, painted, and polished before going on display. And there can be no art without suffering.

  Or at least that’s what I hear. My hair dried during the car ride to the wedding.

  Wigging Out

  Aubrey R. had completed her doctorate just a few weeks before her friend’s early-summer wedding, and felt like a major change was in order. She’d been stuck at her desk for weeks, literally pulling her hair out, and with her paper finished and her dissertation over, she was itching for a physical change to mark her transition from lowly student researcher to Aubrey R., Ph.D. Like Clark Kent chucking his glasses to become Superman or Justin Timberlake ditching N’sync to launch his solo career, she needed a noticeable break from the past.

  So, she shaved her head in an act of joyful rebellion, forgetting in one Bad Bridesmaid moment that she’d agreed to be a wedding attendant and had RSVP’d with a full head of hair. The reality of this commitment did not fully dawn on her until the day before a bridal party dinner, where she would be seeing The Bride for the first time with her skull exposed. In anticipation of the meeting, Aubrey sent a quick e-mail to her friend gently breaking the news of her baldness, saying something along the lines of “Hi, how are you, and by the way I shaved my head.”

  Maybe The Bride didn’t read the whole e-mail, or perhaps she thought the admission was wacky Ph.D. lingo, but in any case, there was no indication that she understood what had actually happened.

  “Apparently she thought I was kidding,” Aubrey said afterward.

  The true punch line came at the dinner party, when Aubrey sat down to silence and looks of disbelief from the other women at the table. No one said a word about her new look as they nibbled on their Caesar salads and sipped their Kir Royales. The Bride simply stared, slack-jawed, for the majority of the dinner, as if Aubrey had come in with a swastika freshly carved in her forehead. It was not until the women were on their way to a bar after dinner that The Bride finally mustered the power of speech, blurting out, “Can you wear a wig?” as the other bridesmaids stifled their giggles.

  “I didn’t even get the chance to offer or talk about it or anything, she just asked me right away,” Aubrey said.

  The Bride explained that baldness did not exactly fit with the theme of her wedding, which was more princess than punk rock.

  “A bridesmaid with no hair really didn’t go with her vision,” Aubrey recalled. “She said, ‘I don’t want people looking at you; I want them looking at me.’”

  Fair enough, you might think—although Aubrey pointed out that people were just as likely to stare at her once she had glued a mass
of horsehair to her head—and in the end she conceded to the plan.

  “I did it because I was doing a nice thing for my friend,” she said. “I thought about whether it would compromise me, and it wouldn’t, but it would really hurt her if I didn’t do it.”

  Aubrey borrowed a cheap synthetic bob from her boyfriend’s sister. It was a flippy, badly constructed number, but it was free and Aubrey had determined that if she was going to wear a weave, she certainly wasn’t going to pay $ 150 for it. She’d also resolved not to care about how she looked on the day of the wedding, but soon found that she couldn’t ignore the way the wig made her feel. Besides the psychological discomfort, the hairpiece dug into her scalp and was unbearably hot and itchy in the summer swelter. She was also terrified it was going to blow off during the wedding photographs, leaving her bare head exposed just as the shutter snapped.

  Mercifully, the wig stayed in place through the photo shoot and for the duration of the wedding. But toward the end of the night, Aubrey could take it no more and pulled it off when most of the guests had trickled out, deciding that The Bride could not begrudge her baldness now that she was happily wed and the vid eographer had traded his camera for a large check and a nightcap She pulled the bob off her head and retreated to a corner, fanning herself with the clump of hair and silently vowing her newfound respect for men who wear toupees every day. After a few minutes she noticed a group of the remaining guests looking at her and whispering furtively. They were friends of the groom and they eventually approached her and began thanking her effusively for participating in the night.

  “They started sort of awkwardly saying all these nice things to me,” Aubrey said. “They thought I had cancer.”

  Ripped Off

  According to the Fairchild Bridal Bank, a study of the wedding industry compiled each year by the publishers of Bride’s, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride magazines, American women spend $606 million each year to get themselves sculpted, sprayed, and shellacked before their weddings. The money is spent on diet books, Pilates classes, Botox sessions, emergency skin peels, and, it seems, the odd wig. Having the ultimate wedding means creating the ultimate cast of human participants, and even grooms are getting in on the act with visits to “sports spas” for a last-minute nip or pluck.

  The bridal industry may target the bride first, but bridesmaids are always caught in the crossfire, coordinating their looks from their bleached teeth to their perfect French pedicures. Who wants to be the one overweight woman in the bridal party, or be ridiculed in perpetuity for amateur-hour eye shadow and a pedestrian hairstyle? So bridesmaids, too, are getting in on the high-octane makeovers, spending upward of three hundred dollars for a day of mud wraps, salt scrubs, and Swedish massage. By this point in a Bad Bridesmaid’s career, money has typically lost all meaning, and most decide that if they are going to the poor-house, they might as well go in style.

  Joelle H. was getting ready for her friend’s summer wedding when one of the other bridesmaids went into full meltdown mode over her customized look. They were having their hair done at the hotel before the ceremony, with one hairdresser in charge of updos while the other worked the curling and flat irons, like an assembly line for Big Hair Barbie.

  The bridesmaid in question had long blond locks and had announced months earlier—on the way home from the bach-elorette party, to be exact—that she would be styling it in tight ringlets. Wearing your hair curly for a formal event is about as original an idea as donning pearl earrings for a job interview or losing your virginity after prom, but the bridesmaid decreed that the “unique” hairstyle would be hers and hers alone for the big day.

