ORCHESTRATING THE MOOD - BRIDAL SHOWS - An Overview

I attended two bridal shows during my tenure as groom-to-be, one in San Diego and one in Bloomington. The shows consisted of lots of brides-to-be and their entourages, mothers, maids of honor, bridesmaids, and anyone else who was recruited or convinced that their opinions are quite valuable in the planning process. I considered giving the advice that bridal shows are a potentially very favorable spot for finding female companionship, given that the numbers are strongly in your favor, and love is in the air. Odds are diminished some, when you consider that every fifth female is probably engaged. But if you want lots of twenty-something females with prominent thoughts of finding Mr. Perfect, this could be the spot. Then I realized this wouldn’t be fair to the vendors trying to make a living. I just laughed so hard I forgot what I was talking about.

The purpose of the show is to dazzle and confuse you with all the options available for your perfect day. It is a maze of booths offering everything from cakes to music to honeymoons. You will feel quite proud of yourself, as everyone congratulates you, since any male present is either the groom or the father of the bride, determined mostly by age. You are self-guided through the rows of booths, where you feel like you’ve seen everything in the first five minutes, then realize, at the end, that you were right about the feeling you had two hours ago.

Cake makers are one of the many vendors offering samples—in their case, little squares of insanely sweet toothpick-pierced offerings. They are thrust upon you in the style of Chinese fast-food sample hawkers at any of your finer shopping mall food courts. The angelic sweetness of the cake and icing made me sick after three samples, as all angelically sweet things do after the first fifteen minutes. It reaffirmed the fact that we really didn’t like wedding cake.
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival