Rage Of The Runaway Bride

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Dan Brodribb's Geek Love appears every two weeks at www.suicidegirls.com. Current article is here.

More of Dan's musings on dating and relationships can be found on his Hot Chicks & Strangers blog.

I spent most of Saturday moping.

It was neat.

I used to get those feelings all the time this combination of sourceless unease and vague angst, kind of a 'what-am-I-doing-with-my-life-I'll-never-achieve-my-dreams" ball in the stomach. It didn't feel as strong or as intimidating as it used to. It was more like seeing an old friend.

So I ate Fruit Loops, watched wrestling DVDs, meditated, checked out some music and got enough work done on my comedy, writing, upcoming presentation for the CIRS conference (See? I can do Grown-Up Work too!), and other odds and ends that I couldn't get too mad at myself.

But Saturday night, ahh, Saturday night...

It was the Night of the Rage of the Runaway Bride.

Have you ever see a woman in a gorgeous wedding dress storming alone down a downtown street clogged with drunk partiers, homeless people and club doormen amidst a backdrop of nighclubs, Donair shops, and Money Mart loan places? It's an incongruous sight.

Here's what happened:

I was standing in line outside a bar with a bachelorette party. The bachelorette party was in good spirits, talking tipsily about their upcoming celebrations when out of nowhere this woman in a very nice wedding dress storms past screaming into her cell phone: "YOU RUINED MY WEDDING!! YOU DESTROYED IT!!!"

GIRL AT BACHELORETTE PARTY: (to the bride-to-be): This is NOT a good omen.

The bachelorette party reacted to her plight with the sort of compassion and nurturing for which tipsy young women are famous...they waited until she was out of earshot and started making fun of her.

But all of them had a nervous look in their eyes as they did so, like pilots joking about plane crashes. You could see it in their eyes. "If we laugh at it, maybe it won't happen to us."

Meanwhile, I went after the bride, partly because this looked like the sort of situation that called for a dating expert/crisis line worker and partly because I REALLY wanted to know what was going on.

She was quite far ahead of me at that point, but fortunately, a group of people eating at an outdoor patio saw me rushing past, noticed my suitjacket, leaped to a wrong-but-helpful-for-me conclusion and yelled, "Hey are you looking for a bride?"

I was.

They directed me around the block. I sprinted around the corner after my blushing blog entry-to-be...and skidded to a halt like a cartoon character.

There in front of me was the whole tableau. It looked like a painting: Newlyweds in Watercolor. In center foreground was our bride screaming at a young man in a tuxedo for "Dancing with HER at my wedding!" In the background left, a quartet of young east Indian men, oblivious to what was going on and yelling drunkenly at each other in their native tongue, and--and this is what made the piece for me, folks--off to the right, sitting surreptitiously on the curb at a polite, but still-within-earshot-distance of the unhappy couple, a woman in a bridesmaid dress with a bouquet in her lap and a cell phone in her hand, furiously texting play-by-play updates of the goings on back to her friends.

That's when I noticed something.

I wasn't moping anymore.

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As a post-script to this story, I ran into the bridesmaid later that night and chatted with her for a bit. As we were talking, the newlyweds came by again, this time holding hands.

So the story had a happy ending after all.