A Good Ol' Fashioned Fish Smacking

I am in a wedding in July and this past Saturday we ran the stag and doe. I have never helped to oversee a stag and doe before, but apparently there is some kind of rule whereby every guest must purchase, in addition to their $10 door ticket, something called "fish insurance." My friend Kristina, the bride, is a staunch vegetarian and animal rights activist, and so I pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of having one of her guests swallow a live goldfish (which is what happens to the one unlucky guest who hasn't purchased said fish insurance). Instead, she agreed to purchase a dead fish from the grocery store (not a fillet, one with eyes and everything still in tact) and allow a member of the wedding party to smack an uninsured guest across the face.

For some reason, more people seemed to pay attention to the fish carcass than they did the bride. The fish had a prominent place on the front entrance table--on ice, of course--where people proceeded to touch it, talk to it, add cigarettes and gum to the inside of its stiff mouth. I wanted to see the humour in this, but for some reason I felt really bad for that fish. We can be so melodramatic about human death, and reserve such grandeur for the memorialization of the human dead, but we degrade and debase the lives of so many other creatures. I tried to spare the fish any further indignity by hiding it, but it was discovered.

It's difficult to be political when a bunch of drunk people want to see another drunk person get slapped in the face with a fish.