I met a really nice exotic dancer at Hugh's bachelor party.
Back from New Orleans. This is my first time doing a Maid of Honor gig, and I'm kind of unfamiliar with the whole thing, so honestly I was trying to just find a balance of "Keyser Soze enabler" and "don't let anyone get a face tattoo." I'm not a very good event planner; I don't have an eye for, like, party favors or decoration or themes. I prefer to be the person who shows up with food and/or booze, and then skulks in the background. But this went off well enough, I suppose. No one ended up in the hospital (that I know of), or vomited in a public place (ditto previous comment), and once you get past those two hurdles I think you're pretty much golden. If, unlike my cousin, you can also avoid passing out in the Pat O'Brien's fountain while shirtless and wearing a showercap that you bought off a random dude for twenty bucks and subsequently getting banned from the premises, you are a winner. You are the one who wins.
The whole thing consisted of both the bride and groom's people, since they wanted to coordinate the affairs and there were overlapping couples in each group. Generally I feel running your bachelor/bachelorette parties simultaneously is just asking for hurt feelings and/or trouble, but whatever, I'm not the one getting married or watching a stripper grind on my partner. We hit almost every touristy thing you're supposed to do. The weekend included the following things, roughly in this order:
-Alcoholic slushies at random Bourbon street bar. (Hurricane and sangria flavors, extra shots.)
-Jello shots. (Inconclusive red flavor. Arrive in large syringes which force cold jelly into your mouth at unpredictable spurting speeds. Best not to say anything about horse semen while doing so, as it is apparently offputting to those with weak stomachs.)
-Drive by beadings. (Purple stars. Did not reciprocate with boob flashing because, no, and also dude just tossed them over my head and was out the door before I could even figure out what had happened. Thanks, I guess.)
-Cafe Du Monde. (In the morning, when most members of the party were still hungover from the night before.) I never remember not to wear black when eating beignets. I always emerge the loser from the powdered sugar battle.
-Graveyard tour of St. Louis Cemetery #1, which I remember mostly for our tour guide's mullet (spectacular, I took at least four covert pictures of it), Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau's grave (unassuming), and the giant pyramid grave that is apparently where Nicholas Cage intends to have himself be buried someday (!!!). It looks exactly like how you would expect Nicholas Cage's grave to look, down to the mysterious Latin and being impossible to ignore.
-A duck confit crepe that was good enough to take my mind of Nicholas Cage's grave pyramid.
-Steamboat ride/booze cruise. Rained like fuck nearly the entire time, with some impressive lightning. Would have probably been very relaxing otherwise. We drank overpriced cocktails and huddled under the awnings while trying to catch pictures of the lightning with our cellphones. Due to the cocktails, we were never quite successful at this.
-The Bachelor/Bachelorette Dinner at Mr. B's bistro. Someone suggested we play the three P's as an icebreaker as we waited/ate-- basically, you go around the table and name your favorite president, planet, and porn type, and explain each. If someone took yours before you went, you had to come up with something new. This actually worked out very well! Conversation was stimulated for the majority of the meal, and had the upside of inspiring prompt and frequent service from our waiter, since he seemed highly amused by it all. As I recall, it worked out roughly to something like:
Lincoln-Mercury-Interracial
Harrison-Pluto-Hentai (Animated)
Polk-Earth-Asians (Live action)
Clinton-Jupiter-Gangbangs
Adams (The first one, not the son)-Mars-Ebony
Washington-Neptune-Lesbians
FDR-Venus-Gay for Pay
-Drinks at Napoleon House. I don't know the significance of it. I suppose I could google it. My theory is that Napoleon is tangentially involved.
