Bad Bridesmaid Read online

  “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.

  “Then two people picked her up, moved her oft to the side, sat her in a chair, and the wedding just kept going,” Jenny said. “It was literally about five minutes before the other one went down.”

  To Snub and to Cherish

  Being a bridesmaid wouldn’t be so bad if we could all just lapse into unconsciousness and awake to find the whole thing over and done with. Unfortunately, the opportunities for disaster multiply as the day wears on, and the bridal party is kept alert with a steady stream of caffeine, stress, and peer pressure. The average wedding is now thirty-six consecutive hours of bridal mania, beginning with a rehearsal dinner and ending only after every family dysfunction has been exposed.

  The presence of bridesmaids throughout all of this is actually about as necessary to the wedding ceremony as the bride’s virginity.

  Kimberly C. saw her efforts as a bridesmaid completely ignored on the day of the ceremony. The event was taking place in a northern Canadian resort town during shadfly season, a two-week period when the large, mouthless insects descend on the region like bulimics in a Burger King bathroom.

  “They live for twenty-four hours, mate, and die,” she said. “When they die they pile up and accumulate to inches of crunchy dead shadflies.”

  Because no one had considered scheduling the wedding during one of the fifty weeks of the year when the entire town was not coated in carcasses, Kimberly spent the morning of her friend’s wedding day the way she had always imagined it as a little girl: hosing away dead insects. Along with her sister, who was also in the wedding, Kimberly had already taken a week off work to help with such glamorous prep. The bridesmaids had bought hundreds of candles for the outdoor party, decorated the hall with fake sunflowers, cooked the vegetarian entree for the reception, called one another names as the stress level grew, and baked and decorated a cake when The Bride realized she had forgotten to order one. When it was time for the ceremony, Kimberly and her sister marched down the outdoor aisle as the shadflies swarmed around them, a grotesque task of Fear Factor proportions.

  “You had to walk with your mouth closed and hands over your eyes,” Kimberly said of the bugs. To make matters worse the aisle ran over a grassy hill, and her strappy sandals sank into the ground with each step. “So I looked like I had some sort of jerky palsy.”

  After Kimberly and her sister swallowed their pride, the cost of their duties, and at least four shadflies each, The Bride forgot to mention them during the wedding party introductions. “We cried,” she said.

  Even in Victorian times, bridesmaids were largely overlooked during the ceremonies themselves. According to Ann Monsarrat, author of And the Bride Wore … The Story of the White Wedding, the nineteenth-century bridesmaid’s most cumbersome job was holding the bride’s gloves while she exchanged rings with her man.

  In other parts of the world, bridesmaids have historically been stuck with equally unglamorous and unrewarding roles. At Belgian weddings in the early twentieth century, bridesmaids collected money from the guests and threw the coins to the poor people gathered outside, cementing a reputation of generosity for the new couple. In ancient Asia, bridesmaids would stand upon the threshold of the bride’s house and refuse to let the hopeful groom enter until they were sure he had earned her hand, pegging him with rice balls as he bribed them with gifts.

  Nowadays, most attendant attacks are reserved for one another, with any goodwill evaporating as they throw most of their own coin into the wedding preparations.

  Geena R. was asked to be Maid of Honor by her older sister, despite the fact that the two women were not particularly close. On the day of the wedding, after months of preparations, the other women in the party—close friends of The Bride—decided to pull rank and stage a ceremonial coup d’état.

  “It was just this big melee. I thought they were going to tear out each other’s hair,” she shuddered.

  One of The Bride’s friends appointed herself MOH and gave the other two subsidiary roles, dividing up Geena’s duties like the estate of a hated parent. Geena did not stand next to her sister during the ceremony, or sign the license as a witness, or deliver the speech she had written.

  “I pretty much just sat at the head table by myself,” she said. “At that point, I was just still there because I had the dress.”

  If she had a rice ball, she would not have thrown it at the groom.

  To Dishonor and Obey

  To prevent any last-minute awkwardness or black-tie backstab-bing, weddings are usually as choreographed, scripted, and decidedly unnatural as Tom Cruise in a May-December romance.

