A few years ago, I wrote a book called “Rude Bitches Make Me Tired,” a salty etiquette manual for the modern age that inspired one bookstore owner hosting my signing to cover the word “Bitch” with multicolored Post-it’s in her store’s display window. She explained: “I don’t want children to walk by and see that word!”
Yeah, OK. But the shit they see on their phones while their prefrontal cortices are many years away from being fully formed is probably more damaging.
Obviously, I thought the idea of an etiquette book with a playfully vulgar tone would become an international bestseller and, well, I’m here to tell you how wrong I was. Still, it was fun to write, and it sold about 27,000 copies so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
So why am I bringing this up now? Because the rudest of all behaviors has just been documented by The New York Times: Couples are charging their guests to attend their weddings.
Tired yet? Join me on the fainting couch before my fat ass hits the floor. Rude bitches, a decade later, continue to make me tired. Also hungry but that just might be my sluggish thyroid because when you hit a certain age, ladies, you should expect your thyroid to forsake its obligations and make like my friend’s husband, Otis, who famously drove to the Piggly Wiggly for a gallon of milk one day 27 years ago and never returned.
But first, Otis? Who names their boy after the Mayberry town drunk? A question for another time. Yes.
The Times quoted gently clueless groom, Hassan Ahmed, who was planning such an extravagant wedding, he assessed each guest a fee of $450 per “ticket.”
Predictably, many guests have not responded, though this came as a shock to Hassan who told the Times he has already spent $100,000 for the gala affair. What part of “I DON’T HAVE THE MONEY FOR THIS” do his guests not get?
Hassan pouted that some of these same friends had spent way more than $450 for Beyonce tickets. Well, yes. Your point, Hassan? I mean one ticket gets you an evening with a goddess that will imprint your life so deeply it will be your last conscious thought on your deathbed, eyes closed. Even so, onlookers will mistake your wistful smile springs from a particularly tender memory of something one of your dumbbell children did. No. It was Beyonce!! The other ticket gets you a very nice slice of cake in a to-go box and a bruise the size of a Roomba from a too-energetic bro dance circle.
The trend extends beyond the hapless Hassan, of course. The Times detailed the decision of New Yorkers Nova and Reemo Styles who charged guests $333 per ticket to thin the herd from 350 to 60 so they could take their guests on a double-decker bus tour of sites important in their couple-life.
One guest said the experience was worth more than $333 so she had no regrets. OK, but doesn’t this become a business transaction? What if the guests didn’t care so much for the lobster/steak dinner atop One World Trade Center accompanied by the vocal stylings of rapper Fabolous?
Can you ask for a refund via Venmo if the steak was “actually a wee bit tough if I’m being honest”?
The trend is here and now and all we can do is rudely bitch about it. It should be obvious, yes, even to the tiny children with the undeveloped brain parts referenced above, you shouldn’t have a wedding you can’t afford. As Andy said to Otis, many a time, “Act like somebody.”
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