Excerpt: 'Bad Bridesmaid,' by Siri Agrell

ByABC News via logo
February 6, 2007, 2:49 PM

Feb. 6, 2007 — -- She's had enough taffeta to last a lifetime.

Meet the author of "Bad Bridesmaid: Bachelorette Brawls and Taffeta Tantrums-Tales from the Front Lines."

Siri Agrell is a journalist. She gets paid to write for a living. But one friend thought she went too far when she wrote an article in a national newspaper about the role of bridesmaids in the modern-day wedding. And that same friend gave Agrell the boot from her bridal party. But Agrell lives to write about it. "Bad Bridesmaid" is a hilarious tale of weddings, bridesmaids and brides gone wild.

Read an Excerpt from "Bad Bridesmaid" below:

SEA FOAM BLUES

It's a bridesmaid's dress. Someone loved it intensely for one day. Then, tossed it . . . like a Christmas tree. So special, then bam-it's on the side of the road, tinsel still clinging to it, like a sex crime victim, underwear inside out, bound with electrical tape.

-Marla Singer, Fight Club

I didn't want to come out of the dressing room.

It was springtime and we were shopping for the bridesmaid dresses that I and three other girls would wear down the aisle in July. The outing had started out like any other weekend shopping trip with friends. It was a gorgeous, brisk but sunny Saturday morning and The Bride, another bridesmaid, and I strolled through a trendy shopping district laughing at people's outfits and chatting about where we would stop for lunch. The sidewalks were crammed with street vendors, hot dog salesmen, and women jumping the gun on summer, barelegged under their flirty skirts, despite the chilly breeze. Music blared from outdoor speakers and we ducked in and out of stores if something pretty caught our eye. We were not, however, the only female shoppers on the strip, and our bubble of bridal bliss would soon be burst. As we were planning our best friend's wedding, the city was abuzz with a different sort of major event planning. It was high school prom time, and the malls were teeming with teenage Lolitas, strutting around in size-zero jeans and taunting us with their tiny frames.

Psychologically, I wasn't ready to hunt for dresses alongside three hundred ninety-pound debutantes. I didn't want to hear them talk about how their minuscule asses looked fat or be forced to contemplate how many years had gone by since my own high school graduation, when I regrettably wore a dress I had made myself and hemmed with purple feathers.

Physically, I was equally unprepared for the task at hand. It was still cool enough outside to require socks, and I had wisely selected a dark pair that were sure to look fantastic when worn with my Hush Puppies and a strapless peach cocktail dress. It should also be noted that underwear has never been my thing, and I had convinced myself that going commando while dress shopping was an acceptable way to avoid having my pantyline pointed out by a stick-thin saleswoman who probably ironed her thong before putting it on. And so I found myself clad in a cheap, off-white gauzy number that I had managed to zip up over my pasty white back, my private areas fully visible through the translucent material, my socks and shoes doing little to heighten the outfit's already minimal appeal, wondering how I could avoid showing it to my friends.

The small curtained dressing room stall in which I stood did not even provide me with a mirror, let alone a window through which to escape, so I emerged with only a vague idea of the disaster that awaited me. Outside, I was confronted by my startlingly unglamorous reflection in the full-length mirror, the store's fluorescent lights making matters worse with their sickly strobe-light flickering. It would have been less painful for everyone involved had I just walked out buck naked. At least then I might have gotten a laugh.

As I had feared, the sheets of gauzy taffeta were not successful in creating an opaque layer, and the dress was as transparent as the look of disgust on the faces of my fellow shoppers. My body, in all its post-winter, pre-diet glory, was hidden by only a fine mist of poorly constructed fabric and the length of my two black tube socks. Across the store, a sixteen-year-old emerged from another dressing room wearing the exact same dress, with a pink slip underneath and high heels on her pedicured feet, her perfectly toned frame a cruel reminder of how my own body had looked before I was introduced to beer, Beaujolais, and brie. She was my polar opposite reflected back at me. And I swear I saw her smirk.

Putting up a Stink

How a woman looks in a bridesmaid dress can sometimes be secondary to how it makes her feel. Wedding attendants are asked to cheerfully contend with cheap material, unforgiving seams, and boning that threatens to puncture a lung if you exhale too deeply or turn sharply to your right.

Aynsley F., an eight-timer, was made to wear a formal suit constructed from fabric she suspected had been torn from a couch. "It was one of the ugliest dresses I'd ever seen in my life," she said. "It was taffeta but it looked like upholstery. It was a mauve skirt and a jacket and there was a ruffle over the butt."

