📞 Hello? Hi. It’s me, Jen Glantz. Welcome to the 1-800-Bridesmaid, by Bridesmaid for Hire. A place where real stories are shared and your best advice is given.
This week: I’m doing something a little different! No caller. Instead, I’m sharing an excerpt of my new nonfiction memoir: Finally the Bride.
This book is about my own personal journey of trying to find love while walking down everyone else’s aisle as a hired bridesmaid for strangers. It includes stories about:
How a psychic told me I’d never find love at a Valentine’s Day party and that I’d be forever single.
A bride who hired me as her bridesmaid and went missing at her wedding. I found her black out drunk in the bridal suite screaming: this is the worst day of my life.
A bride who hired me as her bridesmaid but didn’t want me to walk down the aisle at her wedding. She wanted me to help her end her engagement.
How I went on 14 first dates in one month and ended up meeting my now husband Adam.
Why we met with a divorce lawyer before getting married.
SO much more. I could go on and on — but instead, I’ll share a chapter with you inside this newsletter!
Ps. Anyone who grabs the book on Amazon this week gets a free Newlywed Card Game mailed to them! The perfect gift for an engaged/married friend + or yourself! Hit reply with a screenshot of your order + address details and the card game is yours!
Hold please:
Below is an excerpt from my new nonfiction book: Finally the Bride. The stories inside of this book are dazzling, but also quite outrageous. All of the stories are true and years later, some of these stories haunt me in the middle of the night. It’s a rom-com with bits of silly + strange horror. You can read the full book right here.
The Saddest Bride I Ever Did See
The saddest bride I ever did see was the missing bride I found, after the ceremony ended, French kissing the carpet inside her bridal suite.
Or at least that's what it looked like.
"Um, Juliana?" I slowly whispered to the bride as I eyed her, face down, sprawled out in her poofy white dress, swirl- ing her tongue in patterns on the floor. "What's wrong?"
She closed her mouth and tilted her head sideways, leaving one eye open and the other smushed on the ground.
I tossed the bouquet over my left shoulder and ran over to her.
"Are you okay?"
She didn't answer, but the closer I got, the more I was able to piece together what was really going on.
To her left, a shattered bottle of vodka and giant pieces of glass sat on the floor, holding remnants of liquid like minia- ture life rafts.
Juliana picked up each glass shard one by one and slurped the vodka off it like she was indulging in all-you-can-eat oys- ters at a Vegas buffet.
"Juliana!" I yelled, pulling the glass out of her hands.
She was drunk. Blasted! The ceremony had ended only thirty minutes ago, and she'd been hiding here, sneaking in some alone time with her secret significant other. Vodka.
She sat up and noticed the glass everywhere, quickly open- ing her mouth to either speak or puke, puke or speak.
If she did puke, it wouldn't have been the first time a bride had hurled all over me.
Handling bodily fluids should make its way to the tippy top of my job description. People think my job as a professional bridesmaid is filled with glitz and glamour, but what it's filled with are so many P words—puke, pee, and dare I even say it, poop. When you work up close and personal with people on a big day of their lives, you get hit with everything.
I had a bride puke on my bridesmaid dress five minutes before walking down the aisle, another on the morning of her wedding because she was too hungover to get out of bed, and another when I went to say goodbye at the end of the night: she greeted me with a drunk burst of puke that flew out of her mouth like confetti leaving a party popper.
When Juliana opened her mouth, to my surprise, it wasn't what I expected. It wasn't liquid and it wasn't a coherent sentence. It was just a loud, piercing scream—the kind you finally let out after feeling so disappointed and frustrated, hopeless and exhausted.
Sort of like when you are digging for that one bag of chips in the pantry, and all of a sudden, an entire shelf gets un- hinged and everything falls on your toe. It was exactly the kind of sound you make when everything falls on your toe.
"AHHHHHHHHHH!" Juliana let it out again, reaching around the carpet for more shattered glass to lick.
That's when the saddest bride I ever did see said the saddest line I ever did hear at any wedding, ever.
"This is the worst day of my life!"
Six years later, when I wake up at 3 am and can't go back to sleep because my mind is montaging the moments of my life so far, this is usually the third or fourth thing I think about.
"This is the worst day of my life!"
I took ten steps back, moving closer and closer toward the exit door. I had only been working weddings for a couple of months at that point, and I wasn't prepared for any of this. I thought about running. I flirted with quitting.
But the saddest brides are the most thrilling, and so I stayed.
"I think I need to go find the groom," I started to say. But as my hand turned the doorknob left, someone else's turned it right.
In walked Juliana's mom, aunt, and cousin. Juliana fell backward onto the carpet, her fingers feeling around for a puddle of vodka.
"Everything is fine! I know it doesn't look that way, but it is that way!" I announced in my most professional tone of voice, quickly interrupted by Juliana.
"AHHHH."
"Is this really happening? Right now, Juliana? Really?" her mom said.
"Come on, I knew it. Didn't you see it coming?" her aunt said.
"This is so embarrassing," her cousin said.
I heard a rumble in the hallway, and I knew it had to be the groom. Let him see this, I thought. Let him see this and save this.
A part of me wanted to pat him on the back and wish him a warm welcome into marriage, ask if it was everything he expected, and question him over why he didn't come find Juliana sooner. But there wasn't time. Instead, I put my hand on his back and used the force of my biceps to push him inside the room.
