Wedding Dreams (or Bridal Bête Noir)

It’s April. The weddings are in June. It’s time for the invitations to go out. The brides head for the printshop. Somehow they think that their invitations will come from there. I have news for them . . . we’re not part of their wedding dreams.

The books were large. They were part of the stuff that came with the franchise oh so many years ago. Someone in a tall ivory tower with only one very small window must have thought that it was a good idea. As a novice printshop owner, I didn’t know any different. The big books were put on display right out in front, near a small round table where the prospective bride (and her mom) could look at them.

There must have been at least a few exclamations of “Oh! you have wedding books!” to warn me before the first bride came in. I sat with her for about 3/4 hour, essentially answering the same questions over and over, before I had the good sense to let her take the monstrous book home to discuss with her mother. She then came back the next day to ask my opinion.

“Which do you think is more fashionable? The embossed invitation with the gold foil envelopes or this lovely lace border with the little pink bouquet? And do you think we should buy the napkins to match?”

That was just way beyond me. I have as much interest in wedding napkins as I have in Feng Shui. In fact, I think I have more interest in Feng Shui because it’s kind of fun to say. Feng Shui! I turned the whole process over to beautiful wife, who quickly decided that she was only going to work in the printshop one day per week and that she wasn’t going to tell me which day that would be.

The same bride and her mom came back repeatedly over the next couple of years. I became convinced that aliens had taken over their bodies, because they never looked the same and they used aliases each time they came through the door. But they were the same bride and mom. I know it for certain.

It was deja vu all over again until the day that a Party City store opened up in a new shopping center down the road. The alien bride and mom came through the door, oohed and sighed over the big invitation book, didn’t make up their mind and walked out the door with the 150 lb. wedding compendium in hand. When they came back the next day, though, they didn’t ask my opinion about the monogrammed swizzle sticks. Instead, they told me that Party City had the same book and that all of the invitations would be 30% off of the book price.

I kissed them both, trying to ignore the greenish alien scales that were showing through their possessed bodies. When they left, I praised God for his goodness and threw the massive books into the dumpster behind the shop.

We still get the requests. A lot of times they begin with the phrase, “I want to do something really special . . .” What that means is “I want you to do something really impossible that will tie up your entire staff for nine hours producing 75 of these things, then you’ll have to do it all over again because I’ll want to invite some more people to the wedding and I’ll need more.” Machine operators don’t tie bows with little fragments of pink ribbon. Their thumbs are too big. I found that out the hard way.

And we still do an occasional invitation, usually for someone we really like, who is really reasonable, who is not possessed by creatures from another planet, and who knows what they want. We run the rest of the aliens out of the shop with a hearty Feng Shui! and send them off to Party City.