If you have never heard of Italian Wedding Soup, rest assured it is supposed to look tasty, rather than pale algae green with three honking meatballs, the way the soup at the bridesmaid's luncheon was.

I know this from reading up on the subject while searching for that picture. I had never heard of Italian Wedding Soup before, probably because my family isn't made up of faintly mobbed-up Sicilians who used to supply one-fourth of the alcohol in New Orleans, like mr rampy's is. sis-in-law was sentimental enough to request that the restaurant whip up a batch of the soup, but not sentimental enough to choke more than two or three bites of it down.

It wasn't that bad: just very salty and fatty. Obviously the perfect thing to be eating two days before we'd all have to be squeezing ourselves into little bridesmaid's skirts. Especially when combined with plates and plates of appetizers, salads, bread, and hugeass pasta main courses. I didn't even make it to the dessert course of berries, spumoni, or berries and spumoni.

I did make it through countless flutes of mimosas, however. That bridesmaid, who chose not to skip work to join us, didn't know what she was missing. This is another reason she is that bridesmaid. All of us out-of-townies skipped two days of work to be there for sis-in-law, and that bridesmaid couldn't even take off a few hours.

Which is how long the luncheon took. It went on so long that mr rampy called sis-in-law on her cell phone and accused her of kidnapping his wife.

As fun as going shopping for wedding gifts with my mom was (especially the part where this mother-from-hell let her two toddlers run wild in the department store bathroom to the point where one of them stuck its head under the stall and stared at me for almost a minute), I'm skipping ahead to the wedding rehearsal and rehearsal dinner.

The church where sis-in-law and new brother-in-law got married is gorgeous in and of itself, but its crowning glory would have to be the "Pregnant? Call..." sign planted firmly on its front lawn. Pictures were taken in front of that, oh yes.

The rehearsal itself went off without a hitch. The wedding coordinator was very charming and had a rainman-like recall of everyone's names and positions. mr rampy and I got to be paired up bridesmaid/groomsman because I secured the spot of third-tallest bridesmaid with the aid of a pair of supertall heels...superstar! Mind you, the second-tallest bridesmaid is actually shorter than I, but she went even wilder and wore four-inch platform shoes. There is something to be said for not forcing your bridesmaids to wear dyed-to-match identical pumps.

mr rampy spent the majority of the rehearsal feverishly composing a toast for the rehearsal dinner on his iPac, which is why he was surprised at the actual wedding to find that we weren't having a full mass. And yay to that, because the wedding party had to stand at the altar for the whole time.

Rehearsal over, it turned out that the parents of the groom had no idea how to get to the restaurant for the dinner. This despite the fact that they had chosen and booked it. A few people had a vague idea what to do, so we took off in full caravan of fools formation.

On the way, I asked mr rampy where my parents would be sitting for the wedding. I had noticed that the wedding coordinator had set aside the first five pews as 'family seating' and had specified that two families who are close neighbors of mr rampy's family would be sitting there. One of them is the family that that bridesmaid belongs to, but I know they grew up together so that didn't seem odd. But hey, my mom and mr rampy's mom are in a quilting cult together, plus they have that whole in-laws thing going on.

Me: So where are my parents sitting?

mr rampy: Dunno.

Me: It's just that I noticed that that bridesmaid's family will be sitting up in the front pews.

mr rampy: Well, she's in the wedding.

Me: !!!!!?

mr rampy's brother and I were laughing at him the whole rest of the way to the restaurant for that.

There was all sorts of drama at the rehearsal dinner about who was sitting next to whom. More advice for wedding-planning peeps: SEATING CHARTS ARE YOUR FRIEND.

The lighting was kind of dim, but there was an endless supply of wine, and lots of seafood, so that was all good.

Then we split up for bachelor/bachelorette parties. We girls went back to the hotel to dress sis-in-law up (tight, lifesaver-encrusted tank-top; penis necklace, penis sippy cup; etc.) and discovered that the maid-of-honor was 100% plowed. Seeing as how we had all spent the greater part of the day drinking mimosas, and the greater part of the evening drinking wine, plus she in particular had drunk a bottle of cough syrup (to fend off that nasty plague she had), plus three cocktails, and then had not eaten much of her dinner, this was not really a surprise. Now, the part where she locked herself in the bathroom and passed out cold, that did take us off-guard.

Sis-in-law banged and banged on the door, calling MOH's name, while the bridesmaid who by default became co-MOH went all Macgyver and tried to pick the lock with a credit card and bobby pins. Then sis-in-law called security (who, now that I think about it, never did show up; good thing this wasn't a real emergency), but luckily the MOH had a huge coughing fit and woke herself up.

Once out of the bathroom, she told us all about how she was coming with us in just a moment, and then promptly passed out on the bed.

