It’s called “poverty.” You’ve probably never heard of it.
Here’s the great thing about Etsy. As repellant as some of the shit is that I find there, there is always something worse.
Today I present one of the most insensitive features I’ve ever seen on the Etsy blog. And as usual, it’s celebrated in a circle jerk of obliviousness, complete with hipstermatic photos and dipshit Etsy drones yammering in approval.
Yes it’s a poverty wedding! How fun is that? They dressed like actual poor people! They even did some research:
We got to work researching the Depression era and hobo culture. As we prepared to make everything for our wedding, we collected feed sack dresses and old work boots, antique hand-stitched quilts and jug band instruments. After reading that the word “hobo” may be a syllabic abbreviation of “homeward bound,” we fell in love with the notion!
They fell in love with the very idea of penniless, homeless migrants, drifting from town to town, looking for work! Those hobos were just yummy, with their faded antique quilts and feed sacks, and those super cute boots they always wore. That whole period was just so desaturated and Brother Where Art Thou, which is also totes adorbs.
Okay, maybe many hobos found themselves having to leave their families in order to find enough work to support them, or maybe they escaped from harsh lives in orphanages. And, okay, maybe they died on train tracks or sweltered to death in locked box-cars. And maybe when they did finally find some work, they were set upon by thieves who took everything from them and threw them off of fast moving trains.
Don’t be such a downer! They had totally awesome trash can fires!
The important thing is, hobos were all clowns who had bandanas tied on sticks, like in cartoons.
Anyhoo, it was a super cute wedding. But I can’t help thinking that they could have done so much more with it.
Here are some ideas you can use when you have your own hobo themed depression era wedding!
• Souvenir photos on a lice ridden mattress in the weeds
• Tuberculosis screening tent
• Steal your own dinner
• Cigarette rolling contest with butts you find on the street
• Sterno martinis
• Hobo Stew bar
I’m sure you can think of lots more. Just remember to have fun with it. Golly, that’s why the Flying Spaghetti Monster made poor people in the first place!
August 2, 2011 at 1:47 pm
i was going to post this on the index card thread. unfuckingbelievable.
August 2, 2011 at 5:37 pm
okay i’m going to cheat a little, by posting this at the top as a response to you…
no. you know what’s unfuckingbelievable? the depression era-themed restaurant my sister and brother-in-law took me to in seattle around 30 years ago! i still haven’t gotten over it.
they served you various forms of stew and hard=tack rolls on tin plates, and your table water was served in mason jars – i kid you not. meanwhile, enormous black and white photos of depression/dustbowl scenes lined the walls, a la dorothea lange. people living in tents. people in food lines. hobos in railway yards. etc. etc.
i’m not making any of this up, i just wish i could remember the name of the restaurant … ‘the food line’ maybe?
halfway through i just burst into tears and sobbed. and i do mean burst. my sister and brother in law, self-proclaimed liberals, were just amazed, didn’t get why i felt the way i did …
August 2, 2011 at 5:42 pm
That’s so bad it’s actually somewhat comical.
August 2, 2011 at 8:06 pm
i wish i could feel human suffering so acutely and cleanly as i did in my 20s. losing that ability to connect like that also loses one’s ability to articulate as well … i couldn’t really capture in words the reason why i was sobbing. i could then, but not now.
August 2, 2011 at 5:57 pm
please I’m begging you – please tell me that f-ing place burned down or something.
August 2, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Better yet… if it went out of business and the owners went bankrupt and got a little taste of poverty themselves. I bet it wouldn’t be nearly as nostalgic to them.
August 2, 2011 at 8:01 pm
oh, i would love to tell you it burnt down or they went bankrupt … i couldn’t find anything remotely similar when i tried to google it just now … fingers crossed!
August 4, 2011 at 2:48 am
There’s a place near my home called “Hard Times Pizza”. Drove by the other day – out of business. Not kidding. I laughed and laughed and laughed and….
August 4, 2011 at 1:21 pm
I’ve lived in Seattle for nearly ten years, and I’m certain it no longer exists, or at least was renamed/re-envisioned, because I’ve never heard of it.
August 2, 2011 at 6:17 pm
There was more than one of those restaurants because I wandered into one when I was about 25 – I’m 54. It is exactly like you described it but was in S. CA. The tables were wooden picnic tables with benches and waiters dressed in faded jeans and caps. Same art that you mention and I was in shock. They served the food in graniteware bowls or on the same kind of plates. I was with a couple of other people when I said… “I have to get out of here.” They thought I was crazy because they loved (((LOVED))) going there.
August 2, 2011 at 8:03 pm
how odd! actually i was living in west l.a. at the time i went to visit them! don’t remember your restaurant in so cal, but yes, the tables were picnic tables, etc.
and the odd thing was, it wasn’t cheap to eat there.
August 2, 2011 at 10:38 pm
you’ve jogged a memory – the wait staff DID wear some sort of cap … not baseball …
is there some sort of hat that is iconic of the depression era?
August 4, 2011 at 2:51 am
As I recall, Tom Joad, in The Grapes of Wrath, wore a cap given to him by the prison staff when he left. I think it looked something like a driver cap or an Irish cap, if you know what I mean.
August 5, 2012 at 9:12 pm
This sort of a style was popular in the 30s.
http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=opera&rls=en&channel=suggest&authuser=0&tbm=isch&tbnid=1D_VLHFfYbAQ_M:&imgrefurl=http://adshats.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/great-hats-at-the-mighty-slim-pickins-fund-raiser/&docid=OM803JcZp6s9oM&imgurl=http://adshats.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/gent1.jpg%253Fw%253D500&w=403&h=300&ei=FkQfUO3kFsPkiwKfvoD4DQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=944&vpy=381&dur=2232&hovh=194&hovw=260&tx=151&ty=186&sig=111176584414734687401&page=1&tbnh=151&tbnw=206&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:20,s:0,i:138&biw=1247&bih=688
August 2, 2011 at 6:24 pm
Is it the Breadline Cafe?
August 2, 2011 at 8:10 pm
i just googled that, and apparently the breadline is not directly in seattle. the restaurant i went to was near pike’s place market. i can still feel the thickness of the mason jar against my lips.
August 3, 2011 at 11:47 pm
I use mason jars as ‘glasses’ because I have so many of them, and they are cheap to replace. I’ve used them for forever. I’m farm folk and use them to can food to feed my family later in the year.
BUT~ this sort of restaurant makes me sick.
August 2, 2011 at 7:05 pm
I should open a Russian themed restaurant and make my patrons get in line for bread…while the photos of people dying in Gulag’s line the walls.
August 2, 2011 at 7:18 pm
It can be just over the border from my Nazi-prison-camp-themed restaurant where they don’t feed you anything at all.
August 2, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Where they don’t feed you anything at all, AND make you do all of the labor. Additionally, you should also pack in three times as many people as the Fire Marshal permits in an establishment of that size. Keep the place filthy but bribe the health inspector to turn a blind eye.
You should be nothing if not authentic.
August 2, 2011 at 10:07 pm
You could visit these restaurants for some inspiration: http://www.thedailymeal.com/four-restaurants-where-youll-never-ever-get-table
August 3, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Yea, just steer clear of the LARGE “oven” in the back of the restaurant.
August 5, 2011 at 5:51 pm
Heh… that comment about Russia, along with the restaurant talk made me remember an Onion article from a long time ago:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/russian-television-scores-hit-with-new-game-show-w,658/
August 2, 2011 at 8:48 pm
Hey, Mason Jars are awesome. Don’t let this experience give them a bad rep for you. I own several Mason Jar dishes. Because I don’t have a lot of money and they’re free…
May 17, 2012 at 2:14 pm
I was going to say: Mason jars are standard glassware here in Texas, both in homes and in barbecue joints. And we’re totally sincere about them; it’s not kitsch.
August 2, 2011 at 8:57 pm
This made me so sick to read. Who the fuck does this shit? I remember my grandfather telling me about the depression and how little they had to eat and how hard things were… I could understand backwoodsy or western or country kitsch. But this goes too far. This is perhaps one of the most ignorant, self-riteous (totally spelt wrong) things Ive ever heard of. And that’s saying something.
August 2, 2011 at 9:10 pm
my mother had stories too …
but how different is it from today when we just witnessed the poor being sold down the river of federal cutbacks just to appease the lunacy fringe in washington dc.
we’re all gonna be drinking from mason jars soon…
August 2, 2011 at 10:12 pm
My husband’s grandmother recently passed. I was lucky enough to hear her amazing stories about this era before she left us. She was 93 when she died and she remembered the depression like it was yesterday.
She was a “well-off” family. Meaning her father owned a grocery store so they could do extravagant things like drink milk, and wear the fancy flour sack dresses with the little patterns on them. Of course they never made any money because they were too busy making sure people in the community had enough to eat while handing out endless good will.
Every time I buy an apple or milk for my little girl from the store I think how lucky I am, even considering me and my husband only banked 18k combined last year due to layoff after layoff.
So yeah, go fuck yourselves hobos.
August 3, 2011 at 10:48 am
My grandmother’s stories about the Great Depression were all about conserving water. She made sure you finished your glass of water at the dinner table. She said she was the one to pump the water and there was only one pail allowed a night.
That’s kinda how I feel that wedding should have been. “NO! YOU ONLY GET ONE GLASS OF WATER!!!!!!!”
August 3, 2011 at 11:54 am
Yeah I admit this rubbed me wrong too. If they want to have a shabby chic wedding or something thats fine but dont call it Depression Era Hobo because thats just insensitive and tasteless. My grandma used to tell stories about how they would take eggs from birds nests just so they could eat. People are still suffering today and youre having a wedding poking fun at it. Tasteless.
