Xochitl Gonzalez - A Modest Reception

 

So, years ago, I was a wedding planner. Wedding planning obviously requires you to be detail oriented and have excellent time management skills, but you also need to really learn how to deal with some batshit situations. [audience chuckles] So, this particular batshit happened in 2009. And I remember, because it was the end of the recession, and I was broke, and I was just finishing up my divorce and starting to date again. And so, one day my office phone rings, and nothing good starts with a whisper, but the woman on the other end says, [whispers] "My daughter's getting married in a few weeks and you've got to save this wedding." [chuckles] 

 

She refuses to give us any more details, insisting that we must come uptown to her apartment, because only then will we understand the scale of her conundrum. While this sounded crazy, I realized that I was broke. And so, I agreed to go. [audience laughter] As she was hanging up the phone, she says, [whispers] "By the way, I'm very, very, very rich." [audience laughter] And she was. Because when we got there, she lived in one of those grand old apartment buildings on Park Avenue, the kind with the doorman with the uniform and the cap, and he opens the brass door, and there in this giant lobby, there's only two elevators, because each elevator goes up and opens into its own apartment. And so, we get up to the apartment and the maid in the maid outfit, greets us and takes us down a long corridor into the library that's really just a room for books. [audience laughter] And there, waiting for us alone, is the mother of the bride. 

 

We're going to call her Mia, just for sake of convenience. And Mia says, “This is dire.” She's embarrassed of all of it. Not the library or the maid, per se, but her daughter was embarrassed of being rich. She had been living as a closeted rich person her entire adult life. [audience laughter] None of her friends knew that she was rich. Her future in-laws didn't really have any idea. This has been driving Mia crazy. She's refusing my finery, she's living in squalor, she's refusing Mia's clothes, she's walking around in Old Navy, [audience laughter] and it's just been a nightmare. It's the cross that poor Mia's had to bear for the last two decades. Only now everything is coming to a head with this engagement. Because last year Mia's other daughter got engaged, and Mia threw her a giant wedding at the Pierre and plastered the ballroom in orchids.

 

And so, now, this daughter realizes, “Well, I can't let my mother have anything to do with this, otherwise the jig is up. Everyone's going to know that I'm rich.” And by the way, this impoverishment posturing isn't completely new, nor new to me. As long as I've known rich people, I've known people like this. In fact, probably amongst us now, someone just asked you to Venmo them $5 for Starbucks and next week they'll secretly be skiing with their rich parents in Aspen. [audience laughter] But in any case, [chuckles] Mia's daughter decides she's going to take matters into her own hands and plan this wedding herself. Armed, of course, with Mia's checkbook. And so, she goes along. And now, the wedding's a few weeks away and Mia finally goes to the tasting, and Mia finally sees the venue, and Mia finally realizes this is a piece of shit. [audience laughter] 

 

She turns to her daughter and she's like, "You can pretend to be poor all you want, but I can't have my friends and family coming to this." And so, they get into a giant fight. They agree that the only way to resolve this is by hiring a wedding planner. And the only wedding planner that the two of them could agree upon was my company. [audience chuckles] Now, I want to say that I was surprised by this, except that at the time, a lot of my competitors were really doing opulence, as in plastering the ballroom of the Pierre with orchids. We were known for doing what I like to think of as understated luxury, which in 2009 meant we knew how to make a barn seem like a five-star restaurant. So, that this landed in our lap didn't completely surprise me.

 

And at the time, we would take turns with the batshit. The turn was mine, and so now it's me. The reason why the meeting was so urgent was because Mia had to get to us before her daughter did. Her daughter was planning on calling us on the morrow and hiring us for this affair. And Mia was like, "I needed you to get here, so I could explain to you how things were going to work, and they were going to work like this. ‘You say yes to everything she says. If she asks what it costs, you say it's already included in the contract. And then secretly, you and I are going to plan the wedding that I want.’” [audience laughter] 

 

Now, I would have felt badly about this, except that the next day when I met the daughter, she actually did have terrible taste, [audience laughter] or at the very least, mildly insulting ideas of what she thought poor people would do at their weddings. [audience laughter] She would have had everybody sitting at picnic tables and drinking out of jam jars if she had her chance. And so, I felt like I could do a service here, because Mia was kind of a riot. And as I said, I was broke. Plus, Mia took an immediate interest in my love life, which I really appreciated at the time, because my friends, after having just survived my divorce, were over it, and I had just met this guy. 

 

I'd been married to my ex-husband for 10 years, and so I'd never online dated. I went on the Internet, and I met this guy. He was charming and he was handsome and he had a great job and above all, he had this thing that I used to really look for in a guy at that time, he had a sadness about him. [audience laughter] I don't know why I needed that. I just did. It was so sad. [audience laughter] He married his college sweetheart. They'd always intended on having a big family. Year after year after year goes by, there's infertility problems. Instead of bringing them together, it pulls them apart. He's so open, and he's so vulnerable, and he's so sad. [audience laughter] 

 

I just was all in. We're texting, we're calling, we're running all over Manhattan, traipsing around at all hours of the night, arguing the existence of God, all in. And Mia couldn't get enough. She was making up reasons to have meetings to get me to come uptown. We'd share three bottles of wine and I'd tell her all about it. Everything was great until everything was terrible, because Mia's daughter decides that she wants to reduce the carbon footprint of the wedding. [audience laughter] She wants to do this by having edible escort cards, so that we don't waste anything. 

