Bachelor Party Planning

When Tracy and Dane told me they were planning to be married, I seized the opportunity to insinuate myself into the planning of his bachelor party. Now, I was not Dane’s best man, his brother Alex was, but Alex was 19 years old and lived in Florida, so it was logistically impossible for him to take the lead.

So after a huge amount of discussion over a moderate amount of alcohol Dane and I decided that traditional bachelor parties are lame. At our age, just seeing strippers is not very exciting. To make sport of it we had to take it to the next level somehow. Then it occurred to us: bring the strippers to you. Not in some shady hotel room with a bouncer for security, no, out into the open. We take the party on the road and take the strippers downtown.

Then the idea began to take shape. Where could we take the strippers to places that strippers don’t normally go? The greater the juxtaposition, we reasoned, the more fun it would be. We could take them to the museum downtown. This idea struck us immediately as brilliant. What happens when you introduce strippers to culture (and vice versa)? It was shaping up to be something of a social experiment, like they do in those stupid reality shows. Then we could film it and really have something special to show for all our trouble.

We were so excited about this plan that we kept coming up with new weird activities. The best of these was strippers at the gun range.

Dane and I had both bought guns at the last gun show, which is very easy to do in the state of Georgia. I wish I had gotten a carbon copy of the questionnaire I had to fill out, assuring the vendor that I was in fact a US Citizen, I was not a fugitive from justice, I did not currently have a restraining order out on me, nor was I a convicted felon... It was a long questionnaire. After that it was a two minute phone call to complete my background check and I walked away with a gun. No waiting period if you’re buying at a gun show either.

Dane came by and made a similar transaction; Tracy purchased a stun gun disguised as a cell phone. What followed was a ridiculous display of the three of us in the car playing with our recent purchases. Dane and I had not yet purchased ammo, so we would just cock them action-movie style, pointing them at nothing and marveling at how cool they looked. This was occasionally punctuated by Tracy pushing the button of her TASER, which issued a sharp electric hiss like a moth landing on a bug zapper. At the moment she had the only thing in the car that was actually dangerous, and every time she zapped it me and Dane flinched.

“If you shock me with that thing,” Dane cautioned, “the wedding is off.”

For a while after buying the guns we did nothing at all with them. The next time I saw Tracy she said: “It’s just sitting on top of the microwave. Every now and then Dane will pick it up, cock it, and hold it for a minute, but that’s about it.” He still hadn’t even bought bullets.

Dane and I did manage to get to the shooting range once, but just once. I didn’t have the sense to buy ear protection, so I had a ringing in my ears for so long after I was afraid I’d damaged my ear drums.

But that was the free range, which was actually not far from the hunting lodge where I’d seen the alligators get slaughtered. There was a fancy indoor range we’d been meaning to visit, but it was a little expensive. This bachelor party seemed like the perfect opportunity. What would be cooler than strippers shooting guns? Not only did it give us an excuse to go to the indoor range, but it would be wicked awesome too.

“We’d have to videotape the whole thing,” Dane insisted, to which I wholeheartedly agreed.

But there were a lot of drawbacks to this awesome scheme. The first was that the price of a private party at the gun club (if such a thing even existed) would be more than the price of the strippers. Dane had a buddy who used to run a strip club, so he was pretty sure he could get us in touch with the right people, but we were still going to have to pay the strippers. That being the priority, we didn’t want to introduce any element to the plan that could possibly take away from the overall goal.

The second consideration was location. The rest of the plan revolved around locations downtown, all of which were in walking distance of each other. This provided numerous advantages. If we met the girls downtown we wouldn’t have to arrange for transportation and if the whole event happened right out in public, they wouldn’t need to arrange for their own security. The gun range overcomplicated an already complex scenario, so it was the first part of the plan to be eliminated.

The plan suddenly became straightforward and elegant in its conception, boiling down to one central thesis: How would strippers behave when removed from their natural habitat and transplanted into the everyday world of downtown Savannah? It was a question that didn’t just serve our purposes in providing a unique bachelor party experience, but might prove to serve science itself.

