Aisle Be Damned This Maid Shall Never Flounce Again
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday December 27, 2001
Dressed like a human meringue in a frock that doesn't fit, with a lot of people staring at you. Who'd want to be a bridesmaid?
Call it shallow. Call me an ungrateful friend.
But at the end of what has been an otherwise depressing year for many Australians with ugly xenophobia gripping the country, the disastrous collapse of HIH, September 11, and now devastating bushfires I have found something to be exultant about. Bridesmaids.
With six goes at being one under my belt three of them in the past six months it is with some jubilation that I say I will never have to be one again.
In an age when so much ritual is questioned and discarded, why do weddings get bigger, more costly and more commercial than Christmas?
The bridesmaid ritual illustrates my point. A bunch of women are forced to dress up in expensive, brightly coloured, matching taffeta frocks, flounce down a church aisle clutching weighty bunches of flowers, and sweat it out while being photographed under the Harbour Bridge in unnatural poses.
They then spend an evening in charge of such tasks as accompanying the bride to the toilet so she doesn't get wedged in the cubicle by her skirt hoops.
Can this really be the post-feminist Noughties?
Few Australian women reach 30 without having experienced this phenomenon. I know three sisters who have a special wardrobe in their parents' house just to store former bridesmaid dresses (at least 10). The youngest earnestly claims to have been scarred by one bridesmaid experience. She was 20, overweight after a year at a country university eating ``institutionalised fish and chips", and, while very happy for her marrying sister, pleaded to be allowed to watch the ceremony from a pew.
Her protests were ignored, and so it was she found herself in a Laura Ashley floral dress, with flounced sleeves and a V-shaped waist (her mother thought it would make her look slimmer). She refused to take part in the make-up/hairdo ritual with the rest of the bridal party, watched television until 10 minutes before her family was due to leave for the church, and turned up with wet hair, looking ``like a man wearing a pretty dress".
And another story this time from someone whose two best friends announced their engagements this year. Over the Christmas break she was heading interstate for a week packed with appointments to visit various Victorian wineries and function centres. She spoke of a bridesmaid's dread of her looming ``duties", while knowing she would have been offended if she hadn't been asked to participate.
The Internet, with its abundant Web sites dedicated to making weddings as uniform as possible, sheds some light on the bridesmaid tradition.
According to one site, the use of bridesmaids harks back to a Roman law which required that 10 witnesses be present at a wedding to trick any evil spirits who turned up uninvited. The attendants would dress in identical garb to the couple so the spirits wouldn't know who was tying the knot.
There seems reason enough to keep the tradition going today, but it makes me wonder why this particular one has withstood the centuries while another potentially far more amusing one is no longer around.
Again deriving from Roman law, apparently there was a tradition whereby the wedding cake would be broken on the bride's head, symbolising the breaking of the hymen, and the dominance of the groom over the bride.
With wedding cakes more elaborate today than the loaf of barley bread which satisfied the Romans, it seems a shame we let this tradition die out.
On one Web site I found a reference to a bridesmaid's Guerrilla Handbook. The book contains such gems as the bridesmaid ``comes into her own" when a wedding party includes kiddies, and she's advised to carry bags of jellied sweets to ``encourage good behaviour".
What summed up the antiquated farce for me, however, was a review of the book, sent in by a reader who wrote: ``The toilet paper bridal dress game was a hit at my friend's shower [tea] ... Buy this book it's a life saver for any bridesmaid."
It seems, as with most things in life, that the bridesmaid custom is more excessive in the United States. I asked a friend from North Carolina about bridesmaids in his country.
He wrote: ``In the South it is bigger than huge; it is not unusual for a gal to have most of her sorority sisters up to 12 or 14 in her wedding. Of course, the groom has to match her number with groomsmen, so he's often looking for second cousins, old teachers, the garbage man, etc. to fill the front of the church. This means, naturally, that there can be 30 people at the altar, a sort of amusing ridiculousness you find only in Dixie."
Finally, you might well ask, how can I be so sure I'll never have to be a bridesmaid again. Well, I have no more bookings, and besides, I seriously doubt anyone would ask me again after reading this.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
