Bad Bridesmaid (14 page)

Now, some bridesmaids are Bad because they can’t take the stress or live up to the obligations, but others are just simply born that way. Bad-to-the-Bone Bridesmaids, like Joelle’s co-attendant, will not sacrifice their space in the spotlight even during another woman’s wedding, and will someday morph into mothers who force their children to enter beauty pageants.

Regular Bad Bridesmaids will subject themselves to an unusual degree of stress and trauma in order to look just right, but something undoubtedly goes horribly wrong. Razors, lasers, and tweezers are all instrumental in the quest for perfection, and malfunctions are to be expected when that much heavy machinery is in play.

A three-timer named Casey G. found herself carrying around an eighty-five-dollar foot-tall beehive for her friend’s wedding. She was wearing a retro-style halter dress, and the hairdresser had decided to build her do into a complementary look. After what seemed like hours of back-combing and the dispensing of an entire bottle of hairspray onto the bridesmaid’s head, the stylist felt that further reinforcements were required. Two full packs of bobby pins were spliced into Casey’s hair, enough metal to cause a disruption in the magnetic field around the church.

After the ceremony, the pins were digging into her head and Casey decided to take them out and let her hair down for the rest of the night. She imagined a hair commercial moment: that the last pin would be pulled out and she would shake her head seductively, sending her hair cascading down to her shoulders like that of a naughty librarian at the end of a shift. Instead, her hairstyle stayed exactly where it had been, held in place by the expensive shellacking it had received hours earlier.

“It didn’t come out,” Casey said. “It was still in the exact formation, and it stayed that way all night, unsupported.”

It’s better to have too much hair, though, than to suddenly find yourself missing a chunk. The day before her friend’s wedding, Hannah J. and the rest of the bridal party went to the salon to have their nails done and eyebrows waxed—a last-minute pampering session, a final gloss to perfect their shiny facades for the big day. As Hannah lay on the waxing chair, the serenity of the scene was interrupted by a piercing pain in her eyelid. The technician had somehow managed to rip off a layer of skin along with her wayward eyebrow hairs, and Hannah wondered if reconstructive surgery would be required.

She didn’t want to alarm her friend The Bride, who had never had any waxing done, so she promised her that the redness would fade by the time of the wedding. Once she was alone, Hannah rushed to inspect her ravaged eyelid in the bathroom mirror. There she saw that underneath her perfectly arched brow, a slash of angry red flesh oozed a clear liquid.

“Of course, the next day it was a scab,” Hannah sighed.

Needless to say, she did not return to that salon when in need of a bikini wax.

There are many dangers associated with being in a bridal party, but the role has not yet been definitively proven to give people cancer, although I am convinced that all that exposure to synthetic fabrics and estrogen can’t be good for you. Hopefully, for one bridesmaid, beet juice proves to be equally nontoxic.

Nina M. was selected as one of four bridesmaids in the small-
town wedding of a high school friend. It was the beginning of summer, and The Bride and her maids were still pasty from a winter of sun deprivation. All but one of them, that is. Bridesmaid number three showed up for the big event with a beautiful tanning-booth skin tone, about twenty shades darker than the rest of the bridal party and only a moderately different hue than that of a chocolate fountain. On the day before the wedding, The Bride decided that everyone’s skin must be made to coordinate, and that her dress should be the only blindingly white wedding accessory.

As Nina told it, the operative word was
glow.

There were no tanning beds in the tiny town, but just down the country road from The Bride’s house, a spray-on-tan outlet had recently opened. It was located in the back of a giant warehouse that was home to some sort of oil field operation. On the day of their spray, the women pulled their cars in among the big rigs and pickup trucks with no small amount of trepidation. Nina was fairly sure the sign advertising the salon was a joke, a way to lure hapless women off the road and get them to strip while construction workers watched through a peephole. With fear in their hearts, the bridal party made their way past grease-stained men taking smoke breaks and prayed that the multiple vats of combustible petroleum products had nothing to do with the mystery substance in which they were soon to be doused.

“I was terrified,” said Nina, who had never heard of spray-on tanning before that day. “And the bride was basically using us as guinea pigs.”

The women entered a tiny office and were shown an instructional video explaining that the tanning liquid was made of beet juice.
1
he friendly female owner then demonstrated a series of
moves they would be required to make inside the spraying booth, taking them through their paces like a slow-motion aerobics class. First they were to stand—butt naked—staring at the spray nozzles head on, their arms at their sides. After each hiss of the tanning spray, a red light would flash, signaling that the women should change positions. They had to do quarter-turns, with one arm raised and the other lowered. They had to separate their legs so their inner thighs would be exposed, then turn to douse their sides and back. The owner stressed that their palms should always be positioned away from the nozzles, and warned that it would feel a little funny when they got a face full of beet juice.

“It’s like you’re in the video for “Walk Like an Egyptian,’” Nina said, referencing a Bangles tune that has had no place near a wedding since 1988.

None of the bridesmaids wanted to be the first in the chamber, but The Bride refused to lead the charge. If anyone was going to be blinded, burned, or drowned in beet juice, it was not going to be her. Eventually, she ordered her younger sister to take the plunge. Youth before beauty, they say. After what felt like hours, the teenager emerged and the women inspected her for signs of streaks or posttraumatic stress. She appeared to be uniformly tanned and relatively unscathed, so bridesmaid number two took her turn.

