Mingling Sensation

Jack and Jill went up the hill to spawn 15,000 more wedding parties

The proliferation of pre-wedding parties is getting out of hand. Of course, I’m talking about pre-wedding parties in general. If I was at your specific Jack and Jill party, bridal shower, engagement-announcement party or pre-shower six-months-till-the-big-day Jack and Jill rehearsal karaoke cocktail mixer, I assure you it was wonderful. I couldn’t believe how radiant those two young lovebirds looked, and I look forward to seeing you at the next 19 events leading up to the actual exchange of vows.

I blame Williams-Sonoma. The other day I went into a Williams-Sonoma in search of a blender, and left empty-handed when I discovered that they didn’t have anything for less than $100. For $100, a blender should not only mix up a margarita, it should walk over to the couch, salt your glass and then wave palm fronds while playing a steel drum. I don’t even know what I’d expect from the $230 KitchenAid Pro Line Chef’s Blender, but it would probably be illegal.

Why do these mundane items cost so much? Because nobody actually buys anything for themselves in Williams-Sonoma. The only way you can own so much as a garlic press from Williams-Sonoma is to get engaged and have your friends buy it. Williams-Sonoma knows that registry shoppers barely look at what they’re buying, they just know they need to spend enough money to not seem cheap. You don’t think, “Gee, $150 seems like a lot for a butter tray,” you think, “Yes! Nobody’s taken the butter tray! Now I don’t have to cobble together $150 worth of snifters.” And since people bring registry gifts to wedding-related parties, the best way to ensure you get that olive de-pitter you need is to throw as many parties as possible. Note: If you’re afraid of seeming greedy, you can say, “Please don’t bring gifts to this party.” People will bring them anyway, in order to make those fools who read that message literally, like myself, feel like bastards.

But it’s not the perpetual gift-buying that bothers me, it’s the chatting. If you’re at any kind of a matrimonial function, you’d better bring your small-talk A-game, because you’re inevitably thrust into a social situation with aunts, uncles, neighbors, cousins, cousins’ neighbors, and neighbors’ cousins’ dentists. You won’t know these people, and you’ll have as much in common with them as David Duke has with Malcolm X. So you’ll have to chat, and I’m not good at that. For example, at my friend Wilson’s engagement party, it took roughly five minutes for me to somehow get the conversation on to sex-change operations and make a joke about inverted penises that silenced half the room. A good social rule of thumb, I’ve since learned, is, If you’re eating shrimp, don’t say “inverted penis.”

Another one is, Don’t lure the governor into walking in on you in the bathroom. This one I figured out on my own, probably much to the relief of Mitt Romney. He was a surprise guest at a recent pre-shower party (the party actually had no official name, but I guess that’s what you’d call it) for one of my girlfriend’s friends. As the party wound down, Mitt started edging toward the door. I had to take a leak, so I made my way to the men’s room in the hallway outside the function room, and opened the door to discover the dreaded one-hitter. It occurred to me then that if I left the door unlocked, there was a decent chance that the governor of Massachusetts would walk in on me taking a leak, which would be hilarious. But maturity (and not wanting to get in trouble on the home front) won out, and I locked the door. Sure enough, someone tried the door while I was pouring the foundation for a little Salt Lake City. Was it Mitt? I don’t know, but when I returned to the party, he was standing in a corner by himself, scrutinizing a painting, looking much like a guy killing time waiting for the john.

But you can’t expect all pre-wedding parties to have great moments like that, which is why I think we need to scale this trend back to what it once was: a wedding shower that only the women would go to. Unfortunately, guys don’t usually care enough to exert their influence on the wedding-planning process, and so we travel in the opposite direction, toward weekends filled with perpetual wedding parties and polite small talk. There oughta be a law, I say. Whaddaya think, Governor?