Details fade, but the vibe doesn’t. Modern brides face a cavalcade of choices from the ridiculous (position of the hand-lettered signs indicating the porta potties) to the sublime. (To wear a wedding veil or not? Yes, wear a veil because it’s your one chance and veils are magical.) Resist the temptation to get so lost in the particulars that you forget the purpose of the day. As the years go by, the lasting memory won’t be about the appetizer choice, but the overall feeling of the wedding. Was there unity? Was there joy? Was there love? Those are the most important details.

Big Kiss & Wedding Bliss,

Your Aunt B

Chapter 10
The Beginnings of the Middle

The Mother of the Bride

Beware the emergence of Bridezilla, the Merry Widows had warned Alexa. It all starts out with hearts and roses and ends with tears and threats, they had said that night at dinner a few weeks ago. Even the best-behaved brides will have moments, they assured her. It comes with the territory. The only way MOBs can survive is to rely on good friends for strength and assume that one day, after the wedding, they’ll get their girl back.

But Alexa couldn’t believe that Penny would turn on her the way Ming’s daughter, Tessie, had, by issuing an order via a strongly worded text that everyone in the bridal party lose twenty pounds or be cut from the roster. The tyrant bride, a marketer in the beauty biz with a lifetime of body issues, ruthlessly dropped the fourth bridesmaid, a childhood friend who was a beautiful size fourteen. Surely Penny would never act like Toots’s granddaughter who had flung a sample bouquet of wildflowers at the inexperienced florist, shouting, “Find better-looking nature!” When Frannie described how her newly minted daughter-in-law turned to her in the receiving line and ordered her to move to the other end of the line because she was “ruining the aesthetic” with “her frumpy dress,” Alexa had shaken her head. Penny would never say anything like that to anyone, would she?

She might think it, but never say it, Alexa decided.

But there they were at lunch at a bistro in SoHo in what Alexa had envisioned being a festive celebration of the Miracle of the Dresses when the darker aspects of Penny’s hyper-organized personality started to emerge. After their inhaling a lunch of grilled salmon and asparagus, coffee was on the way as Penny took her mother through her plans for the wedding. The edge in her daughter’s voice took hold as she whipped out her tablet, brought up her PowerPoint, and ran her mother through the details like she was running her through a tour itinerary.