Gilbert - I never promised you a goodie bag: a memoir of a life through events --the ones you plan and the ones you dont

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

A Memoir of a Life Through Eventsthe Ones You Plan and the Ones You Dont

Jennifer Gilbert

IN MEMORY OF JULIE SISKIND

There are stars whose radiance is visible on earth though they have been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light up the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for mankind.

Hannah Senesh

Contents

| The Jen Suit

: At Least

: Turn the Channel

: This Is Not My Fabulous Life

| Red Lipstick

: Putting My Face On

: Running as Fast as I Can

: Chaos Theory

: Miss Gilbert, This Is Going to Be Very Hard for You

| Figure Eight

: Pins and Needles

: Bicycle Pants

: The Scary Mask

: I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag

| The Best Man

: Best Friends

: After All These Years

: Something Is Happening

| Faith

: Class Parent

: All Clear

: Illumination

This is a work of nonfiction. I have changed the names and identifying details of some individuals, companies, and organizations in order to protect their privacy. For the same reason, some events in the book are composites. Ill leave it to you, the reader, to figure out which ex-boyfriends, brides, and others with reason to fear have been granted anonymity.

Keep calm and carry on.

S o, we have a little situation.

I was holding the brides hand, looking up into her big brown eyes. She was standing on a stool so that her wedding dress could extend down to the floor, awaiting the massive tulle petticoat that would inflate all that satin to full-on princess proportions.

The bride knew something was wrong, and I could feel her fingernails digging into my palm. I smiled. The first thing you need to know is that I will fix everything, I said to her.

The bride nodded. I had explained this to her before, just like I did with all my brides: things went wrong with weddings sometimes, and when they did, it was my job as the event planner to make everything right again. I always feel like I should wear a T-shirt that reads, Chief Damage Control Officer.

I continued. The second thing you need to know is that your tulle petticoat got caught in the trunk of the groomsmens limo. The bride kept nodding, and then I added the kicker: The limo drove away.

The bride was nodding more fiercely now, and there was a strangled sound in the back of her throat. The truth was, the last time Id seen the brides tulle, I was running down the streets of Miami, screaming at the limo driver while I watched the tulle being dragged and torn like the last sad piece of tissue in the bottom of my purse. But I didnt think painting that particular picture for the bride would be very productive at the moment.

Now the bridesmaids were getting in on the action. There was a collective gasp in the room, and one of them shrieked. The mother of the groom gripped my arm. Mrs. Lopez had survived Castro, but she looked like this might kill her. Where is it? Are they bringing it back?

Once again I recalled that tulle, dragged and ripped beyond repair through the streets of Miami. Oh, honey. I sighed. The tulles not coming back.

L ooking back on that day when Id frantically chased down the doomed petticoat, I had an epiphany: while I was fixing things for other people, I didnt have to think twice about myself. Obsessing over every tiny detail of other peoples most important events was what I did best. It was the perfect way to avoid thinking about the dark, scary void inside me.

Id done a pretty good job of paving over that void with numbness, but every once in a while, on one of my bad days, the sorrow crept in, and Id have to run and run to get away from it. So I welcomed other peoples situationstheir crises small and large. In fact no problem was too small for me to throw myself into fixing it. Like when the bride at another wedding insisted that we individually wrap hundreds of SweetN Low packets in their own little white envelopes because she didnt want to see any pink on her all-white tables. Or when we spent $50,000 on centerpieces for a corporate eventtall, gorgeous tree branchesonly to find out an hour before the event that our speaker was less than five feet tall, and the audience would never be able to see him over all those branches. So we cut down every one of them using whatever knives we could swipe from the kitchen. Or when five hundred more people showed up for an event than the client had calculated, so I became a coat-check girl for the night. I did whatever it took to make a perfect event.

I was a master of the small stuff, but I really shone in the face of true disaster. Thats when I got calm. When the party boat crashed into the dock, or the venue burned down two days before the event, I became the definition of grace under pressure. And when the brides wedding dress was hanging a little (a lot) low, because her underskirt was currently taking a ride down South Dixie Highway? Whatever. It was all in a days work.

When I woke up the morning of the tulle brides wedding, it was one of my bad days. I could feel it even before my eyes openedit was a familiar sense of dread, a physical ache of anxiety and fear coupled with a suffocating heaviness that filled the spot where my soul used to be. On a day like that, a runaway petticoat was just the jolt I needed. As I was skittering down the streets of Miami after the limo, I was the closest to happy that I could feel at that point in my life. I was in high-gear emergency mode, and all I thought aboutall I cared aboutwas fixing this problem so beautifully that no one would ever know the wedding was anything but perfect. And a brilliant side benefit was that if I could hold this event together, then I could also hold myself together, at least for another day.

It was one of the first events that I had handled completely on my own, back when I was working at a small firm that specialized in wedding planning. The bride was a friend of a friend, and Id become close to her. She was a little younger than I was, barely twenty-two. Her mother had died of cancer when the bride was just a child, and her father was now very ill. As a wedding planner you get used to acting in the role of family counselor without even thinking about it, and I could tell how unmoored the bride felt, as if she were already an orphan. A redheaded WASP from a non-religious Protestant family, shed fallen in love with the son of a devoutly Roman Catholic Cuban-American family, and she was embracing her new life with open arms. This was her fresh start, her new familyand they were all there to watch her walk down the aisle of the biggest Catholic church in downtown Miami. The bride wanted everything about the wedding to be perfect, as if it might be a sign or a promise that her life would be perfect forever after as well.

Meanwhile, the dress. I remember walking into the room in the church where the bride was getting ready before the wedding. Shed already had her makeup and hair done, all curled in crimson ringlets. The Vera Wang dress shed chosen had such full skirts that we lowered it over her head like an art installation while she perched on the stool. Then we did up the hundreds of tiny buttons that ran down the back of her dress. That was when we looked around for the petticoat. In the seconds during which eight pairs of eyes scanned the room for a pile of tulle, I could sense a rising communal panic. Murmurs started to bubble up. ( Whose job was it to look after the petticoat? What do you mean she left it in the trunk of the grooms car? ) Then there were louder hisses and the start of accusations, the kind that ruin relationships for years after.