  For her friend’s wedding, Leah F. and her fellow bridesmaids received an e-mail a full month in advance outlining explicit instructions for the wedding day itinerary and their individual assignments. One woman was instructed to hang back at the church after the ceremony to make sure everyone got in the right car, and another was told to stay with The Bride at all times to make sure nobody got lipstick on her cheek or a drink near her dr
ess. It is possible, Leah acknowledged, that The Bride actually wanted this friend to throw herself into the path of incoming red wine, sacrificing life and limb just like Kevin Costner does for Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard, or Whitney Houston is rumored to do for crack cocaine in real life.

  “She actually did end up getting orange juice spilled on her dress,” Leah said. “And we’re a bit suspicious that it might have been on purpose.”

  The paranoid bride probably invited such hostility by assigning her attendants a litany of ridiculous duties and then deciding she didn’t trust them to follow through. There is nothing worse than being second-guessed all day long by the woman who forced you to wear lavender eye shadow so it would match her bouquet. When Leah’s bride entered the reception at the fancy Ritz Hotel, she spent an hour moving place cards around because she wasn’t happy with how the bridesmaids had done it. She’d also made them all take dance classes so they would look good on the floor beside her, and she got angry if any of the bridesmaids left the reception without permission.

  According to Leah, “Somebody went to the bathroom during the father-daughter dance, and she freaked.” Apparently, bridesmaids require not only a strong sense of duty but also superhuman bladder control.

  Being trapped inside the dream day of a female friend can be scary for a lot of women, especially if there’s a ban on the bathroom or a line for the bar. Having to dance with a creepy uncle or absorb a spill with your chest is nothing, however, compared to the task that Wendy H. was handed at one of her friends’ weddings.

  It was the year she was a bridesmaid seven times, so you’d think she would have seen it all, but there was no way to prepare for this one. The Bride was a high school friend and also a Mormon. Wendy was not, and the attendant discovered that she would not actually be allowed to “attend” the ceremony, as it were.

  The invitations had specified that only Mormons were allowed in the temple for the vows, but everyone was welcome at the reception afterward. Unfortunately, many of the guests—perhaps tired of analyzing the subtext of wedding invitations to establish who paid for what—had glossed over the fine print and come to the church expecting both a program and a pew. It was Wendy’s job to enforce the No Sinners clause.

  “They would come up, and you kind of knew they weren’t Mormon because they didn’t know what any of the procedures were,” Wendy noted. “I wasn’t allowed even inside the doors; I was on the church steps. So I was standing out there with this nice lady from the church and a guest list of who was Mormon and who wasn’t.”

  As politely as possible, Wendy would point out the “Mormons Only” line on the wedding invitations and apologize profusely before sending guests in the direction of the reception hall, which gracefully admitted those likely to burn in Hell. Still, her main purpose was not merely to restrict entry to followers of the Latter Day Saints—that would be too meek a challenge for a nonbeliever such as she. No, Wendy was also charged with preventing the incursion of The Bride’s estranged father, who had not been invited to either portion of the festivities.

  “He’d been excommunicated for divorcing her mother,” Wendy explained. “He did show up at the reception but he never went by the church.” Thank God.

  In Sickness and in Fake Sickness

  I felt sick throughout most of the wedding in which I was meant to be a bridesmaid. Dramatically demoted, I sat on the sidelines and flushed with fever whenever anyone looked in my direction, felt my heart skip as my friends joined The Bride in the horah, flinging each other around in joyful abandon, and wanted to throw up when the bridesmaid speech paid tribute to The Bride’s ability to “stick with you through anything.” As much as I envisioned dying of rejection and embarrassment and knew our friendship had suffered a debilitating stroke, I always knew I would survive her day.

  Caroline H. had her doubts on that score. She was a bridesmaid for the first and only time in a wedding held at a South American island resort. She and her fiancé, who was also in the wedding, decided to make a vacation out of it and set off for a week of sun, surf, and strutting their stuff across the sand for the couple’s exotic nuptials. After just a few days in the beautiful country and perhaps one too many cocktails mixed with the local ice cubes, an intestinal parasite struck up a love affair with Caroline’s insides. Soon, her romantic getaway and bridesmaid duties took a backseat to her relationship with the toilet in her hotel room, where she found herself trapped for hours at a time. As the wedding guests attended a “Welcome Party” at the resort, Caroline said goodbye to her lunch. As the bridal party digested their rehearsal dinner, Caroline vowed never to eat again.

