Pushkin, I'm so chill Gonzalez and I wrote the Fake Poor Bride for The Atlantic and it's the story of the week.

Would you please introduce yourself to the listener.

I'm your lovely wife, Cassandra.

Yes.

And when I proposed to you, one of us wanted a wedding and one of us did not.

Yes, it's not important which one.

Here's the big review.

Okay, you wanted the wedding.

I did want a wedding because you get one chance in your life to have a way beautiful dress.

No, it's important to do this in front of family and friends and have a moment that you know.

It binds you.

It keeps you from just running away.

You've done this thing in front of people.

I think it's because you have fomo.

Oh, and you are more of a traditionalist than you let on.

And you wanted to Elope.

Yes, And I don't know, A lope makes it sound so almost like rebellious and dirty and rash.

But it was more that I just didn't want to have a wedding.

Part of the problem with the wedding for me is because I knew that the default was going to be on me doing much of the work what are.

You talking about?

I found the place I picked.

The excuse me, we both scouted places together, that's true.

I arranged the flower, you did the flower, Okay, The problem was and I found the photographer.

Yes you're Missus Dellaway.

We're all very impressed.

But I told nobody understands your missus jokes a joke about Missus Dollaay, and nobody gets it.

It's like your way of you're distracting.

I did so much you think I did.

This is so not fair.

First of all, a lot of it was convincing you that, yes, we need music at our wedding.

Yes, we need flowers at our wedding, Yes we need a photographer.

People don't want to be invited to a wedding that isn't a wedding.

I'm thrilled that we had a wedding.

I thought it was lovely.

I was going to end this intro by asking you to renew our vows, but I guess that's not in the cards.

We could go to city Hall.

We're gonna read out a restaurant.

We're gonna lope, renew our bouts, have a.

Nice meal with some of our friends.

All right to dated writing is hard.

Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy trying to be you don't stand So it turns on a mic.

Maybe the twiddles nap because a journalist.

Trand has got in that jugle.

Single story.

Just listen to smart people, conversation, film and information.

It's a story up.

When she was at college at Brown, Sochill Gonzalez met some people that she called fake poor.

My wife went to Skidmore, which was full of these people.

They're kids who grew up super rich and were desperate to seem normal.

They'd actually sometimes borrow money from you and then not pay you back, pretending somehow that they couldn't.

It's the pulp song common people, which we can't afford the rights too, so just trust me.

After Brown, Sochill worked as a wedding planner in New York City for ultra rich people, but there was one wedding she was hired to do for a fake poor bride.

Sochill wrote about planning this wedding both in her novel Olga Daized Dreaming and her recent article for The Atlantic.

Wait, okay, so growing up, how much did you know about like high end weddings?

I knew nothing about high end wedding.

I mean, my family's from Brooklyn and everybody just had a catering hall wedding.

You know, like if they were going to have a wedding, they'd go to like one of these turnkey catering halls and yeah, and it's like, you know, X number of dollars ahead and there's you know, maybe splurge and have a Venetian hours really fancy.

Relatives got married at Russ on the Bay in Queens and you'd come out of this floor.

Yeah, it was lavish in a very outer borough kind of way.

What was your parents' wedding?

Like you said that they had a football wedding?

Oh, my grandparents had a football Well that is that is?

Oh a football.

Wedding is like sounds like the most American thing I've ever heard.

It's either so American or I always like it seems so like ethnic.

Like you get Italian heroes and they're sort of wrapped up in tinfoil.

You know, you go to like a deli, you get a bunch of heroes and then people just call out to whoever's standing near the table where all the sandwiches are, and they toss the hero to whoever they want.

They're like, oh, give me a turkey, give me a provoloan, give me a salami, and then they throw them.

And so that's why it was known as a football wedding because they would toss heroes across the little hall that you'd rent out.

The tossing is a key part to the wedding.

Yes, the food distribution system was tossing, and that's how that was a wedding.

So this was kind of what my family knew about weddings.

Nobody understood at all what it was that I was doing.

And I almost don't even know in the beginning that I totally understood what I was getting into.

You graduate Brown, and do you immediately start this wedding planning.

I graduated Brown.

I worked at a really bad art gallery in Soho for a while where I was mildly abused and being paid minimum wage.

I ended up getting a job like art adjacent.

I was like planning events for an advertising award show, and I met all of these creative directors, like you know, the mad men of the nineties, one might say, and they would like they started getting married and they were like, you know, you plan such great parties.

Would you want to help with our wedding.

We want to have like an unusual wedding, And so that was sort of how I segued into.

Webbing what year is this around?

When you see this is like oh three oh three oh four?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well I need to get an idea of how much money we're talking like how much do you charge and how much?

How expensive are these weddings.

So at this point we were probably still charging a flat feet so we would charge you know, anywhere between fifteen and like twenty five thousand dollars.

That's a good business.

We were doing well, like I was like proud of it, like you know, like I was like, this is going great.

And then one day I get this phone call and the woman says, this is an emergency.

I need you to save my daughter's wedding.

And I was okay, and she was like, you have to come up town to my house because only then can you understand the disaster that's happening.

And this wedding is in six weeks and you need to come to see my house in order for me to explain this to you.

My daughter's gonna it's coming in to meet you.

Tomorrow, but I need to see you tonight.

Okay, So this mom calls you, and what's your reaction.

Do you think, oh, I'll go up take that meeting, or this sounds awful or yeah.

You know.

The thing is you are so frog boiled into bizarre and crazy that like you're just like all right, you know.

So she just gives you an address and you're just like, maybe i'll make some money, and then like literally the last thing she says before she hangs up the phone is, by the way, I'm very very rich, and then she hangs up the phone.

Okay, Now, when someone says I'm very very rich, does that mean they're very very rich or it means they're not, so, you know.

Normally you would think that they're not.

Right.

It's like a real Housewives kind of thing to say, you know, I'm rich, Like who actually says that?

But in this particular case, it was true.

And the other thing is the skill that I really have is really sniffing out money.

Like at one point I could tell you sort of like what the average like household income of a neighborhood was, because I'd be like, where do they live?

And like I'd look up the address, like, you.

Know, like, can you tell how much money I have just from talking to me?

No?

I can't.

But like I could probably ask some leading questions, but I won't because you know we're going to be friends.

Give me one question to ask people to find out if they're rich.

Well, the number one thing I would ask, now, I was like, what are you up to this summer?

Nice?

That's perfect, Okay, So you go up.

So I go up, and it was truly very rich.

I mean you sort of walk in and the elevator opens, and you are like in a marble floored hallway, and there's oil paintings on every wall, and there's a housekeeper that meets you who's dressed like you would imagine a housekeeper.

And wait, no, an actual like made out thing.

Yeah, he don't know.

That still happens.

It still totally happens.

I really liked the mother of the Bride.

I'm going to admit, like I really right away because it was like she did the whole thing, and later I would come to find out she was not herself from a lot of money, right, like they had sort of like come into the money as like she had married and she really enjoyed it for that reason, right, And the mom looked very upper East, that's the best way to put it, like rail thin, like you know, just chanelle head to toe, like just really dressed all the time, and she hated to eat but loved to drink.

And I just kind of like dug it, like you know, it was like she just it's a life.

You walk into this apartment, is there a piano?

Right away, there's a piano.

There's totally a piano.

And she's waiting in the library because there's a library and it's just for books in her computer.

And right away she was like she was like, this is the problem, right, and she sort of gestures around to the room and she was like she's embarrassed of it.

And she's like she's embarrassed of all of this.

And so the whole thing was that the daughter didn't want the mother to have anything to do with it except to pay for it.

She was like, I just want to have an average budget wedding.

So the mom in the beginning didn't even know what that meant, but she's like, fine, go ahead.

And now as the wedding's approaching, they go to see the venue and the mother is like finally like is allowed to be included in something and she realizes that what's average is terrible.

You have to realize this is building on top of years you know the mom had like she is like like she's rejecting all my fineries.

She's living in a walk up, like she's wearing old Navy.

I'm trying to give her this lovely life.

My other kids are so happy to come to the house in the Hampton's to wear all my kidsture, and she won't have any of it.

So this was building off of years of exasperation.

Was it going to be at least a nice average wedding?

That this one was gonna happen?

And it didn't help that there wasn't a lot of good taste involved.

When I arrived, it was kind of neither here nor there.

It was neither a nice, low budget wedding nor a well done like expensive wedding.

It was it was hovering in this realm of like, I don't know what I am.

