Yeah hi, it's me again. Sorry I've been out of touch...but seriously, there hasn't been much to write about. Ever since Dave got home from Scotland, wedding plans have been on the back burner. We've mostly each been absorbed with work, minor house projects, prepping for our annual St. Patrick's Day Parade party, snuggling on our new couch (yes, I did just use the word snuggle in all seriousness), and avoiding doing our taxes (because it's super boring). With our own wedding a millenium away...or over a year anyway...there hasn't really been any impending need to do anything. And for those of you who know us well, Dave and I are pretty good at doing nothing. We're leading experts in the field. It's why we enjoy camping so much.
Although I haven't done much in the way of planning my own wedding, I have been dabbling in some secondary planning for my sister Stephanie. My mother and I recently threw her a bridal shower, and while it went off fairly successfully and Steph seemed to have a great time, it's a bit of a relief that it's over. If you've ever been involved in planning one, then perhaps you understand what I mean. If you have not yet had the joy of planning an afternoon party for a bunch of women with sex advice and cupcake pans on the brain, then please allow me to elaborate.
Dave recently told me that at his company they are no longer calling a session of idea sharing as a "brainstorm." Apparently there's too much negativity attached to the word
storm, so they've now adopted the much friendlier brain
shower.
This is not a joke. This is actually a
thing now.
Okay, well if a big corporate bank can reduce a powerful thunder of ideas to a benign sprinkle of musings, then I propose changing the commonly accepted label "bridal shower" to "bridal
shit storm". Any objections?
I say this because I've never once met a woman who actually enjoys going to the traditional bridal shower: the ooh-ing and aah-ing and pretending to pay attention as the bride-to-be opens her gifts; the polite conversation as you sip brunch-appropriate cocktails; the cutesy-poo games having something to do with love and weddings and animal mating habits and such, etc.
As maid of honor, my first instinct was to put a stop to this madness. I suggested that we skip the gift opening, hire a DJ and offer an open bar, turning the whole party into a girls'-night-out sort of festivity. After all, my family of women is a pretty rip-roaring good time, especially when music and a few glasses of wine are thrown into the mix. My mother, however, does not have my sort of vision. With pursed lips she reminded me that this is not how bridal showers are done. Being that this is my first bridal shower planning experience, you can't blame me for trying. And so we dove into a multiple-months-long process of planning for a four hour event.
At first things went smoothly. We chose the venue with little debate - The Greenhouse Cafe in Bay Ridge. They provided a reasonable and delicious menu, audio equipment for music and announcements, and supplied the wishing well and bridal chair to officially mark the party as a shower. We went shopping for a favor, and decided (after moderate debate) on a stilletto shoe-shaped bottle opener. My mother was apprehensive of the modernity of the gift at first, unsure if it was appropriate for older guests. I reminded her that I've only used about 10% of the picture frames, coasters, and oil and vinegar bottles I've received from similar parties, and it's never once driven me to blind hatred of the hostesses. If anyone hated it, no one would tell us to our faces, and we could rest easy ever after.
The shoe bottle opener set the tone for the whole party. The box it came in was pink and black with white polka dots, so we decided to go with a pink and black "diva" theme. If this seems cliche, I apologize. As previously mentioned, I've never done this before. I did spend a very long time researching just what's expected at a bridal shower, and as far as I know, "diva" is one of only a small handful of theme options available; diva, lingerie, and tea party. I still don't understand how this all got started...
Anyway, I went online and started ordering little knick-knacks in the chosen color scheme to round out the decor, including a custom banner with Steph's name on it, advice cards for the guests to fill out, hot pink and black shoe-shaped confetti (very rock star!), and pink game cards with her name also personalized on the front. I even found an invitation with a bride taking a snooze inside of a pink and black polka dot high heeled shoe (it's less hideous than it sounds), which I personalized with a Daniela-original poem (copyright pending).