  “I was heaving my way through the bridesmaid luncheon, couldn’t lie out in the sun, couldn’t get in the pool, couldn’t drink mimosas,” she said forlornly. “They looked like they were having so much fun, and I hadn’t eaten in three days.” Caroline had, however, received a house call the day before from an island doctor, who administered a four-hundred-dollar shot in the ass with what she now suspects were grossly expired antibiotics. “Just when I thought I was getting better,” she said, “I started the second bottle of meds and got hit with another tornado in my gut.”

  Caroline worried that everyone would assume she had really just had too much to drink, but she could do little to dissuade them with her daily routine of puking and pouring with sweat.

  To make matters even more painful, the bride’s grandmother—while outwardly concerned—seemed skeptical of Caroline’s ability to “smile and look pretty” during the marriage ceremony. At one point, the drug-dishing doyenne even offered the ailing attendant a suppository from her personal stash.

  On the day of the wedding, Caroline managed to stay upright without anything inserted up her bum and smiled during the brief ceremony even as her stomach churned. When the music began, though, and The Bride’s brother asked her to dance, Caroline had to tango with the toilet instead. She lay there sprawled on the tile floor of her paradise hotel room, shivering, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt over her dress and listening to the eight-hour party going on directly below her balcony, a sound drowned out only by her occasional cries of agony.

  Halfway through the reception, the other wedding attendants were invited onstage to participate in a wedding ritual where single women pull charms out of a cake, with each one meant to symbolize the profession of their future husbands.

  “I could just barely hear, ‘We need the bridesmaids up here. All the bridesmaids, please come up to the cake table!” Caroline said. “And a little while later, ‘Where’s Caroline? Caroline! We need you at the cake table!’”

  As her own insides were being yanked out of their moorings, Caroline’s fiance subbed in and drew her charm out of the cake on a long pink ribbon. The bauble, along with a necklace from Tiffany’s that Caroline received as a bridesmaid gift despite her lack of participation, was all she had to show for the trip—except, she pointed out, “a lingering stomach problem.”

  Anyone who has experienced a bout of food poisoning knows that it is one of the most painful things a person can go through. You sit down for a nice meal or a quick roadside taco and the next thing you know, you wish you were dead. Being a reluctant bridesmaid is not so different an experience, minus the devastating cramps. Something that seems so natural and lovely—a wedding—soon has you on your knees begging for mercy.

  Two Los Angeles bridesmaids escaped this fate by feigning an illness rather than let a boring wedding suck the life out of them, thus proudly adopting the title of Bad Bridesmaids rather than meekly accepting a night of bad dancing.

  Brooke B. and Kelli F. had been asked to stand up for Barb, a girl they had met in their first year of university. They had hung out a bit, but after Barb transferred to another program on campus, the women had not heard from her until she called to announce her engagement and ask them to be bridesmaids.

  After they said yes (“What else do you say?” explained Brooke), Barb informed them that her wedding would be held on Memorial Da
y weekend, just a few months away. Another mutual friend of theirs had been engaged for more than a year, and her wedding was also scheduled for that day, something the bridesmaids pointed out to Barb—to no avail. Borrowing a tired plotline from The OC, Barb had met her fiance only six months before but would not negotiate on the date, even if it meant her bridesmaids would have to choose one wedding over another. They had been tricked into a game of Bridesmaid Bait and Switch, agreeing to their roles before the other bride had technically requested an RSVP.

  To add insult to injury, The Bride informed the women that they were expected at the rehearsal promptly at 3:30 p.m., but that they were, unfortunately, not invited to the dinner afterward.

  “‘It’s just family,”’ Brooke recalled The Bride explaining. “But everyone else in the wedding is family, so basically everyone went to dinner except for Kelli and me.”

  The ceremony was being held an hour and a half away from the California town where Kelli and Brooke went to school, and they had no place to stay the night before the wedding, so they told The Bride they would just come down on Saturday and skip the rehearsal altogether. “How hard is it to walk down the aisle?” Brooke reasoned.

  The Bride had no patience for this classic Bad Bridesmaid logic, and had other plans for her attendants. She wanted them to spend the night with her before the wedding, keeping her company in a luxurious hotel room that they would split three ways. Stunned but unwilling to say no because they believed Bad Bridesmaid karma would be visited upon them during their own weddings, the two women drove to the rehearsal site, participated in the run-through, and then went to a bar to drink alone while the rest of the family had dinner. The next morning, as they nursed their hangovers and growing resentment, The Bride informed them that she was moving immediately into the bridal suite and that they would promptly have to check out of the room they’d all shared the night before.