WITH THE ROYAL WEDDING APPROACHING AND THE MARRIAGE SEASON WELL UNDER WAY, BEL TREW OFFERS A WHO’S WHO TO HELP YOU GET THROUGH…
The Wedding DJ
‘ARE YOU READ-DAY TO PARTAAY?’ roars Rodney to the empty dance floor whilst slamming Abba into the CD machine. ‘This is DJ Rod in da house,’ he says practically eating the microphone, ‘and Lay-days I’m with you till midnight’. Spinning on his winkle-pickers, Rod points at a granny, who chokes on her cheese puff. Oh yeah.
50-year-old Rodney is in his best waistcoat, a musical number that twinkles under UV lights. The bachelor uncle of the bride volunteered himself as soon as he heard about the engagement and sent a mix tape entitled ‘Rod’s Disco Balls’. How could the bride refuse? It had Baywatch and Ghostbusters, Right Said Fred and the Village People mashed up with Busted and the Macarena.
One of the drunker members of the congregation has entered the dance floor: a recently divorced second cousin called Bridget, who has been drinking since yesterday and just came onto the vicar. ‘It’s murder on the dance floor and I LIKE it!’ pants Rod, and joins in with ‘I’m too sexy for Milan, too sexy for Milllann, New York and Japan’ whilst touching his nipples and spanking his bum. ‘Play ‘Single Ladies’!’ Bridget shrieks, joyously gyrating against the potted palm tree but Rod has never heard of Beyoncé.
The bride intervenes when he starts to play ‘Who Let The Dogs Out?’ every time the groom’s mother walks past and as a peace offering promises to do a first dance, which Rod narrates. She calls a halt to the proceedings when he suddenly changes the track to ‘Like a Virgin’.
‘Touched for the very first time!’ he falsettos at Bridget, who suddenly decides he’s the handsomest man she has ever clapped eyes on. Sensing the mood change Rod switches to Marvin Gaye ‘Sexual Healing’. Rod winks at Bridget, his baldhead a shining beacon in the disco lights and crones Elvis-style:
‘This one’s for youuuu’.
The Bridesmaid - Zilla
Sasha (or Saz as she’s known to a select chosen few) has been up since five fighting the wedding planner. ‘It was clipboards at dawn!’ she shrieks with a terrifying cheerfulness at the bridesmaids who cower in the corner. They’ve just been handed the daily spreadsheet, colour coded and broken down into fifteen minutes slots. ‘It’s Saz’s big day,’ whispers the bride apologetically.
Since graciously awarding herself the accolade of Maid of Honour, Sasha has been on her Blackberry non-stop.
There was the engagement party, the pre-hen dinner, the hen do, the rehearsals and the wedding weekend to plan and execute. Each one demanded a battle plan so fierce and complex, one of the bridesmaids quit (in breathless sobs from HR at work where she was having a lie-down) and another one’s Outlook collapsed under the avalanche of emails.
There was the engagement party, the pre-hen dinner, the hen do, the rehearsals and the wedding weekend to plan and execute. Each one demanded a battle plan so fierce and complex, one of the bridesmaids quit (in breathless sobs from HR at work where she was having a lie-down) and another one’s Outlook collapsed under the avalanche of emails.
But the city flooded, the ‘cabaret’ was a lesbian show called ‘Sleeping Booty’ and in a drunken getaway, two of the ‘hens’ ran off with a stag do.
After weeks of grovelling, the bride managed to coax Sasha back. ‘How can the wedding happen without me?’ Sasha reassures herself, as she re-pencils in her eyebrows. Besides, Steph agreed to credit her on all the service sheets.
After two hours of face-work and a few screaming fits, she knows she looks perfect. It doesn’t matter that the Hair and Make-up guy only has twenty minutes to do the bride. Poor Stephie just doesn’t have the bone structure to carry it off anyway.
The Teenage Waiter
AJ is totally hammered and it’s brilliant! The caterer, arm deep in volau-vents, doesn’t notice Alexander has drunk more than he’s dished out or that he’s propping up the bar Facebooking his schoolmates about the fit waitress, Flo.
‘Omg shes totoly in2 me.lol!!!!!11!!1’ he posts, whilst doing the fringeflick from Skins. Despite being lectured on the virtue of neatness, AJ untucks his shirt to impress Florence, who’s being strategically nonchalant around the Best Men. Fortified by WKD and the wall post camaraderie, AJ pulls his school trousers down his bum and swaggers past Flo with the disinterested grace of a one-legged rapper who needs the loo. I’m so in there, he thinks rearranging his bored face.
