They travel in packs, these young women in $500 hats from Kemo Sabe, fringed crop tops, cowboy boots that have never kicked dirt and sassy polyester sashes. Every 25 feet or so, another entourage appears, halting midday traffic as they snap selfies in the middle of the street. Since when did our mountain town become Nashville of the West for Bridal Barbie? Day and night, they’re everywhere. Blocking the sidewalk outside No Name while one of them yells in a panic, “You guys! I forgot my ID!” Shooting TikTok reels as they try on every fringe jacket on the racks at Blueprints Vintage. Downing pitchers of Aperol spritz and espresso martinis at The Cabin. They’re on the hiking trails, a bevy of Lululemon ambassadors. They’re at the spa, a royal court seated on pedicure thrones. The modern bachelorette party isn’t really a party any more at all. It’s a production, an experience, a way of life. Dammit, I’ll say it. It’s an era worthy of Taylor Swift herself. Call it curated brand activation or immersive performance art. It comes complete with themed dinners, professional photographers and three-day itineraries. How did this even happen in the first place? Obviously, it took a bunch of horny dudes to get the ball rolling. Bachelor parties have been around since at least the Spartans, who toasted departing grooms before marriage. The French call it enterrement de vie de garçon, which I believe roughly translates to Rest in peace, sucker. For centuries, bachelors got their last debaucherous hurrah while bachelorettes were expected to sip tea, exchange recipes and politely prepare for domestic bliss. But somewhere between feminism, Instagram and Airbnb, women caught up — with the bachelorette-party economy now roughly the size of a small country’s GDP. My own late-1900s bachelorette party was thrown together at the last minute by three of my closest friends and consisted of shots, more shots, dancing at (and on) a local bar and a midnight viewing of a porno they’d purchased from the backroom at Blockbuster entitled “From Russia with Lust.” One thing that stands out in my memory amid tears of laughter is their repeated exclamations of “We own it!” as if we’d be watching it over and over again like some kind of X-rated “Napoleon Dynamite.” Thankfully, to my knowledge, there exists not one shred of photographic evidence of any of it. I’m not saying it was better than today’s bachelorette parties. But I’m not not saying it. Though, if I’m being honest, if we’d had unlimited Delta miles and an iPhone with FaceTune, who’s to say we wouldn’t have shown up in Park City like a rhinestone cowgirl, too? As a kind of reality check, I asked some of my friends about their own bachelorette party memories. I wanted to know what stood out the most. I started with my best friend, Mary Ann. I know I was there for it but could only vaguely recall barhopping in Buffalo. That was basically it, she told me. But what cemented the memory for her was something more. “I remember I felt very loved,” she replied. Another friend Michele said what stood out for her was that it was the last time she got blackout drunk. “We danced, got sweaty and random guys bought us way too many shots. I puked in the club’s bathroom,” she said. “The next morning I woke up wearing my pajamas in my brother’s spare room with absolutely no memory of how I got there.” Judi celebrated her bachelorette at a famous New York City restaurant where friends honored her with a parade of phallic desserts. Her fondest memory of the night was “sleeping in a sea of blow-up mattresses in the living room of a one-bedroom apartment and giggling until dawn.” Diane remembered a bar-crawl scavenger hunt. She wore an oversized T-shirt to which her friends safety-pinned the scavenged items: a shoelace, a man’s size XXL underpants, a sign from a local bar, a library card. Ironically, at the end of the night, she found herself sitting next to the owners of the bar from which she’d stolen the sign, which was pinned prominently to her shirt. They wished her good luck, but made her return the sign. Not one of them mentioned the decorations. Or the matching outfits. Or where they stayed. What they remembered were the people who were there. Maybe the bachelorette was just an excuse to get together one last time before destiny took over and scattered us all. Marriages, babies, divorces, job changes, cross-country moves. Life has a way of unfolding in ways you can’t conceive when you’re marching around in cowboy boots in your 20s and 30s. Eventually, you realize the costumes, the songs, the absolute absurdity of it all were never really the point. Next time I see a bachelorette party strutting down Main, I’ll still wonder how our town became ground zero for the Cowgirl Bride Industrial Complex. But I’ll also know there’s a decent chance none of them will remember the balloon arch or the matching pajamas. They’ll remember someone laughing so hard beer came out her nose. Someone making sure they got back to the Airbnb. Someone dancing on a tabletop in her bra. They’ll remember how deeply treasured they were by the friends who knew them before they became someone’s wife. The ones who remembered every version of you — including the blackout drunkie — and loved you anyway. The ones who were willing to put on an embarrassing sash or a T-shirt pinned with a pair of tighty whities. And they did it all simply because you asked. The post Betty Diaries: The unexpected value of bachelorette party industrial complex appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less