Props to my mother for coming up with an awesome idea for the centerpiece. She thought it would be funky to use jewelry mannequins propped up on hat boxes as the centerpiece for the tables. You know the kind of dolls I'm talking about; they're like Barbie dolls dressed up for Fashion Week, but instead of a head and arms they have metal curly-cue spokes you can hang necklaces and bracelets off of. Pretty cool, huh? And for once, I'm not being sarcastic. I loved the idea and told her to go for it. She wasn't comfortable making the decision solo, though, and so she asked for my help with the selections.
Thus began the most torturous phone conversation I've ever had with my mother.
Things started smoothly. There were a few we both immediately agreed on: a flirty hot pink and black cocktail dress; a fuschia sequined cocktail dress; a long, black, one-shouldered evening gown.
But wait! she protested.
Can we mix short and long dresses? Won't that look weird? What will people say!
And just like that my mother grunted and hacked into the receiver, and over the miles of distance that separated us I heard her painfully morph into...MOMZILLA! For the next 2 1/2 hours I pulled out most of the hair on my head as my mother over-analyzed the most minute details about these dolls: cocktail dresses versus evening gowns; casual vs. dressy; shiny versus toned-down; gold versus black spokes.
The variables, which were not evident before, now seemed mind-boggling, each capable in its own catastrophic way of altering the very fabric of our well-organized party.
Once I'd finally convinced her that it was okay to have a mix of short and long dresses, I picked out a sexy little doll dressed in a zebra print evening gown, to balance out the number of short and long dresses (per her request). My mother slowly told me that this doll was not appropriate. Not getting it, I pointed out that the outfit was awesome and totally went with the whole diva theme. She again told me that the doll was inappropriate.
"
It's a black doll," she said quietly.
Huh? "Ma, it's black like Crayola-black. That's only 'cause the dress is white so, you know, it
pops more."
"It's for black families."
"Mom, it doesn't have a head or arms. If anything, it's for
headless, armless families."
But alas, my mother refused to let go her fear of a race riot at my sister's bridal shower, so we trudged on, sifting through images of doll after doll after doll, for about another hour before I finally gave up...I could take no more; she was on her own.
And she did just fine on her own. My mother's jewelry doll selections ended up being pretty fabulous, and were a coveted prize during the games.
Oh, have I not yet mentioned the games? Where to begin...
If you have never been to a bridal shower, there is a rule that you are not permitted to simply sit, eat, drink, and enjoy the company of the women around you. No, you must partake in games the mere existence of which perpetuates stereotypes about the frivolity of women. If that's too many big words for you, let me break it down easy: they're girly in the stupid way.
My mother made it very clear that the games were my responsibility. Looking to make my life easy, I found a pre-printed game card online that included five games, was pink and could therefore be used as part of the table decorations, and could be personalized with Stephanie's name on it. SOLD! I ordered enough for each person to have her own, and the plan was to place one at each dish setting. Easy enough, right?
Wrong! Now came the question of how to actually execute the games and award prizes. Yes, prizes are in fact necessary. These games are not just for fun. They are a competition for prizes selected by mother - some very decent prizes, I might add - and as sometimes happens with competitions, things can get ugly. Our fear was that since the games were pre-printed and everyone would see them all at once, there would be no way to tell who finished each game first. If there was no fair, accurate way to tell who finishes each game first, then how,
oh how! would we know who wins a prize? HOW?
I actually lost sleep over this.
Then I had the idea of making a polite announcement at the start of the party that each guest
please not begin any game without my announcing it first...to keep it fair. Everyone nodded politely at the end of my polite announcement, and then proceeded to (politely?) ignore everything I'd just said. Which, by the way, I wouldn't have cared about if there hadn't been such an uproar everytime I needed to give a prize away:
Hey! you said I didn't have the right answers, but I do have the right answers! How come I didn't get a prize, but she did? Didn't she already get a prize? Are you ignoring our table?
Oh, the horror! the horror!
Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but when you want everything to be perfect
so badly and things don't go your way, one tends to exaggerate. So after what felt like two hours of being yelled at by our guests, I was covered in sweat and suffering from agita. I looked longingly at my sister and other bridesmaids, who at this point were about seven mimosas deep, and sighed...something told me it would be inappropriate for me to get drunk right now. It was the same feeling I'd had in Macy's a few weeks before when my mother sent me hunting for underwear to use at the shower.
