Brides Gone Wild

So, I've returned from the 6th annual bridal fest 2010. My teeth hurt and my tongue is raw from the array of cake samples.My feet are achy from walking up and down the rows comprised of 186 booths of every wedding need a gal might have a hankering for. Wow! Unbelievable! 


When I say something for everyone; I'm lying.There's not much there for an enterprising woman on a small budget. If you have any sort of imagination, this is not the place for you. It is a wonderland if you can't think for yourself and you like your things to be like everyone else's things.It's a jackpot of overpriced look-a-likes.


Women who book fancy photographers have nothing better to spend their money on. I have never been in anyone's home where they have a poster sized portrait of any part of their wedding day hanging on the wall. Never. In this day, when every person is packing a camera phone and even the cheapest digital camera can take superior photo's, what's the point of hiring a pro? Instruct the guests that photography is strongly encouraged.Ask them to send them your way, and viola', cherished wedding memories.


On to venues for your special day: come on, you don't know anyone with a pretty backyard, a lovely FREE park, a V.F.W. hall? When you decorate it isn't it to your specifications and is a chandelier that important? D.J.? It's called a c.d. burner, now get to making a list of all your favorites and find out who has a kick-ass sound system and BORROW it. Really, you don't have a hammy friend who could play the part of d.j for one night? I bet you do. 




None of your friends bake? Is a traditional three tiered white cake the only thing you can come up with for the dessert part of the festivities? My friends Tom and Toni had a massive crispy creme doughnut tower instead of the usual cake. Genius and delicious. By the by, the newest trend- which bakeries don't want to tell you about- is the fake cake.That's a piece of Styrofoam (as big as you want) covered in fondant. The guests eat sheet cake and marvel at the massive wedding cake you have set up on a fancy table.Easy and inexpensive.

This is memorable...

This is not.

You are seriously going to pay a bunch of money for invitations? We live in a world in which senior citizens are computer savvy, I'm sure one of your computer geek friends would be happy to personalize something awesome for you.




Without going off; I could totally go off! The list in my mind is annoying purely because I can see the simplest ways of achieving whatever fantastic wedding you can dream up. If anyone is looking for a wedding planner at half the price of whatever a-hole you've hired, well look no further. I'm not sure that's my best sales pitch, but it's true. Don't be cattle trussed in white taffeta, being herded down a rose petal littered carpet toward the pulpit. Do you want it to be a memorable day, or a day that looks eerily like everyone and their monkeys wedding day?

This is interesting...

This is not.

For the record, I had a great time today with my girlfriends and my daughter. We had laughs and snacks and the girls got their faces airbrushed. The fashion show was a G-rated Chip and Dale's show- LOVED IT. I'm also not engaged; just a professional tag-a-longer.I strongly encourage the indulgence one of these events offers; to just to be a girl dreaming of a dream wedding.Whatever your vision of that may be.

First Thoughts in a Car Wreck

Through the fragmented windshield I can see different people swooping in and out of the scene. I’m the only one left in the cab of the crumpled racecar yellow pick-up truck. Frantic faces of women with confused, panic stricken expressions. They look as if they don’t want to alarm me but just can’t help themselves.

“Oh my God, she’s impaled,” one woman says loud; too loud- I don’t want to know that truth. Why can’t I continue to believe that my pelvis is merely broken and the fence post is tightly pinning me in the uncomfortably dangling bare- footed pose?

No matter how I squirm, I can’t break the death grip the two-by-six has against my foolish nineteen-year-old body. The body I was never extremely fond of and now it wasn’t going to ever be the same. There would always be the chunk of missing bone from my pelvis that wouldn’t be returned or even mentioned again by any doctors. The hole the board would leave in my stomach and lower back would only be sealed by time and many bandage changes; no stitches would ever be sown where the wood tore through my soft susceptible body.

I’m thoroughly upset at the inconvenience the whole situation places me in. The pain reverberating through my bones is like a wild violin song with the strings being rubbed vigorously and repetitively. Vaguely I can see the blood on my arms, but it seems insignificant, it’s dripping from my hair down my forehead and I can see a dark maroon circle forming where the strange pinning board has me in its grasp. The blood ring on my Levi’s cut-off shorts doesn’t look like enough to really be concerned with; it’s kind of camouflaged in its dark red mingling in the dark blue.

The thing that’s irking me most is that I’d just customized the shorts a few days earlier with shiny green sequins following along the edges of the pockets. I’d be mad at the loss of those shorts for a very long time. At the hospital they handed my clothes in a bag to my family. My mom, brothers and sister took them to the rusty burn barrel made from a 55 gallon drum in the back yard of my mom’s house. They later told me that they stood there and cried as they tossed my black bikini and shorts into the flames. Apparently there’s something mournful about your loved ones blood and excrement encrusted clothes that makes you happy she survived.

I just want out of the cab of the small Chevy S-10. I want us to get on with the plan that was moving along so smoothly, albeit a touch too fast. We are going to the ocean; we don’t have time for a car wreck. A small one- fine, I’ve been in enough of those. I do not want to be stuck in this smashed beer can of a truck with my life hanging in some sort of you’re-too-far-from-the-hospital limbo. I have a brown paper sack of illegal fireworks from the Rez, and I want my California friends to see how beautiful bottle rockets are exploding in the waves.

And my body wants to give up.

But I can’t.

 I want more than life itself to be cut out of the wreckage. I continuously tell anyone who gets in my vision from behind the half busted out glass crystals.

“Cut me the Fuck out!” It’s like my disgusting new tunnel vision mantra. It seems like a simple solution; I’m impaled inside of a truck, board all the way through me and plunged firmly into the seat behind; cut me out. Eventually it happens, but it’s not as easy as all that. When you're nineteen everything seems easy until the day it isn't anymore.