-Drinks at The Swamp. I suppose I should bring up Shot Girls. No matter what bar you're at, you'll probably run into the Shot Girls, or more likely, they will come after you. These are young ladies, generally dressed in some form of tight black clothing, bearing a rainbow array of test tubes holding various liquors. Their job is to get you to drink as many shots as possible (and buy some for them as well) and your job is to either drink the shots and pay for them, or elude them. Usually there's some kind of acrobatics involved as well-- some of them place the tube in their mouths and transfer it to your mouth, some of them have you take it from between their cleavage, some of them take it from between your cleavage, some of them have you take it from the crotch, sometimes there is motor-boating afterwards... you get the idea. (In my case, I didn't see the motor-boating coming and there was a near miss from a biting situation, since that tends to be my first reaction to anything.) Sometimes you do double shots!
Generally, I found some of them were much better at it, or at least more inventive than others, and I quite admire that. They also have you pick what colors you want, and this can lead to some hideous taste combos. Once they find out you're a bachelor/bachelorette party (of which there tend to be at least a half dozen of in the near vicinity at any given time), they re-double their efforts. The groom in our party got hit with like six shots of Fireball inside five minutes, and we had to prop him against a wall for a while to get his bearings back.
At one point, one of them bore down on me and shouted in a Stentorian voice, "THE BEST MAN WANTS ME TO DO A SHOT FROM BETWEEN YOUR TITTIES!" And before I knew it, I had test tubes jammed down my dress and I was having to grab them to keep them from falling lower, because I don't have sufficiently load bearing boobs to hold up the tubes. There was a sad lack of structural support. ...Then I accidentally dumped them in her face and promptly fled the scene, to let the best man pay for that particular round.
-Drinks at at least four bars I never bothered to get the names of. We had been debating whether or not we should split off to find strip clubs, and while we argued, we would just go into a new bar, so we never actually got around to going into either Saints and Sinners (Channing Tatum's club!) or the Hustler Club.
-Hurricanes at Pat O'Briens. I did remember this place, because there was a minor incident where the best man tried to make the groom eat a cockroach that was crawling the wall, but he was ultimately unsuccessful.
-Voodoo shop. Again, we were tanked enough by then that I don't recall which one. I bought a pig charm. And a skeleton with butterfly wings. Everyone suddenly decided at once that we should get our palms read, but the shop tossed us out because they wanted to close. I cannot blame them.
-Palm readings, on some side street. Undeterred by being thrown from the voodoo shop, we simply oozed, en mass, down enough side streets until we found one of the areas where you have a bunch of people on the sidewalk with their little tables, waiting to take advantage of drunk tourists who want their palms or cards read. I did both! I always get my palm read when I go; I enjoy it.
The skinny girl with three lip rings who read my cards kept interjecting, "You know what I mean?" after every other sentence, and I kept thinking of Jim Varney and getting distracted. She didn't explain the cards very well, though to be fair, I don't recall them well either. I did get Death, and did not get The Happy Squirrel.
The palm reader was an man named Al, who was hanging out in a lawn chair. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds, all pale skin and black fingernails. He reminded me of an affable, obese spider. He had a good touch with his hands, very light and not at all sweaty. Very zen, and I enjoyed talking with him. He apparently wowed the bride and groom, who both declared to me he was dead on with everything he told them. He was only about fifty percent accurate with me. ("You're dating someone seriously right now, aren't you?" "Nope.")
I wanted to ask him about Louise, and if she could contact me through the entrails of a goat or something. I did not. I did tell him I'd lost someone important to me, and he assured me they were happy and no longer in pain and it was time for them to go. It might have all been bunk, but that's the kind of comforting spiel you want to hear while drunk at two in the morning.
-Cafe Du Monde, again. (Technically also in the morning, I guess, if three am counts, when the party was fully drunk again.)
-Wine in the bride and groom's room, all of us stretched out on the floor and arguing who had the weirdest looking feet.
-Brunch at Brennans. This was probably the best meal I had while I was there. It was worth it. They have weird fucking murals on the wall, though; I think they're supposed to be Mardi Gras scenes, but the closer you look at them, the weirder they get. This one, for example, has a couple who I am pretty sure are in drag, someone with springs on their feet, a parade float, a snake on the parade float, random elves, a large bouncy ball, and some dingus with springs on their feet.