The problem is AJ’s ‘Emo’ hair keeps getting in the way, as does his enormous trainers he doesn’t do up. His Mum, Jill, only let him have the haircut as she mistakenly believed that the greasy bouffant was a cover for his spots. ‘Poor thing!’ The Clapham mums cooed at their book club. His skin resembles a pizza massacre.
AJ speaks in lisping monosyllables through a cross-stitch of braces, his voice a quivering trill of squeaks and drawls (‘He sounds like a donkey,’ Jill confessed to her therapist, dissolving into tears at the thought that she produced such an offspring).
Meanwhile Florence is getting nowhere with the Best Men who are now mounting an inflatable doll, so returns to the bar. This is AJ’s big moment. ‘Wait for it lads!’ Sings his status update. He downs the rest of his drink, leans across the bar…. and vomits in the ice bucket.
Whatevs.
The Monster-In-Law
Lady Huntington-Smythe is on the warpath. The idiot girl her darling boy is marrying missed out her first name on the seating plan. Granted she married into the baronetcy and technically as Peregrine, 7th Earl of Effington and president of the Horticultural Society pointed out, she couldn’t call herself Lady Cecilia as she didn’t inherit the title (anyway she’d then be a Dame)… but who the hell would know that at this orgy of plebs and Liberal Democrats?
Cecilia is on her third husband, the long-suffering William, whom she insists on calling Willy. Sir William Huntington-Smythe accidently married her after being convinced that he’d asked and for a brief moment foolishly thought decades of comfortable bachelor-hood would be significantly more depressing than marriage. Cecilia had been desperate to be dragged out of the middle classes from the moment she demanded Debrett’s Peerage as her eighth birthday present. She had married her way to a baronet and only bemoaned the fact that she’d had Wynyard (James, as he prefers to be known) before she’d got there.
Now Wynyard, or James, or whatever he calls himself was marrying some local girl that had already got herself pregnant and forced the entire menagerie of her family upon Cecilia’s weak nerves. They had to be from bad stock, why else would Coco, her beloved Cairn terrier, be peeing on all the guests? Poor Coco could always smell cheap fabric.
Willy was drunk and pinching the bridesmaid’s bottoms and Cecilia had already had two showdowns with the Maid of Honour. It was too much. How could she ever show her face at Annabel’s? 'To hell with Wynyard! Me and Coco are leaving! ‘Trollop!’ she said in an audible stage-whisper, as she swept out in a flurry of feathers into the night.
The Male Wedding Planner
Fabio has already tried to quit three times this morning. First he was woken up by the harpy of a chief bridesmaid, then they served cappuccinos in the afternoon (Fabio is French-Italian) and finally the local ‘caterer’ had the audacity to suggest ‘mini pizzas’ and ‘cheese puffs’ were canapés. ‘Cheeeeze pouffs?
Wat iz a cheeze pouff?’ he says, whisking it out of the hands of the bride as she tries to eat for the first time that day. ‘No no no. Ze bride must not, wat you say, spoil her look before photos. You eat this you will look like a cheeze pouff! Quelle horreur!’
Fabio was hired by the groom’s mother to, in her words, ‘save the wedding’ and quite frankly, he was horrified. ‘A touche of Pink?’ he spat, ‘Pink?! Zis is not a theme, zis is not a couleur’ before storming off in a semaphore of arm flailing.
Once he had calmed down, he explained weddings must be simple, graceful, chic and organised. This meant Ikebana arrangements of orchids, Tiang Seri interiors (Feng Shui was so ‘done’ he said) and Peggy Porschen monochrome cake sculptures. Organisation was the watchword: he had spreadsheets of spreadsheets and a Google doc file big enough to scare even the most thorough of management consultants.
Fabio carried a clipboard, walkie-talkie, earpiece and iPad around with him wherever he went. When he stood legs wide apart, head bowed and his hands together in an almost prayer-like stance, this was his sacred ‘thinking’ time. ‘Never,’ he said shaking with rage,
‘disturb my zinking time.’
Now he watches in horror as the wedding progresses. The bride secretly sewed diamante onto her dress (‘Wat iz this sparkly sheeet?’) the potato-headed DJ claims Céline Dion was French and then some drunk wench called ‘Bridgeeet’ asks why he was still single at 40! ‘Madame, I am Zirty-seven!’ he says, tearing off his headpiece and heading for his room. ‘Ça suffit! Je n'ai jamais été aussi insulté de ma vie. Vous êtes tous animaux! TOUS ANIMAUX!’
