The trouble with being a bridesmaid

From the moment that ring hits your finger, there are a few key steps that a girl takes:

1) Call everyone you know. Scream into the phone.

2) Lose your voice, resort to email and text messages.

3) Plan your dream wedding in less than 10 minutes- with no thought to budget, reality, or even gravity for that matter.

4) Pick out the girls that would do anything for you- like help you try on 50 dresses, lick 100 envelopes, or listen to you cry hysterically over bad napkin colors. In other words, you pick out the bridesmaids.

The trouble with being a bridesmaid is that nobody really wants to be one. And not so much because of Bridezilla meltdowns pointed in our direction. We're used to dealing with our friends when they've got one foot in the loony bin.

It's really because of those hideous, God-awful dresses. They are the things of horror stories.
Here's a fun website dedicated to them:

http://www.uglydress.com/index.html


I've worn my share of bridesmaid dresses. Some were not so bad. Some were violently horrendous.
One was so bad my own mother told me I looked like a rabid animal drowning in pepto-bismol.

I'm also not the best bridesmaid- I've managed to step on my dress and rip the seam, break the heel off my shoe, break the zipper off my dress, and lose the ever-important "mandatory bridesmaid jewelry". I've also done any combination of the above in any given wedding I've not only been a part of, but just gone to as a guest as well.

I'm a bit of a trainwreck at weddings.

I used to think that women put their unsuspecting friends in these ill-fitting catastrophic nightmares purely for their own enjoyment. I've heard of girls picking out ugly dresses for the soul purpose of making sure they (the bride) look the best on the day of the wedding.

But I think usually it's just an unfortunate cocktail of a color, a cut, and a price range that suits the bride. Throw those together with 5 or six girls of varying height and weight, and you've got a problem. And that problem takes shape at the reception, on the dance floor. Four cocktails in doing the Dougie with it's skirt pulled up over it's  knees and shoes thrown in a corner.

A girl in an ugly dress will just resort to drinking until she forgets about it. And then dancing like an untrained stripper in front of your Grandmother.

So when planning my wedding, I decided to give my friends the gift of not having to worry about it. They're already spending their vacation with me, I think that's enough. And besides, it's a wedding- not a private school. No uniforms required.

Every so often I get a question about it. Who are your bridesmaids? Well at a wedding with 30 guests, it's kind of hard to pick a bridal party. I'd have every girl up there with me. I did ask my best friend to bring a blue dress if she can make it, but other than that.... no bridesmaids.

So girls, wear whatever you want to my wedding. Hell, drink 4 margaritas do the Macarena in a tie-dye bikini and a sombrero.

What ever makes you happy. It's your vacation, and it's that kind of party.