Inside, Juliana was no longer flat on the ground. Juliana was on her hands and knees, banging on the floor like she was a two-year-old having a temper tantrum inside a Target.
The saddest brides are also so mesmerizing.
The groom stood behind me as if to use the professional bridesmaid as a shield.
"Do something, okay?" I shoved him forward once more. "Just do something."
He didn't do anything. Nobody did. We all just watched Juliana and her arms, like drumsticks, beating on the ground.
"Everyone get out," I screamed. "Everyone! Out!"
Nobody knew that I wasn't a professional, that I had just started the business only a few months ago after my Craigslist ad had taken off. I'd had absolutely zero experience with sad brides, only happy ones, so far. I'd dealt with happy tears, happy smiles, happy hugs hello and goodbye. Not anymore. Juliana showed me a side of weddings I did not know ex- isted. The side they don't show you in movies. The side they try to show you in reality shows, but you write it off as be- ing scripted and fake. A side you hope you never see again, though a part of you deep down to the tip of your esophagus knows you will.
The price on my website works for happy brides, brides that ask me to help them go dress shopping and dance to Bruno Mars. Brides that make me wear chiffon dresses and get their little cousin Sarah to smile in the photos. Happy brides are easy brides. Sad brides are loss leaders.
Nobody listened when I screamed. Everyone was standing still as if they were trapped in a snow globe and Juliana was the one shaking it.
Finally, she took matters into her own hands and tossed an empty champagne flute at the wall. More glass shattered everywhere, and for a moment, as the light caught Juliana's reflection and bounced off the tiny pieces, I noticed how beautiful she looked. Sad brides are just as beautiful as happy brides.
Juliana's mom, her aunt, and her cousin marched out the door in a single file line. I shut it hard and noticed something was missing. Something was gone.
"Where did he go?" I whispered to myself, checking under- neath the love seat for the groom. "You have to be kidding me!"
At some point, as the glass hit the wall and pieces flew ev- erywhere, the groom had escaped. He just completely left.
Juliana let me hug her and feed her water from a paper cup. No more glass.
Her words were slurred, but if you listened carefully and didn't interrupt, you were able to understand what she was trying to say.
Juliana confessed just how wrong everything about the day had been, how this wedding was her nightmare and she had never wanted any of this, not the princess dress or high- heeled shoes, not the people on the guest list or the prime rib. She did not say it out loud, but she forcefully tried to peel the ring off her finger, and I knew she desperately wanted to add the groom to that list.
"I did this all for them, my stupid family. I am miserable!"
We sat in the locked bridal suite for the rest of the cock- tail hour and then for another thirty minutes. Nobody came looking for us or cared that we were missing. Juliana was sup- posed to be one of the main characters of this wedding, but she felt invisible.
When she finally emerged, she looked like she had just run through a lawn sprinkler that shot vodka out of it. The way her mascara tears stained her face looked like she had put on a few tiny temporary tattoos.
Nobody cared when she entered the party. Nobody asked where she had been. Her mom, her aunt, her cousin, and the groom acted like nothing had happened.
On the way home that night, I sat in the back of an old taxi cab, picking slivers of glass out of the bottom of my shoe, cry- ing harder and harder as we traveled south on Fifth Avenue.
"Okay, what is wrong?" the taxi driver forced himself to ask. When the crying is louder than the radio blaring, a per- son feels obligated to ask.
"I just thought . . . I just thought weddings were supposed to be happy! So freaking happy!"
I blew my nose in my bridesmaid dress.
"But they are sad. Brides are so, so, so, so sad."
"Hey!" he cut me off. "Life is sad, lady. Life is sad."
He cranked the radio up so the volume was almost deafen- ing, which was appreciated because the crying wouldn't stop. I cried so loud you would have thought everything in the entirety of New York City just fell on my toes.
When I got home, I flattened out on the floor and stared at the ceiling, wondering why, for so long, we have all been made to believe that weddings are the best day of a person's life. People tell you that and you believe them. People lie.
"Not me!" I yelled inside an empty room. "I will not be sad."
Yet there I was, almost six years to the day later, looking at my reflection in a large piece of glass, thinking:
The saddest bride I ever did see turned out to be me.
Want to hear what happens next? Grab Finally the Bride on Amazon! Thank you endlessly for your support.
What’s new with Bridesmaid for Hire:
Jen Glantz here! I’m so grateful you’re here. I started 1-800-Bridesmaid as a way to bring you into the world of my life as a hired bridesmaid for strangers.
If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to lately, here’s a little preview:
A lot of you are reaching out to see if we are still hiring. Yes, but at the moment, there aren’t any open positions. I’ll keep you posted inside the newsletter when open positions to work weddings pop up.
My new book Finally the Bride is now available on Amazon!
My team and I developed these interactive maid of honor/best man speech, wedding officiant speech, and wedding vow tools. You chat with us about the stories, details, and memories you want to include and I write the speech for you — in just a few hours. If you have a wedding coming up and need a speech, check this out. We’re expanding this month to offer wedding officiant and father of the bride/goom and mother of the bride/groom speeches.
I'm Jen Glantz and this is my Bridesmaid for Hire newsletter.
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