[Bucharest, May 17. Image via Getty]

Romanian women wearing bridal dresses pose in front of the parliament in the center of Bucharest during the Bride Parade on May 17, 2009. Around 100 brides took part in the event organized by a wedding photographer and a bridal wear fashion designer to promote marriage as one of the most glamorous events of a lifetime. AFP PHOTO / DANIEL MIHAILESCU (Photo credit should read DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

However, I was still distracted by the open bar. I guess some things never change.

Like the garbage cans at the event. They were elegantly draped in linen just like last year.

2009:

2008:

I went with my mom, fiancé (hate that word still), fiancé's mom, my BFF since high school who's one of my bridesmaids and who just got engaged a few weeks ago, and my BFF's mom.

Once my mom and dad got involved in the planning for this wedding, it got so far away from the small, intimate evening I'd envisioned, and is quickly turning into the kind of giant circus wedding—with relatives I haven't seen since I've menstruated for the first time popping up on the guest list—that I really had no interest in. But they're paying for the party, so it's kind of more their thing, than mine, at this point. I haven't put much thought into any of the planning, beyond having booked the venue and the photographer (who's a friend of my fiancé's). I haven't even tried on a single dress.

Speaking of dresses, there were a ton of them on body forms at the wedding showcase. And they were all strapless. I hate that 98% of wedding dresses are strapless and the other 2% are sleeveless.

Anyway, just like last year, I was mostly interested in drinking free wine and eating free hors d'oeuvres and cakes. However, this year, I took the time to fill out all the different raffle cards to win free shit like flowers, makeup, and discounts from various vendors. (My mom kept every pen from each booth she filled a raffle card at, saying, "It's all freebies here," despite the fact that they were Bic pens without caps or a promo printing.)

The thing is though, since the venue I'm using includes catering and the cake, and requires that I use one of their florists, and since I'll probably end up designing invitations, the only vendor to shop for was maybe some form of entertainment, like a band or a DJ.

The one thing that I knew I wanted was to find a string quartet who could play Mariah Carey songs (or at the very least, "Fantasy") leading up to the ceremony and during the cocktail hour. I did find an awesome company at the showcase called Orchestrations, that can turn any song into a string arrangement and provide you with musicians to play it. However, when I asked the woman at the booth about prices, she wouldn't give me any quotes, but assured me that they could work with "any budget." I know how that goes, though: Unaffordable!

After working half the room, I was hot, exhausted, annoyed, and ache-y from lugging around my goodie bag which weighed a whopping 12.5 lbs. (I put it on my scale.)

It was so crowded, and I was sick of being pushed and shoved by frenzied women with flat-ironed hair, wearing their huge purses in the crooks of their elbows. I felt like I was at the mall on the weekend before Christmas. I wanted to get out of there.

I still maintained a sense of humor—or perhaps delirium—because I found this hilarious:

Heh. Seamen.

I don't plan on wearing a veil, but I tried one on for shits and giggles, and before I knew it, the five people I was with each whipped out their own camera to take my picture.

When I put it back on the rack I saw that it was $1000, and it was one of the cheaper ones of the bunch.

We were there for about two and half hours, and I knew it was time to leave. When I got home, I rifled through my goodie bag.

It included:

• 2 copies of New York magazine
• 2 hardcover books (A Great American Cook by Jonathan Waxman and the novel A Bad Bride's Tale by Polly Williams)
• Chestnut cake mix
• A bottle of water
• Redken straightening spray
• Kenneth shampoo and conditioner
• A crystal keychain
• Measuring tape and a $50 gift card to M&J trimming
• Lavilin deodorant cream
• Korres watermelon-scented, 30 SPF face sunscreen
• Peanut butter crunch Full Bar
• Victoria's Secret makeup bag with perfume and lip gloss
• 2 chocolate bars
• 2 bottles of Milani nail polish, French manicure colors
• Milani eyeshadow and brown lip gloss (which would not be approved by Ashely from Rock of Love Bus)
• 3 different containers of mints
• A brownie and some kind of white chocolate candy
• Sewing kit
• YSL mascara
• Gift certificate for a facial peel
• 20% off of cosmetic surgery, Lasik, Smartlipo, Botox, laser hair removal, Juvederm, Restylane, or a prescription for longer, darker, fuller lashes
• About three million coupons and flyers

• 
  
  It also had a Fashion Forms Bridal Kit that has dress and lingerie tapes, one size extreme silicone adhesive body bra, silicone gel petals, one size thong, and a garter.

