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Pique n' your interest

From bridesmaid to Train Wreck

Last week I spent five days in a whirlwind of activity attempting to make myself look beautiful or, at the very least presentable, for a wedding.

It began last Tuesday morning, five days and counting until the BIG DAY. I was the last minute frazzled bridesmaid, flying into Toronto and trying to squeeze months of neglect into a few short days.

I had done my best in the weeks leading up to the wedding to stay on the seat of my mountain bike as much as possible. The scrapes and scabs on my elbows, war wounds from the first Loonie Race, had practically disappeared and, quite naturally, I assumed I was ready.

My mum took one look at me after I got off the plane however and announced that I was far from ready. Apparently there was a lot of work to be done.

My first major task was to actually get fitted for the bridesmaid’s dress. Seems simple enough but even before the fitting I spent hours going in and out of countless shoe stores for a pair of tan-coloured heels, which I will most likely never wear again.

Heels in hand I stepped into the quiet bridal salon to see what this dress, billed as a sage green satin number with ruffles across the chest, actually looked like. It had been the hot topic of conversation for the past year.

At first everything seemed to be going OK. I shuffled the dress over my head, zipped up the back and turned to look in the mirror.

And then there it was, hanging around me like a shiny green tent. And I was the sturdy middle pole holding it aloft.

Before I had time to panic, the seamstress had tucked and pinned and hemmed and cinched, making it at least tolerable for the time being.

True, no amount of pinning and tucking was going to get rid of the ten pounds I had been planning to shed before the wedding but at least I wasn’t on the verge of a breakdown.

The ensuing days were spent primping and preening and coifing and buffing. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think it made that much of a difference on the wedding day.

Here’s a small sample of what went on behind the scenes before we appeared at the church.

The Tan – The tent did absolutely nothing for my pale pasty middle-of-May skin. But right next to the dress shop there was a blinking light advertising the Mystic tan. The Mystic tan is a 60-second spray on tan that makes you feel like you’ve just come back from the tropics. Gone are the sunburns. Gone the peeling skin. Gone the comments about my British blood.

The lady asked me if I wanted a one or a two tan, two being more sprays. I decided to live on the edge and opted for the darker tan.

Once sprayed the tan gets deeper over the course of the evening.

Lying in bed that night it looked like I had changed race. It was quite a shock to look in the mirror the next morning. By the time of the wedding however I was more a golden brown than anything else and many people were commenting on how healthy I looked. Instead of just simply nodding and taking the compliment, I launched into a blow by blow account of the Mystic tan as though I was their official spokesperson.

The Highlights – Scared by my haphazard approach to the tan, which could very well have been a disaster, I decided to take a more subtle approach with my highlights. The hairdresser said it was probably a good thing that I was getting highlights, what with the plethora of grey hair on my head. Her tip just got a lot smaller I thought to myself as I gave her a wan smile and nodded that I wasn’t getting any younger. A hundred dollars later and my light brown hair had a few slightly lighter light brown strands.

The Threading – Up until then the pain in the name of beauty had been fairly minimal (although, my parent’s credit card had taken a fair beating). The most excruciating pain was reserved for my eyebrows. Those two things perched on the top of your face seem so entirely insignificant. But tending to your eyebrows is an essential part of getting ready, according to those in the know. Girls pluck them, they wax them, and they even get little jolts of electricity. I gave the go-ahead to have my eyebrows threaded. The process involves a piece of thread being rolled over the brows, which in turn rips the hair out of the skin. It’s supposed to be gentler on the skin than waxing but with my eyes streaming I can safely say that there is nothing remotely gentle about this technique of hair removal.

The Manicure and Pedicure – This was the bride’s treat. Five of us in a spa for the day. If it’s possible, the bride is even less girlie than I am. Chit-chatting with the estheticians she mentioned that she had never exfoliated before in her life.

"You’ve never exfoliated," they all exclaimed in unison, turning from the hands and feet of the bridesmaids to gape at the bride, raising their perfectly arched eyebrows at each other.

I think they saw a sucker coming and the bride was convinced and coaxed into buying new lipsticks, with samples of face wash to be applied rigorously before the wedding.

The Up-Do – The wedding day arrived and I was back at the hairdressers again. This time I was getting my hair styled for the wedding. Leaving it up to the experts, I told my stylist that he had free rein. Charged with that command he wasted no time getting out a jumbo size bottle of hair spray and about 45 bobby pins. I thought I was going to get a subtle bun, perhaps a French braid. You can imagine my shock when he announced that I was done and there were pieces of hair spiked up at the back of my head. Apparently it’s all the rage right now. I thanked him profusely and shelled out $95. One of the other bridesmaids loaded up on Motrin after getting her hair styled because the bobby pins were pressing in too tightly.

That being said, it wasn’t all bad. In fact, barring the pain, the worry over the reverse Michael Jackson approach to my skin and the loads of money that was spent, it was actually kind of nice being pampered and fussed over.

Then again, I have to say I was infinitely more comfortable and relaxed as I made my way through Train Wreck last night, at one point tangled in my bike and lying across a rock, with mud on my face and a pedal scrape down my leg. I may not have been looking my most attractive but I was having fun.