To make matters worse, she was participating in an August wedding that took place in an old, unair-conditioned church in the heart of the Deep South. "It was a long Catholic wedding in Spanish and English—twice as long because they had to do it in both languages," Aynsley remembered.

The bridesmaids wore shoes that were so cheap they began to disintegrate at the first sign of sweat. By the end of the service, they'd each lost a dress size in perspiration, their Tammy Bakker mascara streaming down their cheeks, the ruffles on their butts sagging with the weight of absorbed water, and their former kitten heels compressed into flats. They had been reduced to a lineup of deflated, soaking-wet women who looked as though they had just worked an eight-hour secretarial shift inside a sauna.

It must be awful to stand through a summer wedding draped in the skin of an old couch, but imagine what it would be like to attend a wedding in a bridesmaid dress that has already been worn and drenched in sweat.

Twenty-eight-year-old Erica P. was in a wedding where the bridesmaids' dresses were hand-me-downs from the nuptials of one of The Bride's relatives. "The dress I had to wear had been previously worn by someone with the most horrific body odor," said the three-time attendant. The Bride promised she would have the dress dry-cleaned and told Erica not to worry, the only scents permeating her wedding day would be those of fresh flowers and her own desperation to finally tie the knot.

When the dress came back, Erica pulled it out of the plastic bag and got a noseful of BO. "It was too strong for even the cleaners to get out!" she said. Throughout the wedding, the bridesmaid trailed a cloud of stink around with her dress—down the aisle and back, into the reception, and even during the group and family photos, when she had to sit on the knee of one of the groomsmen, the armpit of her dress dangerously close to his nose.

"I had to apologize for the smell of this dress I'm wearing," she said. "And of course, how many of them do you think believed that the dress smelled BEFORE I put it on?"

Pretty Awful in Pink

A few women may have to wear secondhand bridesmaid dresses, but it is a rule of modern society that no one ever wears a bridesmaid dress twice, no matter how many times they are assured of its timelessness, comfort, and durability.

Every bride tries to convince her bridesmaids that their dresses will be stunning couture worthy of a future red carpet or black-tie ball. Because of this lie, women who swear by designer labels, fashion-forward thinking, and black, black, black suddenly find themselves decked out in cheap knockoff strapless numbers in a shade of putrid purple. Almost every woman has one of these dresses in her closet, tucked away in the section reserved for things that are never worn but were too expensive to throw out, like that designer poncho that seemed like such a good idea or the three-hundred-dollar skinny jeans that you were too fat to wear after a four-dollar McDonald's meal. And when it comes to their bridesmaid dresses—like a lot of painful experiences masquerading as important milestones—women tend to remember their first time.

"The Bride first let us know that she wanted us in pink by sending an e-mail," said Madeline J., by now a five-time bridesmaid. This kind of message is among the scariest things that can happen to a woman via computer, second only to the terrifying moment when you accidentally click on a pop-up window at work and find your monitor filled with multiplying images of hard-core pornography. Rather than let The Bride's demand spiral similarly out of control, Madeline and her fellow bridesmaids wrote her back, each crafting carefully worded responses that said they supported her decision but implied that they were worried about its color-coordinated consequences.

"Well, it's your wedding, but be aware that because of my skin tone, many shades of pink make me look like I'm not wearing anything," Madeline wrote in her own reply. "Not that I mind that particularly, but it is after all your day and the attention should be focused on you."

Psychological double-talk of this manner is the only acceptable weapon against a butt-ugly bridesmaid dress. Brides are known to respond to unfiltered opinion as if you've asked them to let the groom's ex-girlfriend jump out of a cake at his bachelor party. Words such as hideously ugly must be replaced with potentially inappropriate, and the term "I'd rather die than put that on my body" substituted with "Don't you think it might clash with your flowers?" This sort of dubious dishonesty is not usually perfected until the later stages of motherhood, when women must convince their children that they are being punished for their own good.

As it happened, this bride stuck by her choice, secure in the knowledge that it did not even come close to the color of a pale girl's skin. Madeline should have been so lucky.

"It was so pink. It was not even fuchsia. Not pale pink. It was fluorescent highlighter pink," she said, still awed by the dress's nuclear capabilities years after she wore it. "It was its own light source." The dress was also floor length, A-line, shiny satin, and multiplied six times, making the bridesmaids look like Dolly Parton's backup singers, circa 1982.