On Air - Late Night Etiquette
Tune in to WOR Radio’s Joey Reynolds Show TONIGHT (May 8th) to hear if manners sway with the time of day.
Forgive Me, But… April Showers
I have been writing about wedding etiquette for years, but I don’t often write on the more practical, conceptual aspects of wedding planning too often so it was an interesting departure from the norm (at a moment when I really needed to break away from my usual usualness) to put together this gallery of Bridal Shower Concepts for Real Simple.com. I have actually never attended a shower like any of these, but I suspect that if people took more liberties with showers, thought about maybe having a coed party, and tried out the idea of having a novel party, showers would take on less of the wedding burden.
Attention Gothamites
Don’t get me wrong. I love New York, and would never want to live anywhere else, but it’s a complicated burg, and a wedding makes it even more so.
My friend Pamela Skillings (who has a book of her own about to appear) over at About.com asked me to offer up two sets of tips, one for people getting married in the city and the other for guests attending weddings in New York and I was happy to oblige…
Because even though Times Square has been Disneyfied and there’s are a few stretches of pavement that look a little bit like suburban malls, there’s still a lot happening on (and off) the grid that can intimidate and confound. (And I don’t just mean the fact that you can’t turn right on red, or the unbelievable rents.)
Do you have a singularly urban nuptial nightmare? Ask away at indieetiquette (at) yahoo (dot) com.
All Right, This One IS Different
I’m not usually any sort of sucker for proposal stories. I tend to feel that the push for new and inventive ways to “pop the question” (which shouldn’t exactly be a surprise anyway) creates too much pressure and undermines the pleasure of the decision. (This is not to say that there shouldn’t be any romance, just a shift of emphasis away from the fairy tale and onto some other sort of genre– screwball comedy works for me.)
So why did reading about one Bernie Peng who proposed to his girlfriend by rejiggering the programming of her video game “Bejeweled” so that it would offer he his proposal once she hit a certain score warm my heart? I don’t know. Maybe it just has the nice combination of elements… It took a lot of thought and skill (and about a month for Peng to reprogram the game). He made sure that she was capable of obtaining an acceptable score before he took the big step of proposing. And really the whole business just feel jolly, eccentric and specific, which is what proposals should be.
Fireworks
One of the odd features of the temporary apartment my family and I live in is that we have a great view. Things are odd in a lot of other areas of this building (discretion prohibits my humorous elaboration of exactly what those oddness are but they can be found in the areas familiar to all apartment dwellers). So I spend a lot of time staring out the window. The last few days have allowed me to make quite a study of Early Morning Fog due to the happy combination of a baby who gets up around five in the morning and incredibly humid weather. One morning was spectacular because it was literally impossible to see anything at all. It was like being in a cloud. This evening, over take out, I was quite dazzled to see fireworks popping outside my window, dispelling (briefly) my Sunday Dread. They were astonishing, highly professional, super-choreographed, doing all of those indescribable things that good fireworks do that leave grown people without words, capable of glottal vocalizations.Very romantic. Everything about fireworks is romantic. Just watch To Catch a Thief if you don’t believe me. Watch it anyway, even it you do.My husband and I did a little detective work, figured out that the display appeared to have happened near a hotel, which we dutifully called and discovered that the display was part of a 25th wedding anniversary celebration. So keep this in mind: you don’t have to throw everything you’ve got into the wedding. Hold off on the fireworks and save them for your 25th. Do them again at your 50th. No one will be sick of them, and strangers gnawing on take out tandoori chicken will be thrilled, briefly, before they remember that Monday is nigh.So happy anniversary, whoever you are.
