Day 23 - My First

No, this is not me planning to hold up the local candy shop… this is how we all dressed up for my first ever French bachelorette party which took place today. Where are the sexy outfits and the cosmos and The Bride dressed up in a toilet paper bridal dress you ask? Nowhere to be seen. Instead, we all wore heavy hats, scarves around our nose and mouths and ball masks to cover our eyes… you see, this is how you (begin to) celebrate a bachelorette party in France:

1st: you call up The Bride on her cell (having first made sure that your accomplice (ie, The Fiancé, or a parent, or roommate) has arranged for her to be "available" that day) and tell her to come outside.

2nd all the friends come out of their hiding spot disguised (see today’s pic) and The Bride has to guess who is who. In our case, by the time she guessed it was me (I’m not one of her closest friends so it took her longer to figure out who I was) I was almost fainting in that heat!

3rd. The friends hand over a custom made tee-shirt (usually with a funny message on it like: “I will soon become an honourable and respectable Madame” or something along those lines) and a similar disguise. The main thing is to cover The Bride’s eyes so that she can’t see where she’s being taken.

4th. One of the girls takes out a picture of The Fiancé from the wallet of The Bride (c’mon ladies, I betcha we all carry a pic of our significant other in our wallets, n’est ce pas?) and gives it to the blinded bride. She must then be guided by the girls and stop every passer by she “encounters” asking them if they think it’s a good idea she marries the guy in the pic.

Highlights of this part of the day:
- When a bratty little kid looked at the pic, then at the blinded bride, and blurted out “nah… they’re both ugly” before snickering and running off like a mean Speedy Gonzalez.
- A couple riding their bikes that were kind enough to stop and politely respond to The Bride’s question with a shrug and a very enthusiastic “dunno, we’ve been together 30 years and never got married, so do it if you have to, but we don’t think it’s essential”…
- A drunken guy who started hitting on The Bride!! (in our defense, he didn’t look drunk when we pointed The Bride towards him)

Here there was a slight change in plans to the way these sort of things usually go… Normally, The Bride is then whisked off with her friends to a prearranged day of either treasure hunting, or mini golf, or picnic-ing or something along those lines. In our case, The Bride is in her first Trimester of her pregnancy and so far things haven’t been peachy for this soon-to-be-first-time-mom. So instead we all headed back to her place and proceeded to “test” how good of a housewife she will be once she ties the knot.

For this all the girls had prepared a series of quizzes for The Bride.

First up, we instructed The Bride to cook us a spur of the moment dish with whatever she had in her refrigerator. I have to admit this was a last-minute thing because initially we had each brought something for lunch but a last minute cancellation from one of the girls left us a pie short. I have to admit I was really impressed with The Bride’s cooking skills. Not only did she went on to make us a delicious pasta bolognesa with fresh basil and shredded parmesan, she even served the meat aside for me! Had it been yours truly in that case, I would have taken out 7 bowls of cereal and started pouring out the milk!!!

Next, the dessert quiz: The bride was blindfolded again (I guess there’s a hidden meaning in a Blindfolded Bride for the French???) and had to guess the flavours of different macarrons we gave her. I was impressed… she even got the pretty weird flavours like Ocean Salt & Carmel or Lavander & Rose Petal… :s

Next we quizzed The Bride on how well she knows The Fiancé. Here she got a pretty worrying 12 out of 25 questions right… but after an emergency committee between the judges, we awarded her extra points for the 11 years they’ve been together.

Then came the quiz on her favourite TV shows (Desperate Housewives and Dexter) and her favourite movie (Some Like it Hot). Here she passed with flying colours in comparison to the previous test (we all agreed The Fiancé didn’t have to know about this).

Last on the agenda, one of the girls had prepared a cute little Diploma declaring that she was now “Fit To Marry” and which we solemnly signed and stamped before presenting it to her.

In all, it was a fun day and the girls where all great. I could see The Bride really enjoyed her day and it was nice to hang out with a bunch of girly girls since it doesn’t happen that often (my circle of friends consists mainly on my work colleagues, André’s pals from high school and college and our poker buddies).

But I still wish we’d at least had a penis shaped cake.

Fned.