Lifting the Lid on Celebrant Secrets – cause lets face it, weddings can be a time of spanx, sisters and scissors.
As a young Celebrant, one of my very first weddings took place in the summer of 2003 in the somewhat stark surrounds of a hotel in central Dandenong. There was no birds chirping, no manicured gardens, literally just a brick building with a worn 1980’s facade and inside was a converted function room with cheap plastic chairs and no windows. It was hot. Like ridiculously hot as I do remember the air conditioner had ceased functioning alongside the glory days of the hotels splendiferous structure.
The bride was particularly worried about her sister in the lead up to her wedding day. Her sister did not like the Bride’s choice of partner. Her sister did not like family events. Her sister liked to drink. As a very relaxed Celebrant, I calmed the bride’s nerves in the lead up to the day and assured her that whatever happened we would deal with it.
The bride arrived in an early 1990’s white ford fairlane limo and was pretty chuffed to have enjoyed her first ever limo ride. She was adorably excited. I was terrified. I wanted so badly to do a good job for her because I knew she has saved every last dollar to make her dream wedding day happen. The Bride’s sister hadn’t arrived yet. The round of mobile phone calls started and it turned out she had ‘car issues’ and a friend was driving her to the hotel but they couldn’t find the place. Mum shouted directions down the phone, my makeup melted off my face standing in the bitumen car park and the bride stayed sunshiny and delightful and bubbly and was happy to wait for her sister, after all she was her sister, she loved her.
20 minutes passed.
Then she arrived.
The sister.
Firstly the car bringing her in almost took out the Photographer, then it pulled up about an inch from the Bride’s beloved limo. The sister rolled out the car with a can of southern comfort in a sweaty hand and a scowl burning her face. She didn’t have time to say hello or acknowledge the fact that she had held up the wedding apparently she couldn’t hold on one more second, she absolutely had to go to the toilet before the ceremony.
I went inside to prep the guests and the groom for the bride’s impending arrival, then headed back to the carpark and waited again. This time for another 10 minutes, then it was decided that I should go in and look for the Sister. After all is a a Celebrants job to make sure everything runs smoothly. I apprehensively opened the bathroom door and heard a faint ‘help’. Now as a normally relaxed celebrant, I panicked and sprung into action, I thought she might have been dying.
But when I pushed open the unlocked toilet stall door, I was not the relaxed celebrant anymore, I just couldn’t make sense of the scene, there she was, the sweaty sister, and she had gotten herself wedged in her ridiculously undersized spanx with both arms glued down by her side because they were so dang tight. Going beyond the call of duty, I grabbed and pulled and even tried the rolling method to get those suckers off, but combined with the sweat, the fact she wouldn’t stay still and my fake nails, those spanx were stuck.
Sissy venomously hissed more swear words then the urban dictionary at her spanx, and she grew louder and louder. Worried the guests would hear I knew the quickest escape for her would be to cut them off. So I went to the front desk of the hotel, calmly asked for some scissors and made my way back in. Sissy had graduated to the floor in a very tightly bound mess and now resembled some kind of flesh coloured, drunken caterpillar. So I cut and cut and cut, and eventually like a baby giraffe she stood up pulled her dress down, grabbed her can of booze and walked out like nothing had happened. Nothing that even closely resembled that level of bizarre had happened to me since I saw some strange goings on in the 1990’s in a nightclub bathroom in Berlin.
I quickly got that Bride down the aisle, got her married to her beloved groom and got myself home, and strongly question now if spanx should come with a warning label ‘Not to be worn when inebriated.’
This content was originally published here.