  In the midst of preparations, though, two of the other girls (who had put considerably less forethought into their hairstyles) decided that they, too, would go curly. This caused the blond bridesmaid to burst into tears, and she ran to The Bride begging her to intervene, forcing her to spend the morning of her wedding convincing this textbook Bad Bridesmaid that she would still look different from the other members of the bridal party, all of whom had hair of various colors and lengths.

  Now, some bridesmaids are Bad because they can’t take the stress or live up to the obligations, but others are just simply born that way. Bad-to-the-Bone Bridesmaids, like Joelle’s co-attendant, will not sacrifice their space in the spotlight even during another woman’s wedding, and will someday morph into mothers who force their children to enter beauty pageants.

  Regular Bad Bridesmaids will subject themselves to an unusual degree of stress and trauma in order to look just right, but something undoubtedly goes horribly wrong. Razors, lasers, and tweezers are all instrumental in the quest for perfection, and malfunctions are to be expected when that much heavy machinery is in play.

  A three-timer named Casey G. found herself carrying around an eighty-five-dollar foot-tall beehive for her friend’s wedding. She was wearing a retro-style halter dress, and the hairdresser had decided to build her do into a complementary look. After what seemed like hours of back-combing and the dispensing of an entire bottle of hairspray onto the bridesmaid’s head, the stylist felt that further reinforcements were required. Two full packs of bobby pins were spliced into Casey’s hair, enough metal to cause a disruption in the magnetic field around the church.

  After the ceremony, the pins were digging into her head and Casey decided to take them out and let her hair down for the rest of the night. She imagined a hair commercial moment: that the last pin would be pulled out and she would shake her head seductively, sending her hair cascading down to her shoulders like that of a naughty librarian at the end of a shift. Instead, her hairstyle stayed exactly where it had been, held in place by the expensive shellacking it had received hours earlier.

  “It didn’t come out,” Casey said. “It was still in the exact formation, and it stayed that way all night, unsupported.”

  It’s better to have too much hair, though, than to suddenly find yourself missing a chunk. The day before her friend’s wedding, Hannah J. and the rest of the bridal party went to the salon to have their nails done and eyebrows waxed—a last-minute pampering session, a final gloss to perfect their shiny facades for the big day. As Hannah lay on the waxing chair, the serenity of the scene was interrupted by a piercing pain in her eyelid. The technician had somehow managed to rip off a layer of skin along with her wayward eyebrow hairs, and Hannah wondered if reconstructive surgery would be required.

  She didn’t want to alarm her friend The Bride, who had never had any waxing done, so she promised her that the redness would fade by the time of the wedding. Once she was alone, Hannah rushed to inspect her ravaged eyelid in the bathroom mirror. There she saw that underneath her perfectly arched brow, a slash of angry red flesh oozed a clear liquid.

  “Of course, the next day it was a scab,” Hannah sighed.

  Needless to say, she did not return to that salon when in need of a bikini wax.

  Fake-out and Bake

  There are many dangers associated with being in a bridal party, but the role has not yet been definitively proven to give people cancer, although I am convinced that all that exposure to synthetic fabrics and estrogen can’t be good for you. Hopefully, for one bridesmaid, beet juice proves to be equally nontoxic.

  Nina M. was selected as one of four bridesmaids in the small- town wedding of a high school friend. It was the beginning of summer, and The Bride and her maids were still pasty from a winter of sun deprivation. All but one of them, that is. Bridesmaid number three showed up for the big event with a beautiful tanning-booth skin tone, about twenty shades darker than the rest of the bridal party and only a moderately different hue than that of a chocolate fountain. On the day before the wedding, The Bride decided that everyone’s skin must be made to coordinate, and that her dress should be the only blindingly white wedding accessory.

  As Nina told it, the operative word was glow.

  There were no tanning beds in the tiny town, but just down the country road from The Bride’s house, a spray-on-
tan outlet had recently opened. It was located in the back of a giant warehouse that was home to some sort of oil field operation. On the day of their spray, the women pulled their cars in among the big rigs and pickup trucks with no small amount of trepidation. Nina was fairly sure the sign advertising the salon was a joke, a way to lure hapless women off the road and get them to strip while construction workers watched through a peephole. With fear in their hearts, the bridal party made their way past grease-stained men taking smoke breaks and prayed that the multiple vats of combustible petroleum products had nothing to do with the mystery substance in which they were soon to be doused.

  “I was terrified,” said Nina, who had never heard of spray-on tanning before that day. “And the bride was basically using us as guinea pigs.”

  The women entered a tiny office and were shown an instructional video explaining that the tanning liquid was made of beet juice. 1 he friendly female owner then demonstrated a series of moves they would be required to make inside the spraying booth, taking them through their paces like a slow-motion aerobics class. First they were to stand—butt naked—staring at the spray nozzles head on, their arms at their sides. After each hiss of the tanning spray, a red light would flash, signaling that the women should change positions. They had to do quarter-turns, with one arm raised and the other lowered. They had to separate their legs so their inner thighs would be exposed, then turn to douse their sides and back. The owner stressed that their palms should always be positioned away from the nozzles, and warned that it would feel a little funny when they got a face full of beet juice.

  “It’s like you’re in the video for “Walk Like an Egyptian,’” Nina said, referencing a Bangles tune that has had no place near a wedding since 1988.