LAST MINUTE IMPROVEMENTS

It is always good to make personal improvements. It is not always good to make them in half the time needed. Obviously, you may only make half the improvement you need to make. If any improvement requires things to get worse before they get better, then you are really in trouble.

We wanted to look our best for the wedding. This included all facets of personal appearance: fitness, smile, and skin tone. First we approached the physical fitness. Christa is a beautiful woman. But like every bride-to-be, she thinks that taking “just a couple pounds from this area” is necessary to have that elite bridal physique. I did not have a goal weight but felt that a little redistribution wouldn’t hurt.

Phase 1: Six months of self-motivated, no-equipment-necessary exercise. This entailed trial runs at playing tennis with each other, doing the Winsor Pilates video workout, and an occasional bike ride. Most sessions began with, “Do you want to exercise?” and ended with “Not really,” two seconds later.

Net results of Phase 1: No noticeable change for either of us.

Phase 2: Six weeks of a free thirty-day trial membership at a local gym. We sat for the obligatory meeting with the gym rep.

“We are getting married in six weeks and want to visibly tone up,” I said. She looked at us like we couldn’t be seriously considering improving ourselves in that amount of time.

“You might be able to see some improvement, if you come in at least five times a week and really watch your diet,” she half-admitted.

“Watching our diet as best we are able has produced what you see in front of you, so tell us again: how many days a week?” I said.

Net results of Phase 2: Slight headway into burning the excess fat, due primarily to the cardio cinema, a darkened cardio-machine-filled room with movies playing on a projection screen. This was our preferred form of exercise, one that most closely resembled sitting on our couch watching TV (some gym members did treat the stationary bikes as recliners). Mix in the reduced appetite caused by wedding-planning stress, and we netted out OK.

Next was smile enhancement. For this we turned to Crest Premium Whitestrips. I picked up the package.

“They claim to take off up to fourteen years, in just seven days, when used for thirty minutes, morning and night. How many days until the wedding?” I asked Christa.

“You better know it’s ten,” she replied. I actually did.

However, Christa never remembered to use the strips in the morning and refused to use them at work. Whose job is so important that you would sacrifice youthful wedding teeth for it, Christa?

She only ended up removing ten years’ worth of stains to my thirteen. That meant my teeth would have been seventeen and hers nineteen, when we got married. She didn’t like the implication of being an older woman wedding a minor, so I drank some coffee and red wine to reverse the anti-aging process and made our tooth union legal without needing my parents’ teeth consent.

The final component was skin tone. Christa began her regime a couple months out. She never wore her makeup to bed, strove to get monthly facials, and invested in top-of-the-line skin care products. She informed me of the work and financial sacrifice it took to maintain her beautiful skin and advised me (firmly instructed) that stress (anything I did) caused blemishes, and those would be frowned upon (punishable by groin trauma).

“You need to cleanse daily and exfoliate once a week,” Christa said.

“When you say exfoliate, you mean rub sand on my face?” I asked.

“Just do it.”

I observed her rituals to try and comprehend the art of exfoliate and cleanse. Then I tried it myself, as she did, right before bed, over the sink. I was unhappy. The sand I rubbed on my face attached to my eyebrows and was very resistant to flushing with water. I got into bed, and my eyebrow made a crunching sound as I laid it on the pillow. It was like I had just swum in the ocean and had salt brow.

“I don’t think this is going to work out,” I said.

“It’s too late now; we’re getting married,” Christa replied.

“What? No. My eyebrows are still being exfoliated, and I want it to stop,” I whined.

”Why don’t you do it in the morning so you can rinse in the shower?” Christa calmly stated. “It’s not like you’re removing makeup.”

“You don’t know that.”

That was probably not my best comeback. But power-rinsing in the shower returned a hint of my manhood the next morning.

The final aspect of skin tone was coloration. We got a ten-session tanning package about two weeks before the wedding, five apiece over ten days. With her work and our new gym schedule, we didn’t quite complete our tanning sessions either. I was hoping to prevent burning on the honeymoon, more than make a statement at the wedding. My head would really be the only thing showing throughout the event, and it would be exfoliated to a high luster. I wasn’t eager to get to the tanning salon, because each time I exited the bed, my flesh obviously smelled roasted. I could have sworn there was a hint of potato, as well, like someone was preparing a side dish.
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival