As a professional bridesmaid, my job isn’t just about zipping on a polyester dress I'll never wear again or dancing the night away beside the bride’s drunk uncle.
I’m hired to go deep into the bridesmaid trenches, figuring out creative fixes if and when mishaps occur on the big day. And trust me when I say that mishaps do occur.
Ahead, I'm sharing six of the absolute, hands down, weirdest things I've had to do as a professional bridesmaid — from giving my bra to a bride's mother to giving a speech about a couple I'd met only hours earlier.
In the era of Pinterest, it can sometimes feel like weddings are less about the experience, and more about how the experience appears on camera. I once worked with a bride who insisted that she had to be photographed in a particular spot outside of her venue. The only problem was that it was right in the middle of a patch of poison ivy. She demanded that someone from the location remove the ivy immediately, but nobody seemed to know how to do it. So I walked over, found a tiny gum wrapper on the ground, clasped it between my forefingers, and pulled out each and every leaf myself. The bride got her dream photos — and I got a nasty rash.
Illustrated By Natalia Spotts.
A couple weeks before her wedding, one bride called me and said that she was worried about a specific uninvited guest crashing her reception. That person? Her previous maid of honor, whom she'd fired three days before hiring me. She asked that I keep watch for this woman, and said she wanted that to be my primary task for the night. She effectively hired me to act as her bodyguard-in-a-bridesmaid-dress, and for most of her wedding, my eyes were fixed on the doors leading into the reception hall. The ex-MOH never showed up — but I was prepared to intercept if she did.
Illustrated By Natalia Spotts.
No matter how much time or money you invest in making sure your wedding day runs smoothly, something can always go wrong. Case in point: I once worked a spring wedding in a field in Nevada. Right as it was my turn to walk down the aisle, I looked down and noticed there were animal droppings all over the ground. I had two choices in that moment: I could ignore the poop and keep walking, hoping the bride’s $4,500 lace wedding dress didn’t come into contact with it, or I could pick it up with my bare hands and move it aside. Let’s just say there wasn't enough soap in the entire state of Nevada to make my hands feel clean again after that.
Illustrated By Natalia Spotts.
I was enjoying my vine-ripened tomato salad at a wedding reception, when all of a sudden the DJ announced that the next speech would be given by Jen the bridesmaid — a.k.a. me. I coughed up a half-chewed tomato, and shot the bride a confused look from two seats over. We had chatted by phone before the wedding, and she had explicitly said I wouldn’t be expected to give a toast. Now, she smiled, and whispered that things had changed and she needed me to do this. Of course, I didn’t have anything prepared, but I grabbed the microphone and improvised a speech for three minutes, in front of a room of 152 strangers, about a bride I’d never met in person until that day.
Illustrated By Natalia Spotts.
As a professional bridesmaid, one of my main roles is to provide all kinds of support to the bride, the bridal party, and other VIPs. In this case, it was a different kind of support. On the day of the wedding, the mother of the bride was in tears because as she was zipping on her dress she realized she forgot to pack a strapless bra. She lived a half hour away and the wedding was up in the mountains, so finding a place to buy a new one was out of the question. So I did the only thing I could do: unclipped my strapless bra and gave it to her for the night. She danced the night away with a well-supported bust, and my lady lumps were (barely) held in place with duct tape that I stole from the DJ booth.
Illustrated By Natalia Spotts.
I’ve walked down the aisle as a bridesmaid more times than I can count on both of my hands and feet. But only once have I done it while being escorted by a dog. In this wedding, the bride decided to make her puppy a bridesmaid (and even had her wearing a matching mini bridesmaid dress) — which sounded super-cute, until I remembered that it’s really hard to get an excited puppy to walk in a straight line, especially if it has to go to the bathroom. Since I wasn’t about to pick up poop mid-ceremony (again!), we went on a long walk outside so she could take care of business before we both made our wedding debuts.
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