So what were the details that you and the mom didn't approve of?

Well, there we had them, Like I think sitting at picnic tables.

There was like a jam jar trend that was running around at the time, and so like there was supposed to be jam jars for wine glasses, lizeh little Mason jars for wine glasses, and like some of it was they just had too many people for the space, so like it was gonna be very very hot.

The ac and the venue didn't completely work.

It was really it was a bit of a mess.

And so the mom says, listen, She's like, you have got to help me, because she can be poor all she wants, but my friends know we have money, and I can't stand by this, like right, So the woman explains to me how it's gonna work, and what I was supposed to do was essentially start to slowly upgrade things.

And as the daughter was concerned about cost or expresses anxiety about costs, I'm supposed to just say it's included in the contract, right, So like you know, you would say, how about we serve these baby lamb shops instead of the pigs in a blanket And I'd be like, well, they're very good, but is that going to add a lot to the budget, And you would just like, it's included in the contract, and then the mom would secretly pay the upgrade fee.

First of all, that's insane.

But secondly, I don't see how that works, because if my whole goal is to present poor, then no one knows what I paid, I'm gonna look rich, which is against the whole point of being fake poor.

So what we agreed upon was that it was never going to be ostentageous, but that we were going to find a way too nice, so that it would be the type of thing where if you didn't know what things cost, you wouldn't necessarily walk in and think like that was lavish, right.

Like, it's right, there's probably a couple signifiers that you have to.

Avoid, and a lot of the time it's in most people's mind it's like big floral arrangements, right, Like they don't realize that actually what was most expensive is that we recovered all of the old floor with new floor and brought in an air conditioning unit.

Right, Like waiters cost a lot of money.

People cost a lot of money.

But like, but people are the difference between your table being full of dirty glasses and you having like a super clean table, always having your wine glass refilled.

But this is so okay, It's pelicitous, isn't it.

It's fiendish?

In some ways, do you think about saying no, Like this seems really both challenging and ethically precarious, Like.

Perhaps subconsciously, I had had a lot of resentments for fake poor people.

Yeah, and so I sort of understood where the mom was coming from and was in some ways frustrated because when the daughter would like freak.

Out and be like, I don't know, that sounds expensive, Like you are like mad about money going into the pockets of people that are not rich, that are like super working people.

All these jobs are like physical labor jobs.

I think, Like it was almost egregious to me to see her want to hoarde something that she didn't value, but for the sake of appearances versus like actually help like people that are working earn more, you know what I mean.

Like, and so it was like it was the idea that it was about an image versus a principle.

I just kind of resented that for image's sake, this was like all just kind of being held right.

I'm so convinced I think you should run for office.

You just completely justified that and made me believe, Yeah, I guess you don't think this job is too crazy to accept.

I definitely felt it was crazy, like I wouldn't lie, but it was like a large amount of money in a really small amount of time, and you're like, we can get through it.

It's gonna be fine.

You could see right away that the mom honed in on me and was like, you are going to be my wedding friend.

You liked you, Yeah, she likes you.

I liked her like.

She would come up with just like the most ridiculous excuses to have a meeting, Like she'd be like, you know what we need to talk about.

Are the napkins?

Come up town.

I'm going to show you the kinds of napkins that we need for this wedding.

We're gonna pick the napkins and then we'll have lunch.

It was all I think, in some ways just a ruse to like, But I really think she wanted was somebody to have fun spending money with.

Right, And you'd go and you'd sit there and talk about napkins, and then you'd talk about life, and you'd talk about love, and she'd ask about your love life.

And you know, at the time, I was recently divorced, and she was like, marry rich next time.

Oh really?

Oh yeah, she was just like it's so much fun.

She really was having a fun time with her life.

Okay, so does this scam work?

At first, it's totally working.

We're all getting along swimmingly.

And then we have a meeting with the caterer at the venue.

The bride says, well, look, I was like, and here's where we're going to put the flower arrangement with your escort cards.

And the escort card is a little piece of paper that tells you what table to go and sit at.

Well, that's called the escort.

Card because it escorts you to your table.

I don't like that, so the escort card.

And the bride says, you know, I've been thinking a lot about it, and I want to reduce the carbon footprint of the wedding, and I was thinking that we could do that by having an edible escort card.

