21 September 2003

You've Been Naughty...

I am currently doing my fourth tour of duty as Maid of Honor. One day I will have to write about all of the experiences, as they were all horrific and wonderful and bizarre in their own unique ways. This time around was going quite smoothly until this past weekend. We were scheduled to have a weekend-long bachelorette party in Baltimore, MD complete with shopping, brunch and sightseeing during the day and a blurred and drunken insanity at night. We were all really looking forward to the diversion from regular life and for, well, humiliating the bride-to-be.

Enter Hurricane Isabel.

Parts of Baltimore were without power, parts were underwater, and we took the hint and stayed home in NJ. Of course, the final decision didn�t come down until the last minute, and at 4pm on Friday we were planning an impromptu celebration that wound up being a huge amount of fun. Our theme? A �You�ve Been a Naughty Little Girl� party.

For the �Little Girl� part I went to the store and purchased party crap like I would if celebrating a 6 year old�s birthday. Animal masks, goodie bags, candy, streamers, noise makers and pin the tail on the donkey. Another friend made a sinful cake. We decided to play mini-golf during the day. And the �Naughty� part? Silly adult-theme gifts from a raunchy store (like a penis shot glass), a Dr. Ruth board game of some sort, and some books, written and illustrated in 1984, on sex.

Oh, yeah. And a stripper.

Dressed as a cop.

All of this was a surprise for the bride-to-be, who had been aware of every single plan for Baltimore but who wandered into a nice lunch at an outdoor caf� on Saturday afternoon knowing not one detail of the rest of her day. Lunch was great and relaxing. The group of us ladies chatted and ate and drank. The theme of the party was revealed to the bride, and her face was a mixture of fear and interest. As we headed off to mini-golf, she grabbed me and said, �You didn�t get me a stripper, did you?� and I lied quite convincingly, �WHAT? No! Get out of here.�

She spanked everyone at mini-golf. I blame the conditions of the course - as it was the most horrific of mini-golf courses I have ever seen - on my losing by one stroke. But the bride-to-be got to do the celebration dance at the 19th hole and called out the families with children playing behind us. �Yeah! I KICK ASS! I�m the CHAMPION!� It was inappropriate and hilarious.

We then returned to her friend�s house and had the beginnings of the party. We opened gifts, we laughed at the illustrations in the sex book, drank much rum and watched the Will Ferrell SNL DVD, and contemplated going out dancing and the like.

Then, at 9pm, the doorbell rang.

The bride-to-be was accused of not having enough fun at her party and the cop, with tear away pants and a boom box, threatened to arrest her. The room erupted with laughter.

The rest, like �Fight Club� or an AA meeting, needs to stay right in that room. I will assure you, though, that he was mighty fine and that the bride-to-be needed to chug a huge glass of wine immediately afterwards to settle her nerves. Mission accomplished.

We spent a good hour after the entertainment left laughing at the pictures on my digital camera, with several shots being deleted at the request of the guest of honor. One I would love to have kept, but it was pretty raw. Oh well.

The perfect dessert to that spectacle was to watch some Chris Farley SNL DVD and eat tons of chocolate cake. We rejoiced that our dancer was much more Adrien (without the bad hair) than Barney in the fabulous Chippendale�s skit with Patrick Swayze. I did my Matt Foley impersonation. We lamented Chris� untimely death and drank a lot.

We then popped in �Bridget Jones�s Diary� and proceeded to quote along with the entire movie as it happened, like the drunk fools we were, pissing off a sober person -- who was also the only one present who had never seen the movie before. I slurred to her, as I had earlier shouted to a pouting kid at the mini-golf course, �Life�s ROUGH.� Right about there, things get blurry for me.

So we all drank more.

The party disbanded around 1:30 in the morning and we lovingly wished the sober gals safe passage home, hugged and kissed each other like drunk women who have witnessed a stripper together only can, and promptly passed out.

I had delicious dreams of being arrested by a tan and hairless cop while my friends offered to post bail, with money in their teeth, direct to his banana hammock.