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.