How does one
use underwear at a party, you ask?
The plan was to orchestrate a performance with the other bridesmaids in conjunction with the reading of a bridal lingerie poem.
Oh yeah, this is a
thing.
It was a great idea, until I actually had to find the exact pieces of underwear to match the poem and figure out where in the party to work it in. I decided to boycott the idea when, cracking under the pressure, I broke down crying in the lingerie aisle at Macy's, a pair of leopard print boy shorts in one hand and a pink and black teddy in the other (in my defense, I had my period and had just gotten off a very looooooong, horrible day at work).
Instead of doing the underwear poem as a performance, I selected an assortment of pink and black lingerie which we strung from the ceiling as part of the decorations. I thought it was classy and cute, but I could tell my mother was still a little peeved at me. She was also mad because I'd ruled out the fifth game on the card. This was the "How well does the bride think her groom knows her" game. The way it works is before the party someone interviews the groom, asking him questions about the bride. Then, at the shower, the bride is then presented with the same questions and she must guess which questions she thinks the groom answered correctly about her. The guests must guess how many the bride will get correct about her groom. Sound needlessly complicated? It is, but you know, it's a
thing so I was willing to play along.
That is, until my mother made it even more complicated. She had a good idea to videotape the interview and play it in conjunction with my sister's answers at the party. So then for a few weeks we argued about how to make this happen. Should we set up a television, put it into a powerpoint presentation, rent an LCD projector, ask guests to gather around the laptop (that one was her brilliant idea)? Eventually, she called the restaurant and they assured us they had all the equipment we'd need there. Then came the discussion over how to tape this interview. My mother insisted that I do it. I calmly reminded her that the three states of distance between myself and Michael might make the task a bit difficult. So the next obvious choice was my brother, Robert. Rob agreed to do it, and it seemed like all was fine.
That is, until my mother called me again in a panic: "What if Stephanie gets too many wrong answers? It'll look like she doesn't know Michael, and she'll feel stupid! I don't want to make her feel stupid at her own party!"
"So we won't play the game, Ma. No big deal."
"But the game is on the card already."
"So what?"
"IT'S ON THE CARD! We HAVE to play it!"
By the time we hung up (for like the third time that day), she was reassured that the matter was not nearly as earth-shattering as she was making it, and a final decision was made NOT to play the game. I called my brother and let him know he need not interview Michael, and that was that. When I spoke to my mother the next day, I updated her on my conversation with Rob.
She was quiet for a moment, but then finally said, "So we're not playing it?"
"Mom, YOU didn't want to play it, remember?"
"FINE! I guess we'll have a boring party with no games and we'll just sit and stare at eachother the whole time and have no fun at all!"
I might have hung up on her after that.
My relationship with my mother somehow survived this whole ordeal. In fact, I remember hugging her a lot during the party, happy that she was my partner in crime for the day. And when she teared up during her speech, I teared up, too. She just wanted everything to be perfect for Stephanie, and I think all of her hard work and creative ideas paid off. In spite of the fact that there was no lingerie poem, no embarassing interview game, and the games were a disastrous mess, everyone still seemed to have a good enough time. At the end of the day, when my sister got up to thank everyone for the gifts (which by the way she did NOT open at the party - "
Please be a dear, and wrap in clear" - YOU'RE WELCOME!) and she started crying, all of a sudden the drama and stress of the planning and execution of the party was totally worth it. She'd had a blast and was truly grateful for everything everyone had contributed.
Later that night, as she and Mike genuinely giggled and ooh-ed and aah-ed over her gifts, drunk since we'd taken Steph out for a few drinks after the party, I started to wonder whether or not I was changing my opinion about bridal showers.
Probably not.
However, you only get married once, and it's not like I'll have to plan my own. With enough mimosas, I might even have a good time at my own future bridal shower.
After all, it is a
thing.
