As a proud beer wench at a fairly upscale bar in the South Side, I have been privy to… As a proud beer wench at a fairly upscale bar in the South Side, I have been privy to witnessing my share of interesting things. Nothing has traumatized me more, however, than what I saw at a bachelorette party held in one of our private rooms.

I had just arrived at work for another Saturday evening of fetching alcohol when I was sent downstairs to pick something up in the private room. As soon as I opened the door, I knew it was a sick, sadistic joke.

A stereo was cranking out some “bow-chika-bow-bow” music while an oiled-up, Fabio-wannabe stripper in nothing but a cheetah thong was, ahem, romancing a group of drunken bridesmaids and the bride-to-be herself who was wearing a precariously perched wedding veil.

While the ladies seemed to be enjoying the drunken romp, my first instinct was to turn and run — and try I did. But several bridesmaids quickly blocked the exit and as I turned and saw Fabio approaching, I nearly began to hyperventilate. When Fabio made some comment about me “playing hard to get,” I think the adrenaline coursing through my veins gave me superhuman strength to drive through the bridesmaids like a mini Jerome Bettis and make a clean getaway. I’m fairly certain I’ve been experiencing the effects of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ever since.

When I was a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be in a wedding. I wanted to be the little princess scattering rose petals on my way down the aisle, to be in pictures with the bride, to be in the spotlight on such a special occasion.

Somehow I always succeeded in drawing attention to myself at the reception, like the time I sat down too hard in a chair and flipped it back, my dress falling over my head and my shoes flying nearly 10 feet in two different directions, or the time my cousin from Wisconsin and I got in trouble for consuming a high amount of Jell-O shots because we thought they were mini desserts. I was always an embarrassing spectacle, but never a flower girl or bridesmaid.

My wish didn’t come true until I was about 17, when a close family friend asked my sister and I to be bridesmaids in her wedding. Since then, I have been a bridesmaid in four weddings, even a maid of honor in my sister’s. Now I’m wondering — always a bridesmaid, never a bride?

But I digress. What I’m trying to say is that, by now, I’m fairly experienced in this whole wedding planning business and what goes down from engagement to the chicken dance at the reception. Never, never, never would we have penciled a bachelorette party complete with baby-oiled strippers into our pre-wedding itinerary. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had our let-your-hair-down, fun girls’ nights complete with our share of one too many beers or glasses of champagne, but the need for a sleazy stripper was never even a consideration.

And why should it be? It’s not as though the bride’s life is going to end when she ties the knot; why should a bachelorette party be a “final hurrah,” a big “The End” on this chapter of her life?

The same goes for guys. Several weekends ago, I was serving cocktails in the balcony of our bar when a bachelor party came upstairs. Within minutes, guys (who were built strikingly similar to the starting defensive lineup of the Steelers) had backed me into a dark corner. The linebacker-esque bachelor was approximately two inches from my face, his breath reeking of alcohol, declaring his love for me and how badly he wanted me to be his “last kiss.”

Call me crazy, but a drunken jerk who wants to make out before he gets married the next day always does it for me. How could one resist that sheer temptation?

I’m pretty certain I rolled my eyes and motioned to the bouncer that they were cut off, before I jetted away and ignored them for the rest of the evening. If my husband-to-be were desperate to make out with a random cocktail waitress the night before our wedding, I would have serious doubts about the future of our relationship.

88,900 results pop up when you Google “bachelor and bachelorette parties,” the majority of them advertising male and female strippers. Perhaps this is why the statistics on divorce are so dismal — we’re entering into marriage as though it is a death sentence, rather than a new adventure with the person we love the most.

I might take up that offer of always being a bridesmaid and never being a bride, after all.

She’s the girl eating cake and laughing while the other single women throw punches and wrestle for the bouquet. E-mail Jessica at [email protected].