So all in all, while I damaged my bank account and liver most severely, the bride was happy. And like I said, no one got a face tattoo or woke up with a tiger in the room, so I guess my job was done. Now I just have to make it through her wedding next weekend, then her henna party next month, and the Bengali ceremony the day after that. Weddings, man. How do they work.
This was supposed to have been a music post for Baco (originally, the inspiration and theme were how much sports were pissing me off, but Baco is more important than sports, so she gets credit for the inspiration now), but I'll do that later this week.
The whole thing consisted of both the bride and groom's people, since they wanted to coordinate the affairs and there were overlapping couples in each group. Generally I feel running your bachelor/bachelorette parties simultaneously is just asking for hurt feelings and/or trouble, but whatever, I'm not the one getting married or watching a stripper grind on my partner. We hit almost every touristy thing you're supposed to do. The weekend included the following things, roughly in this order:
-Alcoholic slushies at random Bourbon street bar. (Hurricane and sangria flavors, extra shots.)
-Jello shots. (Inconclusive red flavor. Arrive in large syringes which force cold jelly into your mouth at unpredictable spurting speeds. Best not to say anything about horse semen while doing so, as it is apparently offputting to those with weak stomachs.)
-Drive by beadings. (Purple stars. Did not reciprocate with boob flashing because, no, and also dude just tossed them over my head and was out the door before I could even figure out what had happened. Thanks, I guess.)
-Cafe Du Monde. (In the morning, when most members of the party were still hungover from the night before.) I never remember not to wear black when eating beignets. I always emerge the loser from the powdered sugar battle.
-Graveyard tour of St. Louis Cemetery #1, which I remember mostly for our tour guide's mullet (spectacular, I took at least four covert pictures of it), Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau's grave (unassuming), and the giant pyramid grave that is apparently where Nicholas Cage intends to have himself be buried someday (!!!). It looks exactly like how you would expect Nicholas Cage's grave to look, down to the mysterious Latin and being impossible to ignore.
-A duck confit crepe that was good enough to take my mind of Nicholas Cage's grave pyramid.
-Steamboat ride/booze cruise. Rained like fuck nearly the entire time, with some impressive lightning. Would have probably been very relaxing otherwise. We drank overpriced cocktails and huddled under the awnings while trying to catch pictures of the lightning with our cellphones. Due to the cocktails, we were never quite successful at this.
-The Bachelor/Bachelorette Dinner at Mr. B's bistro. Someone suggested we play the three P's as an icebreaker as we waited/ate-- basically, you go around the table and name your favorite president, planet, and porn type, and explain each. If someone took yours before you went, you had to come up with something new. This actually worked out very well! Conversation was stimulated for the majority of the meal, and had the upside of inspiring prompt and frequent service from our waiter, since he seemed highly amused by it all. As I recall, it worked out roughly to something like:
Lincoln-Mercury-Interracial
Harrison-Pluto-Hentai (Animated)
Polk-Earth-Asians (Live action)
Clinton-Jupiter-Gangbangs
Adams (The first one, not the son)-Mars-Ebony
Washington-Neptune-Lesbians
FDR-Venus-Gay for Pay
-Drinks at Napoleon House. I don't know the significance of it. I suppose I could google it. My theory is that Napoleon is tangentially involved.
-Drinks at The Swamp. I suppose I should bring up Shot Girls. No matter what bar you're at, you'll probably run into the Shot Girls, or more likely, they will come after you. These are young ladies, generally dressed in some form of tight black clothing, bearing a rainbow array of test tubes holding various liquors. Their job is to get you to drink as many shots as possible (and buy some for them as well) and your job is to either drink the shots and pay for them, or elude them. Usually there's some kind of acrobatics involved as well-- some of them place the tube in their mouths and transfer it to your mouth, some of them have you take it from between their cleavage, some of them take it from between your cleavage, some of them have you take it from the crotch, sometimes there is motor-boating afterwards... you get the idea. (In my case, I didn't see the motor-boating coming and there was a near miss from a biting situation, since that tends to be my first reaction to anything.) Sometimes you do double shots!
