O.Henry Ending

Mad Bride Sydrome

Going whole hog — or whole Dog — over weddings

By Cynthia Adams

The average American wedding now costs over $33,000. Everything about a wedding reads like fiction. Case in point: the wedding of a young friend I’ll call Heather.

Heather, a normally even-tempered girl with a serious job, descended into MBS — Mad Bride Syndrome. Notably, she opted into an honored wedding tradition: attention-hogging. She was careful not to include attractive women in her party.

Heather’s a looker — sleekly athletic — but not a single one of her bridesmaids was of more than average looks and none had Heather’s stunning figure. Even the flower girl was cute, but not too cute.

I love weddings. Where else do you get so much theater and drama, with champagne and cake served at the end? And though I may seem a willing party to many, I am the last person anyone should consult. (I tied the knot at another friend’s wedding, discretely taking my vows inside a utility closet during their reception rather than going through the whole drama. We splashed out on a great honeymoon instead.)

The fact that brides still sometimes seek my opinion tells me something: Their inner circle threw up their hands and gave up. As someone known to court disaster, seeking my counsel reveals a level of total desperation with wedding planning.

Heather began texting me things that had me questioning her rational mind:

What did I think about script versus block text on the wedding program?

What did I think about a Tyrannosaurus rex groom cake for Les, who loved dinosaurs as a child?

What do you think about the playlist for the reception? U2 first, or Fergie? Lex likes U2, but I dunno, she texted.

Huh? Heather’s increasingly nutty messages made me gawk but, this doozy zipped onto my phone screen at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday:

I don’t want visible panty lines at the wedding. What do you think if I tell the bridesmaids not to wear underwear?

Bridesmaids going commando?

Heather hammered out this message while testing 10 different fingernail polishes — each fingernail a different color — while working her power job as an assistant district attorney.

She spent that day asking felons, court reporters, and even one probation officer, what they thought of the various polish colors — Shell, Veil, Whisper, Nice and Naughty, Sassy and Bridal Slipper. Heather has a good memory, so she had each color memorized. She was truly ticked off at what one uppity clerk had to say.

Thing is, I don’t even recall what I replied to Heather’s panty query. But on the Big Day, I could not drag my eyes from their derrières as they made their pantyless way down the aisle. The only competing thing that drew my eyes away from their bottoms was their hair.

Bridal hair deserves its own essay.

Heather’s bridal hair was Marge Simpson–huge, and the bridal party’s up-dos appeared to be sized in descending order of importance.

But Heather isn’t alone in lusting for something magical atop her head. My mother has dedicated, by my quick calculations, at least $99,600 and more than 204 days of her life — nearly a full year — to her hair.

My sister inherited the trait. On her birthday, she sent me an email about a recent hairdo gone wrong. When I asked exactly how bad her hair was, she emailed back something about Dog, a TV bounty hunter and his mullet.

I asked if she had wanted a mullet.

Actually no, she replied. But if I knew about Dog, I also knew about his wife, who had a hair color even worse than his. Whose hair looked more chewed than cut. My sister added she was pretty certain that when she sat her ass down at the salon, she hadn’t requested to be a reality celebrity look alike to Dog’s wife.

It was a slow morning, so I mulled over Dog’s mullet and chewed-off hair. I mulled over Heather’s quest to be perfection from fingertip to wobbly bottoms and towering tops.

At Heather’s outdoor wedding, I was tapped to do a poetic reading, as lightning flashed and a deluge broke. Rat wet, with multiple hair products streaming down my face, I determinedly, gamely, gripped the microphone and invoked Pablo Neruda’s poetry.

Taking my seat, I am sure I heard the whisper: “You know who she looks like? Have you ever seen that bounty hunter’s wife?”  OH

Cynthia Adams has spent the past year trying to undo a hair-misfire. She remains mesmerized by weddings.

O.Henry Ending

Things That Go Burp in the Night

Including iPads

By David Claude Bailey

Even in this hi-tech age of vigilant home security systems, things still go bump in the night. And what sound is more frightening than the thump of a tablet or laptop sliding off the bed onto the floor?