  I was interested to see what a "one size thong" looked like. It's officially the first thong I've ever owned.
  
  
  
  
  

  The "extreme adhesive body bra" looked two fallopian tubes away from a uterus.
  
  
  
  
  

  Which was perfect, since the silicone gel petals look like a form of contraception.
  
  
  
  
  

  They feel really nice, though. I've been squishing them all day, like they're stress balls. I anticipate getting much use out of them, that way, over the next few months.

  Last year, I said that the wedding showcase didn't really sway me either way, on whether or not I wanted to have a wedding of my own, and compared it to anal sex: I always said I'd never take it in the rear; now, sometimes I do. I figured that planning an open bar party to celebrate spending the rest of my life with one person couldn't hurt more than getting fucked in the ass.

  And it doesn't. But there's a lot more shit involved.

  Earlier: Single Slut Crashes New York Weddings Showcase

Like the fact that on Bachelorette.com, this 6" inflatable penis is sold out. Says the listing:

Every bachelorette party should have a six foot tall inflatable penis. In fact, I see more and more of these inflatable penises at the bars and clubs I go to.

Quoth Dodai:

Sad, sad day in America!

The bachelorette party, part and parcel of the Wedding Industrial Complex, has become an extension of the idea that everything is all about You The Bride, and it doesn't matter who you harm or how obnoxious you get in your celebration of winning the ultimate prize of all womanhood: a groom.

Accented with cheap veils, T-shirts, sashes or buttons announcing their status (sometimes all three!), penis paraphernalia and a shitload of booze, marauding bachelorette parties make every effort to command attention at the establishments they choose to gift with their presence and blow-up cocks. The brides-to-be are supposed to give into the worst urges they're told they have is "misbehave" like men supposedly do, as they're soon to give up drinking, fun times with girl friends and general inappropriate behavior for a marriage spent in quiet, sober contemplation catering to their husbands' needs. Obviously, this requires the application of dildos, pawing gay men trying to have a good time (and/or hook up with other gay men) and generally behaving in a way that would be embarrassing to everyone if they weren't already wearing tacky veils, tiaras, beauty pageant sashes and sipping out of penis straws.

Basically, I think those bars have found a very tiny silver lining in a very ugly, black Prop 8 cloud by using it to ban bachelorette parties for being an affront to those who are regularly discriminated against. Now if we can only get them banned for being an affront to good taste, common sense and modern womanhood, I'd be satisfied.

Gay Rights Battle Puts Strain On Parties [Chicago Tribune]

Related: Captain Pecker - 6' Blow Up Penis - Sold Out [Bachelorette.com]

These movies are never about love, or how a man and a woman have decided to spend the rest of their lives together, and long to celebrate this decision with their closest friends and family. These flicks are always about how the female brain goes haywire when she gets a "big day" to be the center of attention. There are scenes involving ridiculous amounts of money spent on disposable things: Dresses worn once, flowers carried for 20 minutes. And does the bride in the films enjoy these lavish luxuries? Of course not! She's too busy fretting and being petty. The brides are always painted as stressed out headcases. Explains Hesse:

"In the movies, planning the wedding becomes the ultimate test in the couple's relationship, and the catalyst that prompts the bride to 'find herself.' She gets plastered (Bride Wars), she spins insane lies (Sweet Home Alabama), she throws punches (My Best Friend's Wedding). If the groom can embrace the bride's edgy behavior (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Runaway Bride), that means that he can embrace her. But if the groom doesn't embrace her newfound spunk (The Wedding Singer, Wedding Crashers), then she'll end up with a different, more awesome guy who does."

Even though I find the concept condescending, Hollywood keeps making these films, and audiences keep watching them. And this is despite the fact that you know what's going to happen, because the Wedding Movie has a formula. Hesse explains:

"We've been watching it for years. Here Comes the Crazy Bride. Again and again and again… It's puffy, it's poufy, it's crinoline and buttercream. But lick off enough layers of icing, and there lurks the monster. Our heroine must wrestle it to the ground, narrowly escaping disaster, to learn if she's captured the right prince."

The question is, why does this formula have to involve making women look shallow and hare-brained?

Hollywood Wedded To The Formula [Washington Post]

Then there is Post scribe Rachel Beckman, who writes about the desperation she felt when awaiting a proposal from her longtime boyfriend. We received more than one dismissively worded tip about this article. One reader wrote, "Feminism means bullying your boyfriend into proposing on your timetable? Hm. Who knew?" Even though some of the longer descriptions of Beckman's prissiness and obsession with the "perfect" proposal were annoying, I didn't find the article anti-feminist at all. What's wrong with knowing that you're ready to get married and being assertive about telling your boyfriend that? It's not like Beckman's fiance was some poor captive with no will of his own.