Generally, I found some of them were much better at it, or at least more inventive than others, and I quite admire that. They also have you pick what colors you want, and this can lead to some hideous taste combos. Once they find out you're a bachelor/bachelorette party (of which there tend to be at least a half dozen of in the near vicinity at any given time), they re-double their efforts. The groom in our party got hit with like six shots of Fireball inside five minutes, and we had to prop him against a wall for a while to get his bearings back.
At one point, one of them bore down on me and shouted in a Stentorian voice, "THE BEST MAN WANTS ME TO DO A SHOT FROM BETWEEN YOUR TITTIES!" And before I knew it, I had test tubes jammed down my dress and I was having to grab them to keep them from falling lower, because I don't have sufficiently load bearing boobs to hold up the tubes. There was a sad lack of structural support. ...Then I accidentally dumped them in her face and promptly fled the scene, to let the best man pay for that particular round.
-Drinks at at least four bars I never bothered to get the names of. We had been debating whether or not we should split off to find strip clubs, and while we argued, we would just go into a new bar, so we never actually got around to going into either Saints and Sinners (Channing Tatum's club!) or the Hustler Club.
-Hurricanes at Pat O'Briens. I did remember this place, because there was a minor incident where the best man tried to make the groom eat a cockroach that was crawling the wall, but he was ultimately unsuccessful.
-Voodoo shop. Again, we were tanked enough by then that I don't recall which one. I bought a pig charm. And a skeleton with butterfly wings. Everyone suddenly decided at once that we should get our palms read, but the shop tossed us out because they wanted to close. I cannot blame them.
-Palm readings, on some side street. Undeterred by being thrown from the voodoo shop, we simply oozed, en mass, down enough side streets until we found one of the areas where you have a bunch of people on the sidewalk with their little tables, waiting to take advantage of drunk tourists who want their palms or cards read. I did both! I always get my palm read when I go; I enjoy it.
The skinny girl with three lip rings who read my cards kept interjecting, "You know what I mean?" after every other sentence, and I kept thinking of Jim Varney and getting distracted. She didn't explain the cards very well, though to be fair, I don't recall them well either. I did get Death, and did not get The Happy Squirrel.
The palm reader was an man named Al, who was hanging out in a lawn chair. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds, all pale skin and black fingernails. He reminded me of an affable, obese spider. He had a good touch with his hands, very light and not at all sweaty. Very zen, and I enjoyed talking with him. He apparently wowed the bride and groom, who both declared to me he was dead on with everything he told them. He was only about fifty percent accurate with me. ("You're dating someone seriously right now, aren't you?" "Nope.")
I wanted to ask him about Louise, and if she could contact me through the entrails of a goat or something. I did not. I did tell him I'd lost someone important to me, and he assured me they were happy and no longer in pain and it was time for them to go. It might have all been bunk, but that's the kind of comforting spiel you want to hear while drunk at two in the morning.
-Cafe Du Monde, again. (Technically also in the morning, I guess, if three am counts, when the party was fully drunk again.)
-Wine in the bride and groom's room, all of us stretched out on the floor and arguing who had the weirdest looking feet.
-Brunch at Brennans. This was probably the best meal I had while I was there. It was worth it. They have weird fucking murals on the wall, though; I think they're supposed to be Mardi Gras scenes, but the closer you look at them, the weirder they get. This one, for example, has a couple who I am pretty sure are in drag, someone with springs on their feet, a parade float, a snake on the parade float, random elves, a large bouncy ball, and some dingus with springs on their feet.
So all in all, while I damaged my bank account and liver most severely, the bride was happy. And like I said, no one got a face tattoo or woke up with a tiger in the room, so I guess my job was done. Now I just have to make it through her wedding next weekend, then her henna party next month, and the Bengali ceremony the day after that. Weddings, man. How do they work.
This was supposed to have been a music post for Baco (originally, the inspiration and theme were how much sports were pissing me off, but Baco is more important than sports, so she gets credit for the inspiration now), but I'll do that later this week.