I pit the bride from hell

The BBQ Pit
61

On the other hand, we really did have terrible service (at least from the caterers) at our wedding. When you pay for something, you don’t expect vendors to take advantage of you because it’s a frantic day and you are deliriously happy. When you pay extra for glass champagne flutes and actual china plates (believe me, we had a small town wedding, nothing big and fancy, but I drew the line at having a semi-formal meal off of paper plates and plastic cups) and you get plastic cups and paper plates, when the head table does not actual receive any waitservice beyond the initial food delivery, etc., well, you should expect to be spoken with.

We had our wedding in a small hick town (hey, I grew up there, and I’m a small town hick, so what can I say). My personal favorite was asking the DJ to simply play some general instrumental classical music during the dinner. We got a confused look, but figured he would be okay - how hard is it to pop in some Handel or something?

What plays for the first 5 minutes of the dinner before someone kindly tells him to try a new CD? Mozart’s Requiem.

We both laugh about it to this day.

62

Oh No! I’ve caught the gay!

Seriously, the one hissy I threw over my wedding was because the idiot at the rental place kept changing my order. I wanted white plates on white tablecloths. Is that so hard?

63

The closest my wife came to being Bridezilla was while looking for bridesmaid’s dresses.

First, a little background. We got engaged a little over a year before we got married, but we didn’t set a date right away. We decided at New Year’s that we would have our wedding at the end of May. We had already done some preliminary planning, so the pieces fell together rather smoothly. A small-ish wedding at our church, where we had met. A couple hours off for people to change, and then the reception in a friend’s yard with a couple of kegs, BBQ ribs, and other foods of this nature. Very low-key, and intended to be relaxed, fun, and above all a celebration. We succeeded admirably.

Anyway, my wife decided to make her own wedding dress. Simply put, it was gorgeous, and not at all a simple undertaking, especially carrying a roll of 60" fabric on the El. She was not, however, going to make four bridesmaid’s dresses, so she and her mother went shopping for these dresses. It should be noted that her mom is an even better seamstress than my wife is.

So, it’s early January, and the two of them hit the bridal shops. At the first place, my wife finds a dress she thinks will work. The stereotypical bridal, “consultant,” is all smiles at the prospect of a sale, until she asks when the wedding is. My wife tells her May, to which the woman exclaims, “This year?!” She then explains that this may be well-nigh impossible to do, and starts frantically searching catalogs and the like. My wife is convinced she was looking for the Hurry-up-the-bride-is-pregnant catalog (she wasn’t).

Finally, my wife has had all she can take of the condescension and the snarky comments about the lack of time in which to work. She looked the woman in the face and said, “I’m making my own gown, and it’s very complex. This thing? I could whip this together in a week!” At which point she left. My mother-in-law is famous for speaking her mind and not suffering fools lightly (God bless her), and my wife said my MIL looked embarrassed.

She settled on some off-the-rack dresses from Lord & Taylor that looked terrific, avoiding the need to deal with the wedding Nazis.

64

Holy crap, I think I’ve dated that guy before.

65

Honey, we’ve all dated this guy. I think he cloned himself. :eek:

66

I didn’t… unless he does a really convincing female impersonation.

67

It’s David Gerrold! :eek:

68

Can we speak a moment about guests?

Excuse me, but when your children are not invited to the wedding, that does means NO CHILDREN. My SIL made it quite clear she didn’t want children at the wedding, and wouldn’t you know it, some of the guests brought their children.

I found that incredibly rude. I do know her MIL spoke to the guest, and they didn’t stay long at the reception.

If you can’t find a babysitter for a few hours, stay home. Some people may find the service a bit distracting with little Johnny racing up and down the aisle, or little Susie screaming in the pews.

69

We solved the “noisy children” problem by having a Vegas wedding. You’ve gotta be pretty determined to take a kid to Vegas; there are too many places the young’uns can’t go.

However, don’t be fooled into thinking that Vegas weddings are small and simple affairs! They’re a whole lot easier than organizing a big church wedding by yourself, but we had more than fifty people at ours, about as many as we expected. Thing is, if you give the relatives an excuse to come to Vegas, they will come.

(For the record, we didn’t elope at the Eiffel Tower, but we did have a great view of the Tower from our Paris hotel room. And the breakfast in bed that came with the Paris “romance package” was to die for.)

70

Rats, that should read “about twice as many as we expected.”

71

We can, but then I have to tell my two Guest stories.

The first is the Guest from Hell. Piece of advice from your old Uncle Shodan - don’t have an open bar at the reception. Especially if the girlfriend of one of the groomsman is going to drink herself into a coma. Literally into a coma - she was rushed to the emergency room and spent forty-eight hours on a ventilator. Her dear friends celebrated her hospital admittance by getting into a fistfight in the parking lot, to which the police were called. One to the hospital, two others to jail.

The other Guest story is from my own wedding, many happy years ago. We were married in the local cathedral, which is open to the public during the day. At the rehearsal, there was what amounts to a bag lady sitting in the pews watching us. Shabbily dressed, paper bag of stuff - the whole works. And she asked one of the bridesmaids when the wedding was.

