Weddings - Part I

It came straight at my face. A flash of colour, an ocular effect. My instinct was to duck and do it fast. Not to miss the article heading my way but rather to avoid at all costs, the screaming mass of female victims surrounding me – hungry for it like wild animals after their measly quarry. Knowing it could be the end of singleness for one of them. That they could finally, be taken from the shelf. It was the wedding bouquet.


As luck would have it, it landed in my arms. How typical. I didn’t want it or ask for it. I was just standing there with the rest of the unmarried’s because I had been (shoved) ushered out there by the bride who was my close friend. Everyone knew it was rigged, that she deliberately threw it my way. I felt guilt and pity as I saw the others minus the bride spray, amble away their eyes downcast. They were forlorn looking creatures who seemed to believe that the catching of a bride’s bunch really did mean they would be next.

‘Come the fuck on’, I wanted to say to them while simultaneously stuffing the caught bouquet down their desperate bulging cleavages, but I knew when it came to weddings and the mammoth connotations behind all the something olds, something blues, these bitches really believed this shit.

I have to say the weddings I have been to and been in have added up to both the best days of my life and the worst. A friend I kinda, barely really knew asked me recently to be in her wedding.

Uh huh, bridesmaid. Yay.

She came over to see me all excited and so forth and laid it on me as if it was the biggest privilege I would ever get in my lifetime. I was still thinking she’d won lotto and was in a state of unpreparedness for her proposal. She was very confused when I merely stared back at her looking incredibly disinterested. She was a relatively new friend at the time and didn’t know that I had been to plenty of weddings and worse still had been in plenty of them, always the bridesmaid never the... and why don’t new friends understand the Memorandum Of Understanding on wedding party etiquette? You have to be mates and I mean good mates for at least 10 years or at least family before asking someone to be in your wedding. It is just good wedding business to me.

Weddings are interesting events. Pretty, emotional and often one big old reunion. Women get to goo and gah over the bride’s attire, hair and makeup and say stuff like, “You look so damn beautiful.” Men get to wear a classy suit and tie. It really is their day. In addition, the already ‘marrieds’ get to say, “Remember our wedding dear,” - as if they’d ever forget.

You get to chuck stuff at the happy couple when they come out of the church and you keep Photo Shop in business. However, as a friend of mine put it once, really they are just very expensive dinners with plenty of alcohol.

It is quite interesting watching couples do the wedding planning stuff after the excitement of the engagement has settled. Some go at it as if they’re planning the Olympic Games for the whole world to watch and others, like my best friend, sat back casually even just two months before the wedding day, spoke about it now and then while leafing slowly and very infrequently through reception venue brochures and hadn’t planned a piece of clothing. Although I have to say that, that made even me nervous.

I’ve watched friends carry wedding books under their arms for months before ‘the big day’, continually jotting bits and pieces down as an idea comes to mind or after watching for the tenth time, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and noting, no meringues. I had a look at a Brides magazine in a newsagent the other day, $22.95. What is that about? Does that come with a free wedding cake?

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