Nina was still nervous, convinced that the machine would malfunction while she was inside, choking her slowly with a thickening mist of orange dye. She stripped down to her birthday suit, rubbed another mystery liquid on her fingernails to prevent them from staining, and took a deep breath.

“I was terrified I was going to come out looking like some streaky orange monster,” she said.

Inside the booth things went relatively smoothly. She remembered to turn when the red light flashed and only momentarily felt like she had been lured into a B horror flick or government-sponsored chemical experiment. Finally, with all three bridesmaids a pleasant shade of peach, The Bride at last took her turn, satisfied that nothing could go wrong.

The next morning, Nina got in the shower early to get ready for the wedding and noticed that the water running down the drain was a deep shade of brown. She thought the city’s water supply had been contaminated until she realized that the residue from her tan was being rinsed away.

The Bride, meanwhile, made the same discovery in a more traumatizing way. In the wedding photographs, large peach-colored stains were visible on the sides of her dress.

Orange is still a better color to be seeing on your wedding day than red. Giselle W.’s bridal party started to crumble along with The Bride’s nerves as the group got their hair and makeup done on the morning of the wedding. The Bride, a friend of Giselle’s from university, had “pre-approved” the two-time bridesmaid’s hairstyle, a dramatic upsweep modeled on the one worn by Julia Roberts when she won her Oscar for
Erin Brockovich.
But when Giselle’s hair was finished, The Bride decided it looked similar to her own and ordered her to have it redone.

His ego clearly damaged, the hairdresser reassembled Giselle’s hair into a less fetching updo, adding to his already hefty fee of ninety-five dollars, and the wedding party headed for the mall to get their faces painted before the ceremony. To save time and the
cost of having a makeup artist make a house call, each of them was booked at a different department store kiosk.

“So I was at M.A.C., one was at Christian Dior—we were all at different places,” Giselle said. “And the bride sort of floated from one to the next, checking up on us, because she was having hers done later at the hotel.”

The bridal party was decked out in red velvet dresses, a material usually reserved for vampire costumes or the curtains in a brothel. It was an October wedding, so the makeup artists began applying rich, earthy tones to complement the autumn theme.

Giselle had a shadow of dark red brushed on her eyelids, and another bridesmaid, Penny, wore deep red lipstick. When the girls’ looks were complete, The Bride decided she did not approve.

“She came over and she said, ‘Giselle, you can’t have red eyes, and, Penny, your lipstick is too dark,’ So we all went back and had our makeup redone.”

The second time around, the wise young bridesmaids offered up their chosen lipstick and eye shadows for approval
before
they were applied. Penny’s new lipstick was given the green light, and she returned to her station for round two. Once her second makeover was done, The Bride suddenly appeared, rushing to the bridesmaid’s side and saying, “No, no, I changed my mind. Change it again.”

Each of the four bridesmaids had their cosmetics reapplied three times in slightly different shades, the makeup artists losing patience and silently reappraising their fifty-dollar flat rate, and
still
The Bride rejected the final product. Finally, Giselle said, Penny snapped and asked what the hell was going on.

The question was too much for the obviously frazzled bride.
She screamed at her bridesmaids that it was her wedding and they would do as they were told, and they reciprocated her rage by detailing how awful their entire bridesmaid experience had been, from the boring shower to the blasé bachelorette. Soon, one of the other bridesmaids burst into tears, sending Deep Rose blush and Charcoal Rain mascara running all over her face, and The Bride sprinted off through the store. Her veil was already in place, and Giselle remembers seeing it trail behind her as she dashed into the purse section, her made-up maids in hot pursuit.

They cornered her near the Louis Vuittons and tried to calm her down—to no avail. Like a trapped fugitive going out in a blaze of gunfire, The Bride attacked, shooting off insults and saying she no longer wanted them in her wedding.

“This is the morning of. My hair is done, her veil is on, and we’re standing in the middle of the mall yelling at each other,” Giselle said. The Saturday shoppers stopped and stared, and the bridesmaids heard people whispering to one another, “Oh my God, they’ve been kicked out of a wedding.”

As the cosmetics girls pointed and whispered and a bemused security guard looked on, The Bride repeated her decision that two of the four bridesmaids were no longer welcome at her wedding. The other two had bitten their tongues when their makeovers were undermined, and were spared The Bride’s wrath.

Giselle and Penny left the mall and returned home, their precious hair and makeup still in place, wondering what the hell had just transpired.

Months later, Giselle found a photograph taken of the bridal party in the department store as they were getting their first round of makeup applied. They had gathered together for a quick
snapshot, The Bride in the middle with her veil in place, their formal hairstyles illuminated by the glowing bulbs of the department store mirrors.

“We’re sitting at the makeup counter together all lovey-dovey,” Giselle said. “And five minutes later, drama unfolded.”

T
here is exactly one photo of me from the wedding in which I was meant to be a bridesmaid. It is a beautiful scene, taken on the cobblestone terrace of an exclusive lakefront golf and country club. The table where I’m seated is surrounded by flowers, and in the background the grass rolls off into water and sunset like a lush green infinity pool.

I had thought about pulling the photographer aside when I arrived and asking her to avoid getting me in any of the official photographs, certain that the last thing The Bride would want floating on the periphery of her wedding memories was my grumpy face.
I decided that was a bit melodramatic, though, so instead I spent the evening with one eye trained on the photographer, careful not to position myself between her and The Bride, the bridesmaids, or any other important relative or guest on whom she may have been training her lens. But in the end, she got one by me.