A New Generation of Bachelor Parties

Note: The following column was first published in July 1999.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — I was the last one to arrive at the bachelor party, and the conversation had already turned to breasts.

"I am such an idiot," one of the party-goers said, literally smacking himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. "I have the breast pump in the car. And Amy is going to need it."

There followed a brief discussion as to whether Amy could borrow Sandy's breast pump, and since I was the oldest one at the party by several years, they turned to me for an answer.

Uh, I don't know, I said. Is this the bachelor party? Am I in the right place?

I was assured this was the bachelor party and, since no consensus had been reached as to whether the sharing of breast pumps was done or not done, the first party-goer left to take the breast pump to Amy, who was attending an outdoor concert with the other women in the bridal party.

Truth be told, and especially as the evening wore on, I think many of us wished we had gone to a concert, too. But guys can't say that. Guys have to carouse before a wedding. It's written someplace.

The groom and all the other party-goers besides me were somewhere between Generation X and the baby boomers, a generation that did not name itself.

Maybe they were the Not-So-Self-Obsessed generation.

The groom was marrying later than his friends — most of whom had one kid at the least — and home life tended to dominate the conversation.

"Nannies," one groaned to the groom. "Let me tell you about nannies."

This set off a wave of horrible-expensive-incompetent-but-what-would-you-do-without-them nanny stories.

We were in a restaurant, and this was the second stop on what was supposed to be a madcap evening.

The first stop had been a three-hour paintball war at a local paintball field.

Paintball is where you dress up in heavy fatigues and facemasks, form two teams and shoot each other with compressed air guns filled with gelatin capsules full of paint.

I had begged off from paintball, claiming that I couldn't leave work that early, and now I was glad I had: Even with the protective gear, almost all the groomsmen bore welts — the groom had a purple one on his forehead for which the bride, he was certain, was sure to kill him.

So now we sat around a long table, drinking beer in moderation and trying to keep the conversation going.

We forced the groom to talk about all the women he had dated in his lifetime, but he was completely demur about the details.

Nobody even told a dirty joke.

At one point, near the end of the evening, one of my fellow celebrants, Amy's husband, who had returned from bringing her the breast pump, turned to me.

"Did they have bachelor parties in your day?" he asked, not unpolitely.

"Did you have one?"

As I was wondering how to answer, it came back to me with terrifying clarity: A bar-girl joint in Chicago's Old Town, strippers sitting on our laps, my friend Kenny, a cop, pulling out his service revolver as a joke, the bureau chief of a major publication going into the back room with one of the strippers and finding out the next day she had lifted his credit card and charged $300 to it, a night of excess, dissipation and indulgence that was ended only by the sun rising over Lake Michigan and the dim awareness I had to get married in a few hours.

Naw, I told Amy's husband. We didn't have bachelor parties back then. Not like the ones these days.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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