Finally, there's a live chat with Erin Torneo, Valerie Cabrera Krause who wrote The Bridal Wave: Surviving the 'Everyone-I-Know-Is-Getting-Married-Years. Torneo writes in the introduction, "I wrote this book because I was tired of seeing my engaged friends become "lobridemized" by the wedding industry, tired of the contradictory cultural messages (women, be anything you want, but if you aren't altar-bound by 27, egads! spinsterhood for you), tired of seeing people get married just because they thought they were supposed to without giving any thought to what marriage is (but an awful lot to the wedding)." Kudos to Torneo for a) coming up with the term "lobridemized" and b) emphasizing how difficult it can be when society is giving women such an incredibly ambivalent message about their lives. If you take anything away from the WaPo's Bridal Week, it should be an awareness of the societal pressures most women are facing when it comes to marriage and the desire to go easy on people who embrace the wedding industry, even with all its faults.

Wedding Week [WaPo]
The Anti-Wedding [WaPo]
One-Ring Circus [WaPo]
Wedding Week: The Bridal Wave [WaPo]
The Bridal Wave [Official Website]

Okay, I should back up here and admit that when I say "wedding" I'm not exactly Modern Bride-ing it up here. Being broke takes care of that, and my parents eloped themselves. By "wedding" I mean a few kegs of PBR and some friends playing old timey music in a warehouse. So, no, it kind of has nothing to do with the tulle-fests these books and this blogger are critiquing. But I guess that's kind of my point: sometimes it seems like "wedding" has become a dirty word, inseparable from the consumer-driven mayhem that is "the wedding industry." Yes, pressure to shell out for chafing dishes and rented chairs and satin pillows for some terrified toddler to tote down an elaborately-decorated aisle sucks. But I like to think that not everyone who chooses (again, chooses ) to celebrate in a more elaborate and traditional way can do so without it overshadowing the point of the wedding or without turning into some kind of white-gowned cartoon virago with dollar signs in her eyes.

And sometimes it seems like weddings are becoming the new "50s suburbia" — easy to mock and stereotype and shorthand for a certain shallow sort of evil banality that's the antithesis of intellectual rigor. Yeah, the women on Bridezillas are out of control — so are 90% of the people on reality TV. But I can honestly say that I've never felt the slightest societal pressure to do anything I didn't want to do, and while I'm probably fortunate in my friends and family in this regard, I think this truly is an age of options: to stay single, to stay coupled, to marry, and none of this should require justification. Forgive me my rant, friends, but I do feel that, ironically, this whole anti-wedding backlash is starting to undermine my sense of choice as surely as does the pressure to wear white. And to paraphrase a recent Brizezilla, "I'm the one getting married so everyone has to listen to me!"

Marrying Type [The Smart Set]

Photo via Flickr

1. The best kind of wedding is the kind where the hosts don't care if you bring a date, but you have more fun if you don't. If there is any way at all to make the headcount not the source of your next ulcer — a cheap venue? a buffet? — everyone will probably be happier and then you can invite people at the last minute.

2. Rogue forces within your family are angling to hijack your wedding. Always. In finance they teach you that the difference between raising money by selling stock or bonds in a company is that shareholders suddenly buy themselves all this influence over things and bondholders don't get to run it unless you really fuck things up. In the case of a wedding, accepting money from parents seems to work similarly. Parents, in my experience, seem to be the single biggest reason the whole process gets "out of hand," because they are looking for some sort of return on their investment, and you are just looking to get drunk with your friends. The latter objective doesn't need to cost that much.

3. Your friends will show up wherever. Do you have friends you don't see enough anymore? Like, maybe they are flaky, or swamped at work, or just it's difficult to coordinate plans now that you are an engaged person and your friend is still living in a room that probably includes as a design accent signage stolen while drunk? Those are the friends who will be really touched to be invited to your wedding, and they will make it and also, give memorable — if somewhat incoherent — toasts. I can't tell you how many faraway weddings I have been to where someone was like "You are a good friend for showing up here," and I am like, "Who doesn't show up to a wedding?" Because seriously, I am longing to apply some priorities to my life, and if I can do something that feels really special and momentous and also get drunk I am going to go. But more importantly, you shouldn't need to do all this in a location that is completely convenient. I mean, here I am in one of the three freaking Courtyard Suites in the vicinity of the Seattle airport, but it's not like I'm sorry I came. But what I am saying is, if you live in New York, don't feel compelled to get married there; everyone knows it probably costs a hundred grand to rent out the VFW.