This is the bride's ideas the bride's idea, that's a very expensive idea.

Well, I think she thought it would be a cheap idea because they were already paying for drives.

So she felt like, can we just put some of those were drives on this table and put toothpicks in them and have the toothpick have the the tag, and so I said, well, what ORDRV were you thinking of this as a slightly strange idea.

So the idea was to have bacon wrap dates on this table cloth, and I thought it was just with little toothpicks and like tags on them, like sales.

And I was like, it's going to look like a table full of floating turns, like little turn chips, you know.

So she leaves and I email the mother of the bride and I was like, everything was okay except this escort card thing.

I was like, here's what she wants to do.

I don't know how we're going to stop her.

And she writes back, for Christ's sake, I wish you were my daughter.

And three hours later I get a phone call and it's the mom whispering, and she's like she knows everything.

She saw emails.

Oh my god, she saw the emails saying she wish you were her daughter instead of her.

That email, no, oh that's devastating.

Oh it's devastating.

It's oh, no, devastating.

And so she've learned two things.

Your mother is doing something behind your back that you don't want her to do, and that she loves your wedding planner more than you.

Like she's basically having like an adulterous affair with your wedding planner.

Okay, Oh no, so she insists, rightfully, so that I be fired.

Oh you have to be fired.

Of course I have to be fired.

I can never talk to you yet.

But like, the mom couldn't quit me, but I just I can't do this without you.

She's like, we have to figure this out.

How long before the wedding?

Did the mom be?

Like two and a half weeks before the wedding?

Like, oh, that's crisis time.

It's crisis time after the break, So Jill finds a way to work undercover for the mother of the bride.

But first, our advertisers are going to sell you an escort.

Yes, it has come to that these are hard times for podcasts.

Okay, So the mom has fired you because she has to from her daughter's wedding.

And do you just walk away at that point or is there more to this?

We devise a ruse more elaborate than the first ruse, where I take one of my staffers and I said, listen, obviously I understand I'm stepping back.

Please meet Anita.

Anita works for the caterer, and she's going to take care of everything from now on.

Wait, he is a woman who works for you, yes, who's now pretending to work work for the caterer.

And the caterers in on it too, And.

The caterer now is in on it.

Now everybody's getting glad.

The florist is in on it, the baker is in on it.

Everybody's in on it because they're presenting fake quotes at meetings, like saying one thing, oh, this is like two hundred dollars a centerpiece, and then in reality it's like seven hundred dollars.

So like like everyone is in on it.

Everybody is in on this.

So now the bride thinks you're not working on the wedding, but you are through your proxies and my.

Proxies, through my spies, and I'm still plotting and adding and decorating and doing things with the mom and deploying her orders to all of the vendors who they she thinks now report to her, but still report to me as a head of state.

What is the monetary differential between what the bride thinks she's paying what she's actually going to do?

Right, thinks that we've added costs, but probably like ten thousand dollars worth of cost, and in reality, we probably added like one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of cost and.

You've been able to hide them.

Yeah, and a lot of stuff she didn't even know about, Like I don't even know that she ever noticed that we redid the floor.

For instance.

The bride thought that we were renting the venue, you know, for the day of the wedding, But we rented the venue for like a week in an that we would have time to do all the things we needed to do.

She didn't know that in order to make the people fit, I was going to need to build custom furniture.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, like, like, why would you think about that?

Like I knew that, and then I her mother agreed and we paid the bill.

How many people do you have working on the inside for you?

Every vendor, like so, every the florist, the venue owner, like every.

Vendor, each of these places.

Yeah.

So the day of the wedding comes and I, you know, and at least an hour before they were getting there, I was like, I have to make myself scarce, right, And so I go and I post up like maybe a block or two away at a restaurant, and I'm just texting with like my staff and I was like live live, giving orders right like as people and questions came up, like from the moment that the mother of the bride woke up.

She was paranoid that the daughter was going to find out, right like now it's like she's going to find out.

She's going to find out.

And I get a text from one of the people on my staff and they were like, the mom's drank a little bit too much and maybe hasn't eaten enough.

And I was like, all right, we'll see if you can get see if you can get her a little plate of food, you know whatever, pull her to the side.

And then it was like a text.

It was like something has gone south.

The mom and the bride have disappeared, and we can see them.