 

The escort card, for those of you who don't know, is the little piece of paper that's at the cocktail hour that tells you what table to sit at when the dinner starts. Mia's daughter decides that we're going to save the environment by having bacon-wrapped dates with a toothpick in them and a teeny little tag that has your name and then the table number, and then you're just going to eat it. And so, I did what I was supposed to do and I said, "Oh, yes, oh, that is a great idea." And then, immediately, when she left, I emailed Mia and said, "What are we going to do? It's going to look like a table full of floating turds." [audience laughter] And Mia replies, "Oh, Jesus Christ, I wish you were my daughter." [audience laughter] 

 

Now, they say that there's no accidents, but that night, Mia forgot to log out of her Gmail, and her daughter went on the computer and saw the correspondence, and insisted, as one would imagine, that I be fired immediately. Except that Mia couldn't quit me and I don't know that I could quit Mia. [audience laughter] And so, instead we devised this elaborate ruse, more elaborate than the original ruse, [audience laughter] and we’re going to have one of my employees-- And I'm not proud of this, but we had one of my employees pretend that she worked for the caterer. We sent an email introducing them and saying that I was hands-off, it's all in this woman's hands. They go off and she tells this woman all of her hopes and dreams and nothing that the bride and this woman say holds any water, because the only thing that matters is what happens between me and Mia. And so, they're off planning this modest, eco-friendly wedding, and Mia and I are planning this lavish, I mean, environmentally unsound affair. [audience laughter] 

 

We are making custom-made furniture. We've got flowers imported from Holland wrapping around the windows of this loft. We're re-flooring the floors. We're landscaping a deck. It was going to take three days to just set this party up before it even happened. And in the meantime, I'm still dating this guy. Only it's starting to get weird. This divorce is starting to feel very, very complicated. It involved real estate and a soft real estate market. And only in New York does somebody say to you, "Well, it's so difficult because of the soft real estate market," and you say, "Of course." [audience laughter] But I was starting to feel like I was unwittingly sleeping with a married man. It didn't feel good. And so, I was like, "Why don't you let things settle? See how long this takes, let things settle or let the market perk up, either one, [audience chuckles] and then call me and let's see where we are? You never know."

 

I really was trying to be very Zen about the whole thing, because I was really into him. But it was hard, because he was also kind of rich and I was also kind of broke. He never said that he was rich, but he said things. He talks about how he'd gone to this prep school, he had a big wedding of his own at the Plaza. I could put two and two together. And so, could Mia. She was really cheering this on. She'd grown up poor, so she was like, "Marry rich. It's so fun. It's so fun." [audience laughter]

 

So, a couple of days after this breakup of sorts, Mia calls me, as usual, frantic, urgent, panicked. "Napkins. We've got to talk about napkins. You've got to get uptown to this linen store and we need to talk about these napkins." We are there being persnickety about napkins for, like forever until we then go and have our usual lunch where we split a salad and two bottles of wine. [audience laughter] She's asking about the guy, and I tell her about what happened and how I had to make the break. And I was like, “I'm holding out hope. You never know. Love finds a way." 

 

All of a sudden, I just remember something that I couldn't believe I'd never brought up before. And I was like, "You know what, Mia? It's so funny. He actually went to the same prep school as your fake poor daughter.” I was like, “I wonder if you know him." Know him? Does Mia know him? The elevators. Mia lives on 17 South. His parents live in 17 North. She had just seen him the weekend prior in the Hamptons with his wife and their six-year-old son. [audience aww] Mia remembered the son's age, because she had been at the kid's bris. There is no divorce, [chuckles] there is no apartment on the market, there is nothing but this guy being a terrible, terrible person. Which, at this point, I'm also not that sure that Mia and I aren't, [audience laughter] because we are still going behind her daughter's back to plan this wedding.

 

We are not only having this adulterous mother–daughter affair, but [audience laughter] we're running a con on this poor girl whose worst sin is that she's got terrible taste in escort cards. I just was starting to feel terrible, but I was in too deep. So, the day of the wedding comes, and I'm there setting up, and I'm folding the beautiful napkins, and I'm fixing the forks, and everything is perfect. The flowers are fully in bloom, and the $100 bottles of wine are all chilled. I've got five staff members there secretly disguised as waiters. And very nice-looking waiters, because Mia didn't like the original uniform. And so, we upgraded, obviously. 

 

Now, clearly, I couldn't be there because the bride never wanted to see my face again. So, I take myself to a restaurant a few blocks away and I'm calling in orders to my staff. I'm texting with frantic Mia, who's like, "She's going to find out what we've been up to. She's going to find out what we've been up to." I am assuring her, "Mia, we're almost at the finish line. It's going to be a beautiful day. Just a few more hours to get through. She's never going to find out." 

 

Now, I didn't realize that the reason why Mia was so confident that her daughter was going to find out is because Mia was going to get drunk and tell her. [audience laughter] And so, halfway through the reception, she pulls her daughter aside and confesses the entire scheme. And this poor girl on her wedding day realized that her life these last few weeks has been a lie. She's surrounded by traitors everywhere she turns. And she, of course, sees red. Who can blame her? Take it from me, finding out that you've been deceived does not feel good. And she says to Mia, "I refuse. You can never see her again. You can never talk to her again. If I find out that you're having any more contact with the wedding planner, I'm cutting off all contact with you." 

 

And so, Mia acquiesces and she agrees to family therapy and individual therapy and she's never going to see me again. She sends me a dramatic text message that says, "She knows everything. This is goodbye." [audience laughter] Except Mia being Mia, of course, it wasn't really goodbye. I still hear from her every now and then. Maybe a call, sometimes a text. But in looking back, I sometimes can't help but wonder, was this gorgeous lavish wedding really worth it, culminating in a fight between mother and daughter? Would they have been better off with picnic tables, and jam jars, and escort cards that looked like turds? [audience laughter] Then again, relationships can be mended, but wedding photos are forever. [audience laughter] Thank you very much.