So the rest of us went off, me driving like a carpool mother. The night proved to be exceptionally cold, so I ended up lending my sweater coat to sis-in-law and shrieking "Holy cow! Holy cow!" as we ran from bar to bar. I guess I was watching my language so as not to come across as foul-mouthed or something. Co-MOH was laughing at me by the end of the evening and saying that soon they would work me up to saying 'Motherfucker'. Contrary to appearances, my mouth is not all prunes and prisms, a fact which I demonstrated to the delight of at least my own sense of irony the next afternoon when I said 'fuck' in front of my mother after dropping my lovely vest into a pile of dust bunnies.

We were hitting a lot of bars that I used to hang out at regularly back in the days when I went out drinking every night and was dating a feckless Englishman ten years my senior, so being back in that milieu was a little odd, to say the least. I felt simultaneously sort of nostalgic for a younger self who had the time and lack of responsibility to be able to booze it up every night, and mother-hennishly "Step 1: Get the bride a drink; Step 2: Line up peeps to gnaw candy off her breasts; Step 3: Keep our little group safe from freaks" at the same time.

I'd forgotten how harsh the moment is when they flip the lights on after last call.

We made enough money off the candy-gnawing to treat our whole group to dinner at Taco Cabana, and then we tracked the boys down with the help of a map scrawled on a napkin that mr rampy had passed to co-MOH when they were sneaking a smoke break at the rehearsal dinner. Or, rather, co-MOH's and my memory of the map, seeing as how she accidentally left the map itself back at the hotel, where MOH was probably vomiting red on it at that very moment. As she did on the sheets and her jacket, which she was wearing, chunky-style, the next day, until someone gently told her that she smelled.

Lest anyone reading this think we were prudes, we would have hit a male strip club during some point of our revels, but the only one we knew about had burned down. So instead, we ended up at a female strip club that is apparently open all the time (only no alcohol after 2). Maybe it's just because I'm a girl, but I found the arrangement of the stripper acts to be kind of boring:

Song 1.) Dance around in your little outfit.

Song 2.) Dance around with no top.

Song 3.) Dance around with no bottoms.

Dude, where is the variety?

Also, the bathroom was disgusting. The stall had no door, and this disheveled-looking woman was vomiting (lots of that going around that night) and vomiting and vomiting while I tapped my foot impatiently. It wasn't until two days later, while I was having my hair done, actually, that I realized she and the woman patting her back were lesbians. Not that that matters, but I can't believe it took me that long to process that fact.

Then, when I was trying to go, this other lady kept trying to look at me (just like those stupid kids) so finally I hollered at her that I have a very shy bladder and she should just wait outside. Then mr rampy came in to see if I had died, because this little adventure had taken up like twenty minutes of my life by this point.

Two of the other girls in our party were the sweetest, nicest girls ever. They very much reminded me of my Laura Ashley-esque college roommate (who was one of my bridesmaids). We sat together in plushy arm-chairs in the audience and discussed how much we don't get strip clubs. I don't understand the fun of them after the alcohol isn't being served. Actually, I don't understand the fun of any place where alcohol isn't served.

The last excitement of the night was when the strippers dragged sis-in-law up on stage, locked her in stocks, and began whipping her. I was in a total deadpan daze at this point. I had seriously had like double-digit drinks by this point of the day (3:30 a.m., to be exact), and I had been sleep-deprived to begin with. So I was automatically taking pictures, just as I had done before when co-MOH was humping sis-in-law's chest, when a d.j. we'd met had had sis-in-law mime licking a plastic penis he'd held to his crotch, and when I realized in the dark of the stripclub that hey, sis-in-law's penis necklace really does glow in the dark.

And the next thing you know, the manager is scolding me that pictures aren't allowed in there and trying to expose all my film. I guess if I had been thinking clearly, I would have realized that they don't want people getting free porn from them and selling it on the internet or something, but at the time all I could think was, "Way to draw the line. It's okay to be nekkid here, but god forbid that people outside see them!"

mr rampy came to my rescue, slipping the camera out of my hands, putting his thumb over the film window, telling the manager it was a digital camera, pushing a random button so that a little green light flashed, and claiming that now the film had, indeed, been erased. Then he dashed outside and hid it in the car for good measure.

On the way back to dropping everyone in my group back at the hotel, mr rampy was gloating about his cleverness.

"Yeah, way to go, honey," I said. "You outsmarted a guy who works in a strip club."

He thought that very funny and was laughing about it all the next day.

This is how late it was when we finally got back to my parents' house: we had just laid down in the guest bed when we heard the morning newspaper hit the front door. Then we heard my dad moving around, getting ready for work.

Given, my dad gets up freakishly early, but still.

Five hours later, we were up and at things again...