Monday, October 1, 2012

Bridal Showers

No Pictures...Must Protect the Innocent...and Guilty...


Don’t get me wrong; I love my family and friends and when I find out they have found the [first] ‘one’ I am ecstatic, overwhelmed with joy and well wishes for their marriage that has half a chance of working out...Yeah, I am not in a relationship, if you couldn’t tell. Not to mention I am a horrible person.

When the initial excitement has worn off I realize what comes next—engagement parties, bachelor/bachelorette parties, receptions and DUN*DUN*DUN* BRIDAL SHOWERS. The undeniably worst of all wedding related parties.

Typically an afternoon affair with food and beverages provided all of the attendees eat the tiniest bits of food and let on that they are “watching their weight.” Guests young and old are mingling with each other and making nice with their friend’s crazy in-laws to be, cooky aunts and weird friends from high school. Not ONLY must you meet these people, often times, teams are formed to play shower games…horrible, terrible, very bad unreasonably silly games.

List of Ree-donk-u-lous Games:

Toilet paper dress design

Guess what is in this paper sack

Love/wedding word scrambles

Blissful advice (this is where I write something vulgar and obscene on a scrap of paper and the bride has to read it out loud…and then the grannies and family usually write something heartfelt and useful.)

Groom/Bride Trivia

Don’t say the secret word-clothespin game

Wedding bingo

The list goes on…

If you are ‘Lucky’ you WIN. There is generally a ‘prize’. It is not the kind of prize any reasonable human would want, such as, oh I don’t know…$money$, gift cards, new shoes, a car…or anything I would ever actually use. You will however, receive lots of smelly candles, jars of candy, neckerchiefs, and really anything that will fit in a small gift bag and not cause the maid of honor to go broke. When I win (this happens a lot) I often ‘forget’ my ‘winnings’. Nonchalantly leave them behind like a doggy bag from a sub-par meal.

After super fun games the bride usually opens gifts while the shower go-ers look on; like a small child at their first birthday party. YEEHAW!!

“Oh more dish towels, thank you Gramma!” “YES! New pots and pans! Mom, you’re the best!!”—These brides always register for gifts that I don’t understand how they have lived without up to this point. “Really bitch?! You are pushing 30, you have lived on your own since college and you don’t have forks?!?! What the fuck? What do you eat with now?!”

SOMETIMES your friend’s slutty friends are organizers and they aren’t smart enough to Google what a shower is and end up combining skanky bachelorette traditions. Just what I want to see on a Sunday afternoon: my friend’s grandmother wearing her cross necklace while sipping out of a flesh colored cock straw. Granted, sometimes it is your friend’s slutty grandma putting you in awkward situations sipping dick straws and guessing how many inches the groom’s cock is, either way…I’d rather clean a bathroom at a frat house the morning after the annual toga party.

The food is ‘fun’…Showers are typically held in the afternoon at a weird time like 2 or 3. So you are either full from an amazing lunch or starving and dehydrated because you woke up with barely enough time to dress yourself before you ran out and bought the gift and the bag you brought it in.

Typical shower food includes fruit and veggie trays, the tiniest sandwiches you have ever seen, green salads, mayo salads, cheese platter, hummus, chips, salsa, and other miscellaneous dips. It is entertaining to watch your friends, family and strangers pass by or take the smallest amounts of food because they are pretending they live a healthful lifestyle. I refuse to give into this.

If sandwiches are cut into 4’s I take 4. I need a whole sandwich. I liberally add hummus to my raw veggies, tong-fuls of salad and as much fruit as possible. The largest hurdle for me is the plate size. Bitches are always putting out plates with a diameter smaller than the smallest boner you have ever seen. It takes planning to overload a plate like that without spilling.

When you are done standing in line to eat and the plate has been masterfully piled or sparingly used (depending on your method) often times you sit in a chair…but not at a table. This is a paradise for a klutz. Drinks on the floor to kick over, evasive foods that slide off the edge of the plate, hard to reach napkins while trying to balance your plate with food for and all while sitting in a circle judging each other based on the choice of food and beverage and style with which you opt to ingest. Men have no idea how hard it is to sit in a circle of your peers and eat while stock piling bitchy comments to share with people later…being a woman is exhausting. *Fart Noise

The way I usually choose to ingest my food is: as fast as humanly possible. Other styles include: intermittently taking the tiniest of bites during conversation, whenever wine/champagne is not being guzzled, quickly and semi-secretly so when you go off to the bathroom to puke few people notice.

No matter what your style cake is almost always next. And yes every bitch in the place just wants “a tiny sliver.” I personally like “the biggest piece without much frosting.” It really is the best way to enjoy cake. If the entire side of any cake didn’t become totally dry and inedible I would frost mine only on the top. Only kids eat edge frosting.  No matter what the approach the result is plates schmered with frosting and/or half eaten pieces of cake.

These events wouldn’t be the interesting experiences they are without all of the characters: 2 Grannies, Mother of the Bride, Groom’s mom, miscellaneous close ‘normal’ friends, cooky aunt or 2, siblings, weirdo cousins, lushes, skanky hos, that one bitch who has to leave in the middle because she has somewhere else to be, random kid someone brought, uber competitive person who wants to win every game despite lack of interest in prizes (THAT’s ME), irrelevant old high school friends and a myriad of other skanks. It is a Mecca for female style competition; with dirty looks, fake laughs, “potty pow-wows,” and the ever important “I’m the bride’s best friend competition.”

By the end guests are tired from drinking too much booze, eating very little and throwing it all up. Everyone is out $20-$50 for a gift, (not included in the wedding or bachelorette gift), probably spilled on their shirt/skirt/pants and need to go home and enjoy some carb and fat heavy meal to comfort themselves while facing the reality that they will never marry, their wedding sucked, their marriage sucks, and the only reason they went to the shower was to avoid doing laundry. 

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