Compost Studios

Once there was a woman professional in Northern Virginia who became engaged to be married. Sporting an impressive diamond on her left hand, the executive at a well-known international management consulting firm put all her professional skills and personal passion into planning The Perfect Wedding.

It would be elegant, traditional, and showcase her social standing, affluence, and good taste. Not a religious person, she nonetheless “shopped” for an impressive church to hold the wedding in—a church with WASP credentials, soaring cathedral ceilings, and proper stained glass windows. She booked a prominent hotel for the out-of-of-town guests and the reception.

She shopped endlessly for the perfect silk gown with a royal-looking cathedral train. She went to great lengths to ensure the bridesmaids’ gowns, invitations, and flowers were understated and expensive in a way that said “East Coast” and “old money,” even though she came from a middle-class family in the Midwest. She had vellum stationery and calling cards printed with her married name: Mrs. John Doe. It made some of her feminist friends want to gag.

Still, friends are friends, and they participated in her wedding fantasy. The ever anal retentive bride insisted on inspecting the undergarments her bridesmaids planned to wear under their gowns to ensure everyone had proper support, no visible panty lines, and any and all torso flab corseted into submission. She gathered the bridesmaids for a “makeup rehearsal,” to be sure all their makeup would be flattering, set the right tone, photograph well, and be neither too much nor too little. Nothing would ruin her perfect day in the ultimate American power city: Washington, D.C.

But the hyperventilating, social-climbing bride neglected one small detail: national politics. Washington, after all, belongs to the politicians, lobbyists, and protesters, not to Midwest girls with aspirations.

And so on the weekend of her wedding, the bride discovered D.C. was hosting the largest gay-rights rally of the entire year. Parades, demonstrations, conferences—it was one stop shopping for gay activists from across the nation.

So as Bridezilla’s mom, dad, grandma, siblings and relatives were flying in from their conservative Midwest towns, they had no idea they would be sharing D.C’s planes, taxis, restaurants, and yes, hotel, with tens of thousands of gay activists.

These were people who were descending on D.C. to make a point and to force people to confront the reality of gay lifestyles, and so their behavior was rather extreme. There were drag queens, flagrant public displays of affection, simulated sex acts, banners, placards, and exaggerated lisps and struts all over the city.

And so the bride, trying to impress her family and guests by celebrating with utmost taste a completely, thoroughly traditional ritual of heterosexual love, was upstaged by preening and prancing gay men, low-maintenance lesbians with spiked hair and motocycle boots, and hundreds of people leading so-called alternative life styles.

In the elevators, the restaurants, the taxis, the streets, and even at her fancy hotel, Bridezilla learned she was neither a Princess nor the center of God’s universe. She had to share the world (and her personal space) with people who didn’t prescribe to her circumscribed world view and ideas of success. In that sense, it turned out to be a perfect wedding after all.

May 30, 2006