Today, I gave a bridal shower for my best friend Heather. Wedding etiquette dictates that I, as maid of honor, perform this task. A friend of Heather’s, who lives down the street from my parents, Rhonda, offered to help me, and to host the shower at her house, and I agreed. So then she basically took over the whole operation. I mean, this woman must’ve been absolutely starved to give a shower or something. It sure seemed like that from the way she muscled in.

At first, I was relieved, because she took over a lot of the pain-in-the-ass tasks, like sending out the invitations (made on her computer, with duck-embellished corners), but I got annoyed at her for being so controlling about the whole thing. And plus, her style and my style tended to clash. Mostly though, I just gave up and gave in to her ideas of what a shower should be, which were probably very similar to the ideas that the people who work at Southern Living magazine have about showers. Or the people at Family Circle. Or Kraft.

 

Rhonda is one of those people who cooks with Pam. I just don’t understand the whole Pam thing. The night before the shower I was over at her house making meatballs, and she asked me to hand her some Pam, and when I opened the cupboard where it was she had three different freaking kinds of Pam in there. You know, like olive oil flavored, butter flavored, some other kind, I guess just Pam flavored. Pam...it kinda reminds me of doing a shot of WD-40 or something. It has this weird alcoholic tinge to it.

 

I did fight for a few of the things I believe in strongly. Like, no gunky store-bought icing on the cake (which Rhonda wanted to be in the shape of a hat, for God’s sake). Because I hate store-bought icing so. Especially the white kind. Yuck-o. It reminds me of Crisco mixed with confectioner's sugar. In fact I think it basically is.

 

The Cult of Cake.

So this morning I woke up at nine, in my old bedroom at my parent’s house, to a beautiful sunny summer day. Unfortunately, the night before I had promised Rhonda I would be at her place at nine to make the cake, which after much argument she had finally agreed could be frosted with whipped cream. It had to be assembled and then chilled for two hours. I gulped down a cup of coffee and headed out to face her. When I got there she was FREAKING out about the icing: would we have enough? Would it spread right? Would it melt off the cake? etc. I found that if I hummed quietly while I worked it helped to drown her out while having the beneficial side effect of calming her down a little.

After the cake was iced (no crises occurred), we decorated it with daisies and ivy leaves. It looked great, in a hat-shaped sort of way. Rhonda took half a roll of pictures of the cake creation process: the cake when it was naked, the cake while it was being iced, after icing was completed, three pictures capturing each of us (me, her, her mom) strategically placing flora on the cake, the completed cake on the kitchen counter, on the dining room sideboard… it was like some kind of cake-worshipping religious moment going on. She actually asked an unsuspecting and uninvolved neighbor, out watering the lawn, to come in and view the majesty that was this hat cake. The neighbor hesitated, and then politely declined. I was in the front yard picking flowers for the dining room table bouquet during this exchange.

 

 

A Truck Invasion.

A few minutes after the conversation with the neighbor, a huge truck snorted by. "That's kind of strange," I said. "I believe that’s illegal," said the neighbor. Rhonda said "Oh, I think that's Tim... yep, that's him. He's just stopping by to say hi, I imagine; he's got some stuff he's delivering." (Tim is Rhonda's boyfriend.) Hah! What an entrance. Tim is the kind of person who just thinks it is normal to drive a semi down a little one-way neighborhood street and park in the church lot at the end of the street, where a cop car happens to be sitting on this fine warm summer morning. I don't mean this in a bad way. After chatting amiably with the cop for a few minutes, he marched over (ticket-free! I was impressed) for the sole purpose of saying hi to his girlfriend. Then he left.

 

 

Yes, It’s Quite Humid, Isn’t It?

The ladies started to roll in at about half past noon. I met some of Heather’s friends from work; she's a middle school teacher. They were very nice, but I found it difficult to keep a conversation going for longer than a few sentences. Her mother arrived with assorted other female family members. Most of the attendees were already married.

 

 

Fashion Notes.

Oddly, a disproportionate number of women were wearing outfits of an overall avocado color (4 out of 18). Best dressed: Heather's bisexual sister-in-law, who showed up with her daughter and her lesbian lover in tow. The sister-in-law was wearing a frog-green cotton sundress printed with a weedy-looking plant design; her ten year old daughter wore a forties style pastel getup; the lover wore khaki clam diggers and Doc Marten boots. Rhonda had put on a pair of beautiful earrings made with oblongs of purple glass, but they looked like they were stretching her earlobes. Someone asked her if they were heavy but she insisted they were not.

 

 

(excerpt from Daybook2)

 

 

 

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