4. The only thing worse than that "as long as I am dying alone maybe it should be sooner rather than later" feeling at a wedding is the "um, would it be possible for my boyfriend to more demonstratively convey his discomfort at the distant notion that this might ever threaten to happen to us?" feeling. Around the time I attended this wedding for which I still, um, owe a gift, I started along that line of reasoning, "Wow, weddings are where it is socially acceptable to sob openly about the fact that you are still single, that is fucked up." But I realized something recently: it is probably better to be dateless at a wedding for that reason, because if you are single, that could really change at any moment, whereas if you are with a significant other and it is not going to work out, the next two to five years could potentially be occupied extricating yourself from the relationship and coping with the messy emotional aftermath.

5. Summer > Winter Duh. I suppose this makes it harder to schedule the thing, but no one complains about having to schedule their office Christmas party in December. Or maybe they do, but they are lame.

6. Jewish > Other traditions. There are many beautiful wedding traditions, like henna tattoos (skip these if you get the shakes) and the great Indian "let the kids hide the bride's shoe and blackmail the bride into paying them money to get it back" tradition and the Catholic "drinking to excess and whatever else we do" thing and many others I'm sure, but the best traditional wedding regimen is probably the Jews' dancing around in a circle and breaking glass thing. So if you have any excuse to incorporate Jewish traditions other than the Orthodox Jews' "separating the men from women" thing, do so; your guests will appreciate.

7. It just occurred to me that this wedding I attended on Saturday did not have a wedding cake. I really love frosting, it's like the only really sweet thing I ever desire, so I should have noticed the absence of a wedding cake, but I didn't, until this morning. When I thought, "Wow, it is really cool that Ryan and Anna held their wedding at a youth hostel and everyone stayed in teepees and bunk beds and covered wagons and that he bought a sterling silver ring in Florence and she wore it for the first year of their engagement and that they had a whole bouquet fashioned from Peeps and that they gave out free keepsake beer koozies and that we had the leftover barbecue and Beast and candied yams last night. (Oh my god, and I never knew frozen pizza could be that awesome.) Though I really wish someone had baked more of those cupcakes." No one notices what is "missing" from a wedding if nothing is actually missing!

The Big Day Gets Smaller [Washington Post]

Like we were looking for another reason to hate on the Wedding Industrial complex!

Anyway I don't say it a lot but: in some ways men also have it rough.

Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn To Islamic Fervor.

Furthermore, the wedding was an enormously affecting experience for everyone involved, and like, I got a lot of great T-shirts there, not including the one my roommate found herself without enough shekels to buy:

VISIT ISRAEL
BEFORE ISRAEL VISITS YOU

Anyway, shalom as they say!

A funny thing happened the other day when we drinking heavily at a bar in DC with our college friend Mike. His fiancée didn't show up to meet us, and we began to wonder whether there was a reason we hadn't received our "Save The Date" notices yet. Good thing the next sentence out of his mouth was, "Would you believe some people thought they hadn't been invited because they hadn't gotten Save The Date notices?" Ha! "How absurd is the 'Save The Date'? Anyone who expects a "Save The Date" so they can cross out their weekend nine months in advance should just forget about coming altogether, they're clearly too important to be our friends." We decided Mike, whose lady assured us that he did more than his share of their wedding planning, would be the perfect wedding planner for us in the event (heh) THAT happens, and commissioned him to write this short opinion piece, "Planning A Wedding Is No Big Deal And If You Think It Is The Terrorists Have Won."

Put down that $10 copy of the summer issue of Martha Stewart Weddings. Stop watching Bridezillas. And no matter how much you long for validation from all the other brides who also obsess over every last detail, step the hell away from The Knot. Because planning a wedding is just not that fucking hard.

My fiancée and I are getting married in October and, as far as we can tell, the whole thing is pretty much planned already. This fact seems to stun people who, upon learning of our elaborate plan to wed, assume that commiserating over how tremendously stressed out about this awesome responsibility we must be is a bulletproof small-talk strategy. Sure, we both know people who spent hours and hours in the months before their weddings running around from meeting to meeting, updating their personalized WeddingChannel.com pages or generally going berserk over the whole thing. But instead of being stressed out, we're mostly confused about what, exactly, is supposed to be so complicated about this that there are already two editions of Wedding Planning For Dummies. We've dealt with the whole thing ourselves, with no hired-gun consultant overseeing it and hardly any logistical input from either set of parents (though they are helping to foot some of the bill, which FYI is coming in just under the national average of $37,000). And we're not doing some radically scaled-down anti-wedding, either — we're having a Saturday night party in Washington, D.C., with more than 120 guests, a live band, plenty of flowers, etc. (Though according to Macy's, we're "happy hipsters," so who knows, maybe the whole thing will wind up coming off like a bad night at Misshapes.)

