Bride, Oh, Beware

It’s a tough world out there — the world of bridal shows especially.

As Jonathan mentioned, we got chatty with the vendors at our foray into Bridal Show World. Many of them were charming. Especially the bakers. The bakers on the whole were appealingly obsessed with their work, and some were even a little surly, like great barristas in dark Parisian cafés. I think we brides could have all filed out the door for the day and they would have been happy to bask in the glow of their own creations. It was refreshing.

Other people were less refreshing. On the whole, the photographers seemed kind of enterprising. The DJs were openly so, to the point that you couldn’t help but like them. They sort of reminded me of young Charlie Sheen playing a broker. Sure, he’d rip out your guts and eat them with his Wall Street sushi if he got the chance, but he’d be awfully cute doing it.

But all these characters weren’t nearly so enterprising as the pink-cheeked dishware hawker who accosted us the minute we walked into the room. I couldn’t help it. I asked, “so, what does this have to do with weddings, exactly?”

Anyway, the show was great fun. I was glad we went. Even though it wasn’t appropriate for my years, I loved the gyrating boys in the tuxedos. It was great trying all that beautiful cake, lactose or no lactose. It was great watching the small town models navigate the catwalk, some of them so nervous their faces had frozen into a mask, some casting hilariously haughty looks at the crowd, and some just going with the flow.

It was when we got home that things got a little weirder.

First let me say that I am not a person that wins things. Case in point: the bridal show. Truly, many valuable prizes were given away there, and it’s not like there were so many people to win them. If you can’t win something at a bridal show, you’re pretty much cursed. That’s me. Although once I actually spent about a year industriously entering every high-ticket sweepstakes I could find, from Ford Explorers to seven-day trips to Rome, I didn’t win even a T-shirt or a AM/FM clock radio.

The only thing I ever won was a weird book on Dungeons & Dragons, and I have no idea how that happened.

But once we got home, after little time passed, we started getting the mailings — and the phone calls.

The mailings were pretty innocuous. “Buy invitations through us and get free RSVPs.” Stuff like that.

But the calls were telling us that we’d won things. For example, the photographer who called to let us know that we’d won a free engagement portrait package. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a portrait taken with Jonathan. We’re both so lame and busy, we don’t actually have one picture of us together. But when I told Jonathan, we looked at each other and he said just what I was thinking: so did we really win? And this is really free?

Or is this a really clever way of getting us through the door, and either practically guaranteeing a hefty upgrade, or nailing down a contract for the big event itself?

After all, if I were a particularly enterprising photographer, I might call my leads after the show to tell them they’d won a free engagement package.

At any rate, that was small change compared to the Big One. The Big One was a series of ebullient messages left on my answering machine over a week. Sometimes, I just don’t feel like answering my phone, and I get 30 to 40 backed-up messages. After all, anyone who knows me knows they can reach me instantly through email. The people who call are sometimes the love of my life, but mostly they’re strangers.

During this particular period of phone sloth, I got five or six calls informing me that I had entered for a free honeymoon at the bridal show, and that the company in question had “some really good news.” I guess what set off my alarms was the slightly bored tone in the operator’s voice. In fact, she seemed to be chewing gum while she left the message. And then, there was the dull roar of what seem like hundreds of other operators leaving the same message for other brides in the background. Hmmm.

So I didn’t call back. Somewhere in my mind, I had the idea that if I’d really won something, I’d get a telegram or a visit from Ed McMahon, or at the very least, a notification in the mail. I actually half-hoped that something would show up in the mail, but it never did.

They kept calling, and I kept ignoring the calls. But finally, I decided to attack my 35 backed-up messages, and on a whim I returned the call.

It went really strangely. First of all, I called late at night on the weekend — a time when many traditional businesses wouldn’t answer the phone. But someone answered. I told him I’d been getting a number of calls. He responded that meant that I’d won something, but he didn’t seem interested in who I was. He began to tell me that there was some kind of show that I had missed by not responding, but then the line appeared to fuzz out and I lost him.

It was just me and the dial tone. And I created this horrible and satisfying scenario of loss in my head. I was Laura in Dr. Zhivago. I’d been on the verge of an all-expenses-paid vacation to somewhere Technicolor, like Tahiti. I thrown it away because of my phone sloth. Let this be a lesson to me.

But then I got over it, and decided to research the company that called me. Let’s call them “Meretriciously Bridal.” I Googled for “Meretriciously Bridal free honeymoon.”

And I turned up a lot of weird information.

Let me be the first to say that I have no personal knowledge of any connections between “Meretriciously Bridal” and other companies. But other brides have linked them, and other brides have a lot to say about the experience.

Apparently, if you sign up at a bridal show or even certain wedding web sites, you might get on a certain company’s list. And they might call to say that you’ve won a vacation, and all you have to do to claim it is attend a 90 minute sales pitch for cookware.

It sounds like most brides and grooms who go have no intention of buying. After all, they’re on the verge of paying for the most expensive party of their lives. So expensive, they find themselves desperate enough for honeymoon funds to attend a cookware pitch. And yet, after a high-pressure sales pitch involving a video of a dying bird, on average they seem to end up signing for about $1600 worth of cookware. It almost makes timeshares look cheap.

In many cases, it seems, the contract contains a clause stating you only have three days to cancel. Unfortunately, it also seems that you can only cancel with the original salesperson, who goes mysteriously AWOL during this three-day period. And it also seems that the company/companies involved are extremely aggressive in court, so regardless of any buyer’s remorse you may feel, you will end up paying that $1600.

You can read a lot about a similar, possibly related free vacation deal here:
www.consumeraffairs.com

I was grateful that I listened to that little voice that questioned the gum-popping operator.

But it’s a tough world out there, especially when it comes to weddings. “Few things in life are free” is still true, even if you did manage to meet the man of your dreams.

And if you do hear you’ve won something big after signing up for a bridal show? Wait for Ed McMahon to show up on your porch, or at least the telegram guy.

Unless you really want a lot of cookware.