“It’s just my iPad,” my wife, Anne said in a semislumber. “Happens all the time.”

What doesn’t happen all the time, I learned when I brought her morning cup of Earl Grey in bed the next morning, was the screen going black save for an ominous, flickering blue aura on one edge.

I’ve watched as my wife has become addicted to watching ospreys hatch in Washington state; getting all hot and bothered while slinging barbs on Facebook at relatives with opposing political views; and, worst of all, howling aloud after watching another YouTube “Funniest Cat Video Ever.” Selfishly, I like her being iConnected. I can ask Anne to put things on our social calendar, issue reminders (Emergency: We’re almost out of kimchi) and make urgent requests (Let’s have Korean barbecued pork belly for supper tonight, requiring said kimchi).

The tone of voice she assumed the morning after the drop was the same one she used when our springer spaniel had its first seizure — grave without any opening for humor. We needed to go to the Apple Store, she announced, a place she knows I despise.

“Can’t I first send out an email asking for advice?” I wondered aloud.

“You can do whatever you want, but I’m going to the Apple Store as soon as I can get an appointment,” was the reply.

Email dispatched. Within seconds, O.Henry’s resident comic wrote, “Drop it again. LOL.”

Meanwhile I’d been trolling the Internet for advice.

At www.ifixit.com, I found a number of distressed iPad owners with either poor typing skills or bad grammar or a poor command of English or a combination thereof.

“Hi my touch panel is broke but screen is warking I am change the screen but after I fix all part screen not come on but sound is coming what I can do please,” wondered Roofi.

Someone named Haris suggested: “Try to tap it with your hand on its back frequently and then press power button.” A flurry of grateful responses followed agreeing that spanking your iPad is not a bad thing.

I waited until Anne was out in the garden and took her iPad to the woodshed. Nothing.

The genius at the Apple Store was oh-so-sympathetic and confirmed that Anne’s iPad was still alive by plugging it into his MacBook Air. The screen, however, had broken off all relations with the rest of the computer. The geniuses at the Apple Store, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, don’t do repairs. But for a mere $279, Anne could get a refurbished iPad and they’d help her retrieve from the iCloud all her stored and treasured URLs for the World’s Funniest Cat Videos, not to mention the password to the Starz site where she can view Outlander episodes a day early.

I asked the genius how broken an iPad had to be before they’d refuse it as trade-in for refurbishment. Couldn’t I just take it apart to see if I could fix it?? Anne looked at me as if I had suggested performing DIY brain surgery on our spaniel. The genius was a little shaken. I could try it, and if I brought back anything resembling an iPad, they’d swap it.

With Anne’s blessing I took my friend’s LOL advice and dropped it on our car’s floor mat from a height of about a foot. The luminous, cheerful blue of the startup screen blinked on and, Maria and I were declared brilliant — until the screen went black again that night. I dropped it a few more times and the screen came back on looking like a tie-dyed T-shirt. Far out!

Plan B: a rendezvous with one of iCracked’s local iTechs. Frank Harmuth assuaged our fears; what I had been doing was fine. “We call it burping the iPad,” he said at the Starbucks in Barnes & Noble’s at Friendly. Wrapping Anne’s in a weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal he “burped” it again — to no effect. A few alternate moves produced temporary flashes of luminescent blue. “I don’t want to break the screen,” Frank said, explaining that it was attached to the computer by a male and female connection via a wiring harness. The original drop had resulted in a sort of coitus interruptus. Jiggling and lightly tapping the iPad usually restored the lost spark, so to speak — until it needed burping again, he explained. Noticing that he was afraid to give it the Maria and David treatment, I said, “Can I try it?”

I did a hard drop from the height of a few feet onto Starbucks’ hardwood table and Bingo: IfixedIt. The cats are back. The latest political diatribe comes via Facebook. Anne’s watching her bird chick cams again. Outlander’s in the queue.

And I’m now known, at least around our house, as the resident iGenius.  OH

David Bailey, O.Henry’s editor at large, doesn’t suggest hard burping your iPad or trying to iFix your laptop without Frank Marmuth’s expert guidance via FrankH@iTechs.com.