And sure enough, she showed up at the ceremony. Same outfit, same everything.

And she was wonderful. All smiles as the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Shodan came down the aisle, singing the hymns with enthusiasm, and bubbling with warm wishes for us both when she went thru the reception line on the way out of the church. I invited her to the reception, but she said she couldn’t make it.

I wish to God my father-in-law were half as gracious.

Regards,
Shodan

72

Yeah, unless, like me, they mean “This will be the happiest day of our lives to date, and the beginning of a wonderful life together.”

Unfortunately, most people seem to mean it just like you say.

73

I’ve been to many a wedding; and the worst I have seen was the drunken and verbally abusive father in law.

It’s hard to pretend to be having any kind of fun when this dude keeps muttering loudly:

“Waddaya mean I’m drunk? I’m not drunk! Bastards! Think you’se better’n me? I’ll kill ya! Bastards!”

Strange thing is that he’s not normally a drunk - in fact, that was sort of the problem; turns out later, he rarely drinks, but in “honour” of the wedding, had imbibed a lot - with unfortunate results.

Problem is, what do you do? Stop the wedding and drag the father of the bride out - probably resulting in a fist-fight? And who is going to do that? His wife couldn’t control him. He’s a big guy, looked like a gorilla in a suit (the father of the groom in contrast was a tiny fellow and a true gentleman - you could see him wilting with embarrasment, poor fellow).

In any event, we just gritted out teeth and got on with it. Made for tense and awkward proceedings all around.

I don’t know if his daughter ever forgave him for it, because soon after the wedding she ran off with one of his employees and I never saw her again (the groom was a relation of my wife’s).

74

I think you’d be surprised at how many people are that determined. When we went to Vegas, there were children everywhere, all the time. We saw one woman dragging three kids under the age of 8 onto a tram at 1 in the fucking morning. She couldn’t figure out why they were all so cranky. :rolleyes:

Then you have people like my cousin who was determined to bring her non-toilet-trained 3 year old to our French Quarter wedding because the kid had never spent the night away from her. We finally talked her out of that, thank Og.

75

If you want to guarantee Guestzilla’s presence, just have karaoke at the reception. The last wedding I was in (as a groomsman), one of the bride’s coworkers got plastered, wouldn’t relinquish the microphone, and was going to every table trying to get people to join her on stage. She was so annoying, the DJ came up to me and asked me if he should cut her mike. I said yes, but the groom’s brother overruled me and said he’d handle it (he did)
I had only a few requests for my wedding/reception, and no karaoke was near the top of the list.
Mrs. Chock didn’t go Bridezilla, mainly because I handled most of the planning with the church and reception. We had zero parental interference as we paid for the whole thing ourselves (we were both in our 30s and had good jobs + plus we had conflicting cultural traditions. Western culture - bride’s parents pay for the wedding, but in Chinese culture the groom’s parents pay for everything). Also we had an awesome DJ who pointed out to her that the reception was for the guests, and they should be comfortable and have fun. This kibboshed some of her more borderline-Bridezilla notions, something I was unable to do on my own. (Really honey, keep the slideshow under 10 minutes or people will get bored. Not everyone wants to see every photograph you’ve ever been in.)

76

Something like that happened to me, but with a co-worker. She had been planning her wedding (a grand affair, planned for May) for well over a year, and then I got engaged at Christmas. My fiance and I started planning a small, simple wedding for April, a month before my co-worker’s wedding. She was furious that I was getting married before her, when she’d been planning her wedding for a longer time, and was going to be stealing her spotlight. WTF?
She took a perverse pleasure in stating that I’d never be able to book a reception hall or get a photographer or a dress or anything else in that short amount of time. She was in full BrideZilla mode all the time, making phone calls, screaming at phtographers and caterers and having nervous breakdowns over the color of the napkins.
We were able to do it in just four months. My fiance’s cousin was a wedding phtographer and he did the pictures. I got my dress from a consignment shop, and we were able to do everything “wedding-y,” just on a much simpler scale than most. I think we spent about $4,000 or so for the whole thing, and most of that was for the reception at a hotel banquet room.

77

Slideshow? You had a slideshow at your wedding reception? Is that customary somewhere?

78

But . . . but . . . it’s supposed to be her day!

79

The last couple of weddings I’ve been to have been really small affairs. When my mom re-married her now ex-again husband, it was in his house (which was really a well-glorified trailer).

When my sister got married, it was very low-key. The invitations stated “Anyone wearing anything more formal than jeans and a T-shirt will be soaked with a garden hose on sight.” The whole thing took place in their backyard and eventually turned into your typical redneck barbecue party, only with champagne and cocktails in addition to the beer.

So I can assume my own wedding will be only as fancy as the bride and the bride’s family insists it be.

80

Well, from your username, I’d expect you to at least insist on Japanese schoolgirl uniform inspired dresses for the bridal party…