OK, I promise this is the last one. No. Really. This time, it is. I just can’t stop telling these wedding disaster stories, because you all keep springing them on me. And they’re just too funny.
I mean funny later — not funny when they happened. Well, maybe sometimes when they happened. But it was like when my daughter Curly Girl was small and threw up on the floor of a McDonald’s restaurant (sorry to whoever had to clean it up) until vomit came out of her nose. She cried hysterically and I kept promising her, “Really, someday you’ll laugh at this.” She didn’t believe me. But, guess what?
Occasionally, she’ll say, “Hey, Mom, there’s that McDonald's where throw-up came out of my nose,” and, yes, we’ll laugh.
That’s like the things that happen at weddings, except weddings provide the opportunity for more stress. I’m recording these stories to try to show my favorite daughter that she doesn’t need to be anxious about “everything being perfect” in her upcoming wedding, because nothing is ever perfect. Trust me. Nothing. Except Godiva dark chocolate.
I’m going to tell you a couple of stories that were related to me by my actual friends (yes, I do have some) with whom I’ve shared adult beverages on many occasions. I’m not using their names because I am not interested in sudden death. They know where I live. In some cases, I’m paraphrasing their stories here as I remember them, with the reminder that my brain is not trustworthy these days:
Friend: “I knew my first marriage was doomed when, at the reception, I made out with the best man. It was so weird. He and I had never had anything between us. But … when I was coming out of the bathroom at the hotel where the reception was, he was also coming out of the men’s room. We just looked at each other, and he grabbed me and we both started making out. It was like this pent-up passion. Then we just pulled away. I straightened my hair, he straightened his clothes. I walked out into the hall leading back to the reception and he followed me five minutes later. I should mention that he was smokin’ hot. Tall, blond, swimmer’s body and vivid blue eyes. All to say I wasn’t ready to get married but didn’t know how to get out of the elaborate wedding plans. We also never spoke of it. He and his girlfriend moved away about six months later and we lost touch. I’ve always felt bad about it.”
Friend: “We were threatened with arrest and jail at our wedding reception, because we were the third wedding at the facility that day, and the people running the place were tired and wanted to go home. They told us it was over and we should leave. We pointed out that we still had two more hours on our contracted time that we’d paid for, but they said they would call the police if we didn’t leave. One employee told my wife, ‘Pretty dress. It will look good in jail.’ We ignored them and tried to have a good time. Ultimately, no one went to the slammer.”
And here’s a wedding that I, your Frumpy Mom, actually attended. It was held at a resort near Rosarito Beach in Baja. The bride and groom decided to hold it there in the hopes that their big bosses would not want to attend. (But they did anyway). They put down a deposit to hold their wedding day. When they went back down to check on things, they discovered the wedding planner had run away with all their money. The resort did reimburse them, but then the cases of champagne they’d brought down were also stolen. One of our friends used an ATM in Rosarito and had his ATM card and money from his account stolen. (Are you sensing a theme here?).
The bride’s school friends who were from Long Island, New York, came back to the hotel sobbing because they had never seen beggars on the street before. This tended to put a damper on things.
During the rehearsal dinner, which was held in a beautiful ocean view salon at the Rosarito Beach Hotel, I went into the bathroom and found the groom’s mom sobbing. She was upset because she’d paid a fortune for this dinner and they had served lobster instead of the steak she had ordered. (We’d all had lobster the night before). And no one on the catering staff cared or would even listen to her protests. I assured her that lobster was just great and people were having fun, so she should relax and roll with it. I hope she did.
During the wedding, the officiant (humor columnist Jeff Kramer) rode in on a politically incorrect burro wearing a big sombrero. He cracked his head on a branch and almost fell off. The rest of the wedding went off without a hitch, until the bride’s brother lost the keys to her car. He only had one job: To drive her car back to the states for her. She spent the morning after her wedding night frantically trying to figure out how to get her car back into the country with no keys. You never appreciate the auto club until you don’t have one.
Afterward, the bride said to me, “Never have a destination wedding. Never!” And what do you think this woman told me when I announced that my daughter Curly Girl was getting married?
“You should do it in Mexico!”
Seriously, my friends. You can’t make this stuff up. (And, by the way, I love Mexico.)
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