Chapter 7 – Bridezilla: Notes from the Honeymoon

To this day, I don’t know where Boss & Bridezilla spent their wedding night. The only info forthcoming was that they were staying at a hotel somewhere in the greater metropolitan area.

Were they afraid their more rustic friends and relatives would organize an unnerving shivaree? (I suspect the answer to this one is “Yes!” and secrecy was probably a good call on their part.) Did Boss worry that a one of his jilted lady friends, in a jealous rage, would hire a hit man to ambush the newlywed suite and do away with his blushing new bride? Was he nervous that a disgruntled former associate might sabotage his vehicle overnight and wreck their honeymoon plans? We may never know for sure, but I don’t put any fear completely outside the domain of Boss’ neuroses.

Regardless of motive, this silent treatment was remarkably odd, because boss is typically overflowing with extraneous details. In fact, in the many months since I had been in Boss’ employ, I could expect from three to five calls per day from his cell, even on holidays, even if he was out of town.

Boss is quite unreserved, so I could expect to spend no less than 15 minutes per call trading opinions on issues about which I never realized I needed to be incisive. For instance, whether McDonalds utilizes “real” chicken for their McNuggets, whether cell termination fees are legal, whether the fluoride in toothpaste is toxic over time, or whether that burger he’d grabbed from Hardee’s was liable to agree with his innards. All this in addition to the numerous business-related discussions we would have over the course of the hectic workday.

As the wedding had drawn nearer and nearer, and I’d heard NOTHING about where he and Bridezilla were going, how long they’d be gone, or even what the heck I should do about the pressing day-to-day business decisions I’d have to make in his absence, I was quite astonished. But there was zero. No calls, no notes on my desk, no explanatory emails. Knowing Boss’ penchant for last minute directives, I kept looking for something just around the corner, but nada.

I’ll have to admit, I was half anticipating this shutdown of contact. You see, Boss had previously experienced no gender barriers to his communication. He liberally made cell calls to other females with the same sense of freedom that he felt to call one of his sisters, or his mom. No strings attached, no apparent ulterior motives, no seductive intentions. He is unfailingly kindhearted, gregarious and compassionate. He is notorious for giving friendly, spontaneous hugs to people of all ages, even upon first meeting. Whatever woman agreed to be the other half of this expressive individual would have to be okay with all the love he liked to spread.

Bridezilla had been in a romance-induced stupor for a bit during the preceding weeks, but sometime close to the wedding, she apparently realized she WASN’T okay with her fiancé’s bountiful chatting and serial embracing after all. She hadn’t known Boss well, obviously, but even though she recognized that he was REALLY outgoing early on, I don’t believe she was prepared for the sheer volume of women that regularly come rustling through his personal space.

Or for his frame of mind about some of those women. Preening his ego he might have been, but he remained genuinely convinced that, in spite of his personal disinterest, many of these women fervently yearned for his carnal attentions. By virtue of his long years of bachelorhood, during which he felt the need to recurrently remind himself and any bystanders that he still had it “goin’ on”, Boss often disclosed his hunches that a particular woman or other had made desperate attempts to get him alone. When he became affianced to Zilla, I think that bravado was compounded by Boss’ desire to reinforce in her mind the concept that she had made a PRIME catch. So, Boss had no qualms about amusing Bridezilla with bygone tales of thwarted passion. The breakdown was that poor Zilla wasn’t amused. She became suspicious. And a little ticked.

(How suspicious? How ticked? Later, in the flurry of fantasy during which we imagined that Bridezilla would become Boss’ executive assistant, I noticed that the business cell phone bill had mysteriously disappeared. All umpteen pages of it. Mmmmhmm. I deduced later that Bridezilla had swiped that thing and gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. I imagine she was none-too-pleased to see that there were HUNDREDS of calls to a whole host of females (including me) over the course of the month in question, adding up to DOZENS of hours. Even now, months later, the cell bill will intermittently appear on my desk with only the statement page present, and I know Zilla has struck again. I envision her holed up with Boss’ contact list and a calculator, furiously deciphering who he’s been talking to and for how long. All I know is, MY cell phone is now utterly devoid of calls from Boss, and I’m no longer required to thrash out whether Bill Gates will really come across with that $250 if Boss forwards that email to ten people. )

Post-wedding, almost all executive communication now comes through Boss’ sister, who is also on staff in our office. The honeymoon was no different. We got updates on the conjugal goings-on two, sometimes three times per day. They had a nice trip to points south. Beautiful scenery, so relaxing.