We worked on this plan for months, mostly just talking about how awesome it would be and laughing about it. We would meet the strippers downtown, walk them around to the museums and art galleries and take their picture in front of the city’s landmarks.

The rules were simple:

• They could not know the specifics regarding the nature of the experiment. According to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, nothing can be observed without being altered. This is especially so when the subject knows it’s being observed.
• They had to dress in the their standard stripper attire. No secret identity stuff. The look was key, so long as what they were wearing was legal.
• This addition came from Dane: We would carry a boom box with us and every time we turned on the music, no matter where we were, they would have to dance.
• The whole thing had to be caught on tape and in still photos.

And this was something to get excited about. It had all the makings of a real bachelor party. All we had to do was make it happen.

Fixing the Future

I'm starting this topic to solicit your input on how we can fix the future. Should we go with jetpacks? Or stay on the girl robot technology? Or is it a matter of philosophy rather than technology? If we were to have a World's Fair or build an EPCOT Center, how would we portray a world of tomorrow that's still worth believing in?

I don't mean "fix the future" like it's already broken. Think of it more like fixing a boxing match, like insuring an outcome to things.

Let's pretend that an apocalypse is not imminent, and fixing the future actually means making the world better than it is today, which is actually the point of life in the first place.

The future isn't broken, it hasn't even happened yet, so for the same reason it isn't written either. If you could have any future, what would you ask for?

WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORKING TO ACCOMPLISH?

Ninja Wedding (that title makes it sound cooler than it was)

This was the year for weddings, apparently. I had discovered at the beginning of the year that Tracy and Dane were engaged. Some months prior I had received word from Milford that he intended to marry as well, but dismissed it when no communication on my part warranted confirmation from him on the matter. Finally in February he called me out of the blue and told me that he was indeed getting married the next month and wanted me to be the best man. Tracy and Dane were planning their wedding in May, so that put two weddings on my social calendar for the Spring roughly within a month of each other.

The Milford nuptials were planned for Easter weekend. I don’t know what it is with people planning their weddings on Easter weekend - it’s not even a three day weekend or anything - but this is the second one of these I had been invited to over the years. The first was my buddy Dave’s wedding, which was actually performed during the Renaissance Festival, so half the guests were wearing their medieval attire as formal wear. That’s an interesting scene, but it was a pretty ceremony.

Milford’s wedding was to be a hit and run situation for me. I got fitted for the tux here in Savannah and made arrangements to pick it up just before leaving. I would head down Friday, do the wedding on Saturday, go visit my family on Easter Sunday, then back down to Savannah on Monday, where I would drop the tux back off again. Ninja wedding - no muss, no fuss.

Here’s something you probably already know, but I was stunned to discover: When you’re in the wedding party you have to pay for your own clothes. What’s that about, man? Thousands of dollars getting dropped on this thing, but the players have to supply their own costumes? And that’s nothing for guys, who can rent a tux for $130, but imagine what a drag it is for the bridesmaids, having to purchase outright notoriously awful dresses that they don’t even want to wear once. I was not prepared for this.

I mean, I was prepared for it as in I was in a position to afford it, I’m just saying that the whole business seemed so cockeyed that I quietly confirmed this custom with several neutral parties before I was able to reconcile myself with it.

The weekend was hectic, but since the schedule was so tight it was over soon enough. It was somewhat awkward because I didn’t know anyone involved but Milford, and with the exception of one person who’d been a casual acquaintance in college, this was true of the guests as well. I got to give a speech and do the best man toast, so I guess that’s cool, but as soon as the reception was over and Milford and his new bride made their goodbyes, I hopped in the car and drove straight to my parents’ house. Then it was Easter and out.

But I felt like I missed out on something as a best man in that I never had the chance to organize a bachelor party. Not that I wanted to throw a bachelor party for Milford; he and I were not good together under such circumstances. But it still felt like, under normal conditions, that’s something I should have gotten the opportunity to do.

And this nagging thread dangling in front of me would become the carrot of encouragement I needed for my next adventure. As I said, I had another wedding coming up later that Spring.