Wedding Shower #6
Highlight of the afternoon: riding home with Jenny Cluggish and passing a dark red and black hearse with a rusted-out door and red and black faux fur on the dashboard!!! We shrieked with laughter for the next two blocks, the other drivers must’ve thought we were crazy.
Gift: Recipe cards and box– all of them vegetarian recipes. Most of them quite simple. I have no expectation that she will actually do the cooking for longer than a few years. Her parents keep a chef who was on staff for a former US president for the hunting lodge and club they run.
Best food: chocolate cupcakes with pink icing and chocolate sprills.
Cuteness factor: The bride and groom’s custom-designed monogram embossed on the paper napkins.
This shower was classic. It’s why I hate showers to begin with. Lots of tiny, perfect-looking young women trying to top each other for the most chic outfit and gift.
There was lots of the increasingly-bourgois “good design” you see everywhere now a la Target: clean lines and geometric shapes– circles and stripes. Chocolate brown and pink with hints of mint green, everywhere.The invitations, the food, even the bride and her mother’s outfits matched the color scheme of the decor. The bride was registered at Crate & Barrel, which basically means I will never be able to afford anything she was given, and between one thing and another, got her entire china set (all but the teapot) in the one afternoon. Also, monogrammed bathroom towels.
As always, it’s difficult to explain just what is so awful about wedding showers. There are no real words for it. It’s this horrible smugness. This monumental attempt at perfection– and awareness on the part of some that they’ve more nearly attained it than others. This shower of scathing and unspoken criticism hidden beneath a polite veneer as smooth as cream, with the faint ineffectual warmth and rosiness of a fake log in a gas fireplace. Throw in pantyhose and heels and you’ve got a recipe for a miserable afternoon.ÂÂ
The thing is, other-criticism is only an indicator of self-criticism. If only, if only we could stop being so insecure and genuinely feel comfortable with ourselves and with each other, none of it would play out the way it does. But human nature is what it is, and woman-kind is what she is. And there will always be the equivalent of the wedding shower to play merry hell with my complexes. If I let it.
In the meantime, here’s to good eats, free champagne, dancing, and bachelors who don’t mind treating me like “just one of the guys” on occassion. Let all the world get married! “Good Lord, for alliance! Thus goes everyone to the world but I, And I am sunburnt; I may sit in the corner and cry heigh-ho for a husband!” –Much Ado About Nothing