They were like they went to like a back room where guests wouldn't go, and they're clearly in it, like they're getting into it.

And I guess what ended up happening was the mother of the bride got intoxicated and told the bride like confessed the whole thing.

Like the guilt was overwhelming her, and so she was like, I have to tell you, you know.

She's like, do you like the way it turned out?

Well, I never fired the planner, like they actually did all of this, like we and the bride.

I don't know what reaction she thought she was gonna get, but the bride lost it, right, Like, I mean, she's been deceived on her wedding day twice.

And she like realizes that the people that she thought were catering staff still worked for me.

So she's just like outraged, right, and like tells her mother, We've got to go to family therapy.

You never can talk to her again.

I never want to see her name again.

I don't want to hear about her again.

And it was like an affair exactly.

And I get a text from the mother of the bright like this is goodbye.

She knows everything, Like it's the end.

Have they contacted you either like when the book came out or she.

Did say congratulations I got a note that's in congratulations on your book.

She did, yes, Like but it was very classy.

She's a classy lady.

She's a classy cookie lady.

I never heard from the daughter, and like, I you know, I feel like that This probably was also a come to Jesus time about like class and money and presentation of self.

But like, you know, I just think that the mom was longing for somebody to like want to throw a really good time, have a really good time with her, having a good time for other people.

Was the wedding a success from the guest point of view?

From your point of view?

Was it a good wedding?

I think it was a beautiful wedding.

I think it was a beautiful wedding, and like it was definitely a more comfortable, more like sort of elegant affair, But it still felt like them, you know what I mean, Like it didn't feel like I know what the mom would have done, and it would have been a very different party.

Okay, So besides don't go into debt.

Do you have one piece of wedding advice you want to give people?

This is like something I would have told a bridal magazine.

But color is always free, No, Like it's like like I really like you could just you can order anything in a color and it makes everything look much nicer and it doesn't cost you anything.

Right, Like, ask guests to wear like one bright color.

It'll look really beautiful.

This is great.

Before you go, I have to ask you what were your summer plants.

I'm I'm spending it in my friend's house upstate that she rented while she plans a lavish wedding.

So I am Brooklyn this afternoon and going upstate.

Upstate is such a broad.

Term, like such a broad term.

See that.

I think it's Hudson Valley.

That's my guess.

Yeah, okay, all right, I'm getting an idea of what's going on here, So chill gun Zalez.

You wrote the Fake Poor Bride for The Atlantic and it's the story of the week.

Thank you so much for coming on our show.

Thank you so much for having me.

This is a lot of fun.

The place where I got married, which is called the Downtown Association, is a private club in Manhattan that's been there since eighteen eighty seven.

Like dead animal heads on the wall, Billiard's Room, Cigar humidor basically a real life game of clue, and it came with its own wedding coordinator, a proper tall blonde woman with a way bigger engagement ring than Cassandra had.

Usually she dealt with the bride's mom or at least the bride, but instead she had to deal with me, which sucked for her.

At one point, after explaining to her that I didn't want any flowers, I came up with this idea of having people just grab their food from the buffet and sit at any table they wanted to do, like no escort cards.

I got halfway through this idea when the wedding lady said that isn't done.

She got really upset, and I didn't think that was a very good reason, but she was just not gonna let us do this for our guests, and I'm sure she was right, Like, honestly, no one wants to sit with cousin Lou.

Sorry Lou, but you really didn't have to show everyone what every key on your giant key ring meant.

That isn't done.

At the end of the show, what's next for Joe Stein?

Maybe he'll take a naper poke around online.

Our Show Today was produced by Kate McAuliffe and Nisha Benka.

It was edited by Lydia Jean Kott.

Our engineer is a Manda kay Went and our executive producer is Katherine Shira dah And.

Our theme song was written and performed by Jonathan Colton.

And a special thanks to my voice coach Vicky Merrick and my consulting producer Laurence Alastin.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

I'm Joel Stein and this is the story of the week.

So do you regret having the wedding?

I feel relatively neutral about the fact that we had a wedding.

You know that I didn't want to.

I didn't want to be a broad I don't have that princess bride dream.

I don't either.

I didn't have that dream, but I just it wasn't It was a beautiful wedding.

Everybody knows who the bride was that to Ajel, and it wasn't me.