The bridal shower is a rite of passage for the man. As his daughter heaps boxes of domestic goods on his living room floor, he witnesses large portions of his own life evaporating but holds out the slim hope that one of the women will step on the cat and kill it. He hopes that something good, like feline extinction, can emerge from the bridal shower.
Periodically, the man does hear the siren call of his wife, urging him to emerge from his lair to help serve the pineapple punch, but it is too late for apologies and the man is cranky and flip as he tosses cookies onto tiny glass plates and attempts to answer the question: "What are you doing here?"
Naturally, the man looks for certain escape routes: the baseball game on television, a loose shingle, a squirrel on the back deck that needs to be trapped and deported to Kentucky. While the women eat cupcakes and discuss wedding colors and the various nuances of the Big Day (all of which the man, of course, is paying for by taking out a third mortgage and cashing in his life insurance policy), the man sits in the corner, behind a large decorative floor piece, and bites his fingernails to the quick. He spits the tiny bits of fingernail into a potted plant, as he hears petunias crave calcium.
As the wedding shower is winding to a close, the man stands by his wife to thank people. His wife reminds him that he should help some of the elderly down the front steps and that, if anyone is going to break a back carting shipping crates full of china and kitchen appliances, it should be him. He is, after all, expendable.
When the shower is over and the final guest has departed, the father of the bride collapses on the couch while watching Stanley Cup Hockey.
The man doesn't know anything about the Stanley Cup. He only knows that there are two hundred cups sitting on his living room floor, some in floral patterns, and he will be drinking out of them until he dies.
This is his final memory . . . and he sleeps on it.
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