Here's what we did: we went to see some venues. They're in the phone book, guys! You can just walk right in and look around! We found one that could accomodate an open bar for all of our friends for a decent price. We sacrificed top shelf liquor in the name of the budget, but we knew from experience that well booze gets you just as drunk as the expensive stuff. If not drunker. We tried to get away with not inviting our billions of young cousins, but when my aunt pulled a fast one on us and got the kids lobbying, we gave up — but I think we've got good leverage to make the cousins babysit our future kids for free. Then we called a talent agency, which sent us a DVD with demos of bands. We watched the DVDs and chose one. They even let us check them out in person first. Then we found a rabbi who wouldn't mind starting the ceremony a bit before sundown on a Saturday. The rabbi was the hardest part. It wasn't that hard.

It's one thing to get all freaked out over your wedding if you're the kind of asshole who wants a "long bar made completely from ice and monogrammed with (your) initials," serve "signature Matt-tinis and Love-mopolitans" to your guests or do your hora-ing on a "custom-made white dance floor." If that all sounds good to you, there's no cure for your egotism, and apparently you've decided the world is perfect and you can waste money instead of giving to charity, so by all means, go crazy.

But for the rest of us, despite what Jezebel reported a few months ago, it's just not true that "once you're in it, you're in it, you gotta have the best band, the best flowers, the best dress."

There's no reason to bother meeting with more and more vendors if you've found someone whose work you like and whose price fits your budget. Is it possible that someone getting married across town from us is going to have better flowers? Maybe, but our guests won't know, so we don't care. (Besides, does such a thing as "better flowers" even exist? Oh, you know what? Fuck you.) If you actually know anyone who cares that your tablecloths don't match the colors on your invitations, tell them that you're very sorry, but they received the invitation in error and you hope they'll make alternate plans for the evening. If you never start worrying about that kind of bullshit, it'll never have the chance to take over your life.

And if you can remember that the basic goal of your guests will be to a) try to get their money's worth in booze and food for all the gifts they had to buy you and b) get laid, it's easy not to go too overboard. It's just a big party! Just like all the other parties you've thrown in your life! Okay, with a rabbi/priest/minister/imam/whatever, fine, but they're just stoked they didn't have to buy you gifts. Trust me, a little open-bar scotch and any decent imam will overlook the flaws in your color scheme.

All the manufactured stress does seem to underscore the one truly excellent insight in Rebecca Mead's new book (I mean, at this point haven't we all beento enough weddings to know that, duh, shit's gotten out of hand?): that with more and more couples living together before marriage, there's no actual, legitimate traumatic event at the end of a wedding anymore. (Well, unless you're, ahem, "saving yourself for marriage"). Instead of losing their minds because they're moving out of their parents' house and starting a new life with a man they don't know that well, brides lose their minds because they can't find monogrammed flower pots or because they don't know how wide their chair ties are.

So brides of America, chill the fuck out! You have nothing to lose but your chains. And your full-length trains. Remember, it's not like you have real problems.

Anyway, In an interview with Salon Rebecca shares her favorite bridal magazines (InStyle Weddings and the trade publication Vows) and explains that the fundamental problem with the wedding business is not that it isn't feminist — hiring a wedding planner "could totally be construed as a post-feminist act" (!!) but rather, the consumerism of the whole thing:

One of my favorite pieces [in Vows] described how to market to the "nontraditional bride" and warned readers that this kind of woman is dangerously apt to "forget the wedding and prepare for marriage." These articles were often unintentionally hilarious, but also very chilling. People who work in the wedding business often appear to be very warm and sentimental, but they're salespeople, and the successful ones are completely coldblooded about it.

Okay, but why are all our friends so goddamned susceptible to these reptilian salesbots? Doesn't our generation have enough experience with, uh, men to know better?

The Marriage-Industrial Complex [Salon]
Rebecca Mead
Earlier: NY Times Book Reviewer Loves The Big Tacky Weddings!
The Economics Of Weddings Continue To Blow Our Minds