And Bridezilla was getting sick. She was having mild abdominal pain, but so disquieted was Zilla, and so concerned was her Dh, that he had rushed her to the emergency room. Boss got word to us that she had cystitis. I could tell from his message that he wasn’t quite sure what that was, but he feared it was serious. We married ladies around the office giggled a little. Some of us had experienced a bladder infection on our honeymoons too. But poor Zilla; even though the ER doc gave her some meds, they apparently didn’t tell her what was causing the problem or what she should do about it, so she got even sicker.

You know how, after it’s been a REALLY long time since you’ve been to the theater, and you finally go – the popcorn smells SO good, you just can’t resist, so you buy a BIG TUB, with extra butter, and before you know it, you’ve eaten it ALL, because you can’t get enough POPCORN? Well, that’s how it must have been for Boss, only not with popcorn – well, YES with popcorn, only not the movie kind, the Fishie kind. Anyway, I think one of his sisters set him straight on exactly what was going on, and how Bridezilla might be able to, um, alleviate that problem by a quick trip to the facilities after . But I heard that he blamed himself, because he just couldn’t get enough popcorn, which was WAY more info than I wanted to know.

Once the newlyweds got to the bottom of the cause of the first problem, and the antibiotics started to kick in, they did a little day-tripping at their honeymoon destination. They even attended the taping of a television show, during which the host had interviewed them and given a special celebratory gift to commemorate their marriage, and invited Bridezilla to come back and SING at the next show taping.


Sadly, it was not to be, because before the clock struck midnight, Bridezilla was back in the emergency room with more abdominal pain. The doctor ordered some tests. One of the tests showed that Bridezilla had a functional cyst on one of her ovaries. The doctor shared the results, emphasizing that he wasn’t concerned about this, and given Zilla’s latest health trouble, he thought the pain was probably associated with the increased activity in this region of late , so he put Bridezilla on a day or two of pelvic rest. BWAHAHAHAHA. Just what Boss wanted to hear on his HONEYMOON!!!

Meanwhile, Zilla was flipping out about the cyst on her ovary, and recruited Boss to join her. Of course, the two of them asked no questions of the medical professionals, conducted no research, they just spread the horrid news with what they considered appropriate gravity. Bridezilla has (sniff, sniff ) a functional cyst on her ovary. (Yes, dearhearts. Zilla is a fertile female of childbearing age, so yes, she WOULD have cysts on her ovaries. Those are called eggs, and they are ripening and preparing to burst and consequently be available for fertilization. It’s called ovulation. You may have heard this term before?)

But oh, no. This news drove Zilla to take to her abstinent bed. Boss called the TV show and notified them that Bridezilla couldn’t come to sing because they had just received the report that she had a cyst on her ovary. Accckkk.

As I may have mentioned before, Boss has a habit of sharing WAY TMI. Back a few weeks ago, when I’d been lobbying for a much later wedding date, Boss had indicated that the later dates were off-limits because of proximity to Bridezilla’s menstrual cycle, and then before I had time to jam my fingers in my ears and sing “La,La,La!” he told me the precise date of her last period and the date we could expect her next one. Oh, hurl.

Nonetheless, based on this unwelcome but unavoidable bit of data, I instinctively knew when Bridezilla could be expected to ovulate, and it was. Right. About. Now. Yessiree. Boss and Bridezilla shelved Zilla’s vocal television debut because she was preparing to release an egg.

And that’s not all. A couple of days later, after their journey back home, they attended a fairly large gathering at which Boss had been asked to speak. Zilla herself recounted to me later that as Boss addressed the crowd, she felt a “painful pop,” and when Boss introduced his new wife to the throng, she announced that the cyst on her ovary had just burst. Woo hoo.


I’m entirely confident that Bridezilla had NO idea that she had just proclaimed to all and sundry her first ovulation as a married woman. Or that she, now off pelvic rest, was about to become Pregzilla.


I came home and instructed Dh to mark down the first full week of August in his planner – because I predicted this was the week that Boss would be adding another nut to the family granola.