Because You Can’t Be Happy Without Suffering
Apparently, the pre-wedding makeovers that brides put themselves through have acquired some new trends. To lose weight, women become bulimic (at least temporarily), take up smoking, set themselves up for unhappiness by purchasing wedding dresses several sizes too small. They get all sorts of physical adjustments (Botox, for instance). And articles like this one in the Guardian (UK) blame wedding culture and have invented a new affliction called “Competitive Wedding Syndrome” for the fact that women seem to feel obliged to torture themselves. But I wonder bout the larger culture of punishment. Weddings are supposed to be happy occasions, among the happiest. So why would it be that women are so easily obliged to torture themselves and feel undeserving unless they force themselves, at great expenditures of energy, money and time, into some possibly irrelevant model of perfection. IndieEtiquette gets a lot of questions from brides and non-brides about questions of justice in weddings. Perhaps everyone would feel much more rational, and manage to be more polite and feel less put upon if they were eating enough and channeling some cash away from cigarettes and into the nuptial budget.
Perils of the Engagement Story
Engagement stories leave me cold. They almost always have. Either they seem canned and prefab or there’s some thin thread of desperation lurking in there. All of the emphasis on creating this perfect spontaneous (but not) moment that is public and private at the same time just seems like a recipe for anticlimax, bitterness, grudges, and… well no one said I wasn’t a sourpuss. But here’s a case in point, a little object lesson stuck in an amusing article about working at the super swank Per Se restaurant. Read on:
“The gentleman on table 23 plans to propose and has arranged for us to deliver a Fabergé egg at the end of the couple’s meal. Proposals are nerve-racking for everyone involved. While terrified lovers contemplate eternity in sickness, poverty, death or worse, equally anxious waiters imagine ruining what might be the high point of these people’s lives together. We clear the table after the cheese course, leaving only the candle and two glasses of champagne.
The maître d’ arrives with a wooden box (the humidor we usually use for truffles) on a silver tray and bows to the lady with great ceremony. She gasps, placing her ringless hand on her heart and gazing at her intended with dewy eyes before reaching for the egg. The maître d’ closes the truffle box and steps away from the table, staying close enough to witness the moment.
It is all we can do to feign calm when she opens the egg and there is not a ring in sight. She begins to cry. Her fiancé instructs her as to the egg’s value - we can’t catch what he says - and she pretends to be moved, but I know that she is heartbroken. He eats his dessert with gusto while she prods at hers with her spoon, crestfallen. When he finally pulls the ring from his pocket, her joy is more like worn relief. ”
And a fine time was had by all. (The book, by the way, is Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter, by Phoebe Damrosch)
Going Somewhere?
I had the pleasure this week of meeting Susan Breslow, who is the About.com guide to Honeymoons and Romantic Getaways and was thrilled that she let me answer a few of the most common etiquette questions I get about destination weddings and contemporary etiquette and here is my quick Q&A. Destination weddings have been extremely popular for social and antisocial reasons. On the one hand, wedding couples enjoy the fact that their nearest and dearest are gathered together for a long weekend and they get to hang out in some interesting locale and spend more time together than more domestic weddings usually afford. On the other hand, the time and money guests need to have on hand for destination weddings tend to be factors that cut down on the guest list, so these affairs are often smaller than events that are closer to home. I do wonder, though, if the trembling economy is going to hit destination weddings hard.
In Addition
I was so giddy about being included in New York Magazine Weddings (summer 2008) that I didn’t notice I was actually in an extra two pages of the issue until I showed it to my mother over the weekend. I did a couple of very long interviews for the magazine and was impressed at how deep the questions went… and now I see why. For more solutions to general problems, pay a visit to page 116 of the issue, where you can see my answers to questions about: rowdy kids, seating charts, plus-ones and other guest issues.
They Say It’s the Ultimate…
wedding planner, that is, and it was supremely exciting to be dragging myself through the supermarket today, flinching at the price of grapes and suddenly seeing the New York Magazine Weddings supplement. I loved it when I was engaged and I love it more because they included me as an Expert in their “Ask the Experts” pages (along with a gown designer, a team of stationers, a wedding planner, a caterer, beauticians, and a photographer). I can’t link to the page on the New York Magazine web site because they still have the last wedding supplement up (here is the last guide) but if they don’t update soon, I’ll just scan the page and put it up for you all to read.
