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A Mock Wedding
is a funny way to celebrate one of the numerous early wedding anniversaries, especially if a group of young married women friends want to join in a surprise.
The bride may be invited to a chum's house and presently the procession may appear before her.
The bride should have a cheesecloth or mosquito netting veil with dried orange peel to hold the folds in place, and she should carry a bouquet of white chicken feathers tied with white tape the shower part can be little bows of rags. -- The bridesmaids might all wear the cheapest of farmers' hats, with huge bunches of goldenrod or asters on them or else such things as little kitchen utensils sewed on the front in place of flowers. Bouquets of burdock tied with colored cretonne would be [96] attractive for them, or possibly as a substitute for the conventional shepherds' crooks they could carry umbrellas with big bows on the handles. A third suggestion for the bridesmaids is that they carry grape baskets filled with none too choice outdoor flowers and weeds.
There should be a flower girl, of course, who can wear an abbreviated costume. Her hair should be in ringlets with a big ribbon tied around her head, and she may carry a market basket filled with scraps of paper, or flowers if you prefer, to scatter in front of the bride.
The ring bearer may carry a curtain ring on a sofa cushion.
At the ceremony, of course, you must omit all the really solemn parts, but you may let someone make up some questions for the minister to use. For instance, he may say to the mock bridegroom, "Do you promise to obey this woman?" Instead of saying, “I will" and "I do," they may say, "I wilt" and "I doth." [97] For a wedding breakfast, you might serve creamed codfish in heavy crockery, and follow it with helpings of cream of wheat either cold or hot, which can be served to resemble ice cream in little paper cases. There should be a wedding cake which may be only gingerbread, and some kind of grotesque motto may be inscribed in the frosting. [98] A
There is no cooking here worth the name, and that is deliberate. A mock wedding is a party built on calculated ugliness, and the food is part of the joke rather than an exception to it.
- The menu has to be read as a jokeCreamed codfish in heavy crockery, cream of wheat moulded in paper cases, gingerbread for a wedding cake with a grotesque motto on it. Nothing here is meant to be good. Every item is recognisably the wrong thing presented in the right vessel, which is the entire structure of the party.
- The one trick worth keepingHot or cold cereal pressed into small paper cases reads as ice cream from across a room. It is the cheapest visual gag in the book, it costs nothing, and it works on anybody who is not looking closely.
- Props from the houseMosquito netting for a veil, dried orange peel to weight the folds, white tape and rag bows for the bouquet, a curtain ring on a sofa cushion, chicken feathers, umbrellas for crooks. The whole party is assembled from things nobody had to buy, which is the most practical thing about it.
- BurdockListed for the bridesmaids’ bouquets. The burs fasten into clothing and hair and are genuinely difficult to get out of either, so cut it late, carry it in a bag, and keep it away from anything woollen.
- The scriptI wilt and I doth, and questions invented for the mock minister. The page says to leave out all the solemn parts, and that is the etiquette of the form: the ceremony is parodied up to the vows and no further.
The mock wedding is a folk entertainment rather than an invention of this book, and the version here has a specific target: a woman a few years married, ambushed at a friend’s house by a procession of other married women. Every element restages her own wedding in its cheapest possible materials — cheesecloth for the tulle, chicken feathers for the bouquet, a curtain ring for the ring, gingerbread for the cake, creamed codfish for the wedding breakfast — and the comedy lives in the gap between the day as it was staged and the household as it actually turned out. The book files it between the Tin Wedding and the Silver Wedding Shower, in a chapter of anniversary parties, which places it exactly: this is a joke a group of women made about marriage, to each other, at an occasion nominally celebrating it.