August 2, 2011 at 10:01 pm
My dad would have just LOVED that restaurant (note the sarcasm dripping). He told me not long before he died that his Dustbowl Oklahoma parents never went to a restaurant in their entire lives because they were always so careful after the Depression. And he ran away from home at 14 years old, completely deaf, because so many aunts and cousins moved onto their farm because they were the only people who had FOOD in the family. Around that time my great uncles were working in coal mines for room and board and not one penny of pay–like thousands of other American men–because it meant they weren’t at home eating the little food their wives and children could scrounge up. So. Fucking. Romantic.
August 3, 2011 at 1:02 am
I worked as a bank teller in the late 90s, and we had elderly people who banked with us and were still so traumatized by the Depression that they still didn’t quite trust banks not to fail, 60+ years afterward. And that particular bank weathered the Depression and had been around for about 150 years, in one form or another.
August 4, 2011 at 1:39 am
Fortunately their fears were completely unfounded.
Oh, wait…
August 3, 2011 at 2:56 am
Was is Po’ Folks?
http://www.pofolks.com/
It’s halfway between “Depression Chic” and “Shitty Cracker Barrel Knockoff.”
August 3, 2011 at 1:51 pm
no, doesn’t look like it. this place was only stews and then for desserts, pies. and they also offered these absolutely HUGE cinnamon buns to take home.
and it was a somewhat pricey place, IIRC.
August 6, 2011 at 6:19 pm
OMG, there was one of those in Anaheim, CA, may still be there. We went to a wedding reception there for a workplace friend – of course, hers wasn’t themed, I think it was something they could afford.
I think it’s more of a “you gotta perdy mouth”, kind of a po’ folks….
August 3, 2011 at 10:08 am
In her book, Red China Blues, Jan Wong mentions that when she was in China in the late 80s:
“Retro-hardship became hip. People flocked to nostalgia eateries like Beijing’s Remembering Bitterness Restaurant to listen to blind accordion players while sampling famine era menus of fried locusts and boiled weeds.”
The name of the restaurant comes from the Cultural Revolution when people were forced to attend “Remembering-the-bitterness-of -the-past-in-order-to-better-savour-the sweetness-of-the-present lectures. The presence whose sweetness they were supposed to savouring during those lectures was a horrible era of political oppression.
August 3, 2011 at 11:53 am
Because when you’re going to a restaurant you totally need a reminder that some people don’t have money.
The fuck is wrong with people?
August 3, 2011 at 1:54 pm
yeah, exactly – and some of them are the people who are waiting on you.
the restaurant was exactly like the wedding: you got to play at being a hobo with your tin plate, and your mason jar. beyond the utter repulsivity, insensitivity, etc. it was just plain fucking stupid.
August 4, 2011 at 2:51 am
Maybe this is a Southern thing, but lots of people I know use Mason Jars as glasses, and not just to save money. There are even ones made with handles on them for that purpose.
Only mentioning it because I don’t want anyone to walk into a restaurant with Mason jar glasses and think they’re being offensive or poking fun at the poor, because that isn’t the case. I think the photos were over the top tasteless and offensive. Someone mentioned Po’Folks and I also wanted to mention that wasn’t the point of that restaurant, it was just super cheap food but yes, it sucked.
August 5, 2012 at 9:18 pm
If you’ve got gingham curtains and Mason jars for glasses, I assume you’re going for country cute.
If you’ve got tin plates and pictures of breadlines on the walls, and the waitresses are wearing flour-sack dresses, I will assume you’re going for ‘insane’.
August 5, 2011 at 5:32 am
I live in Seattle, so I was curious and did some research. The restaurant was called the “Breadline.” I found reference to it in a blog on VintageSeattle.org: http://www.vintageseattle.org/2011/02/25/smith-tower-1972/
August 8, 2011 at 3:06 pm
yes, i think that was it…it was part of the pioneer square revival/restoration. because that area was so adrift in poverty, it made for a tasteful seamless transition, i presume.
thank you!
August 16, 2011 at 11:12 am
OH GOD. Was it Po Folks?
August 2, 2011 at 6:06 pm
thank god I don’t read the Etsy blog ever, because my head wants to explode.
August 2, 2011 at 6:52 pm
With all the perverse things Regretsy has introduced me to, I have NEVER had the reaction of wanting to go hide in the corner and rock myself and cry. But tonight I do.
August 2, 2011 at 7:31 pm
Please Take your comments to etsy! I feel some optimism coming on, we might actually get this taken down!
Then again I probably wrong.
we’ll probably all just get our accounts deleted
August 2, 2011 at 9:38 pm
What’s next? An adorable evening at auschwitz?
These people are insane. The ever increasing stupidity of the world is starting to keep me up at night. I’m almost ready to get rid of my internet. I already avoid the news. cripes.
August 2, 2011 at 11:36 pm
me too! the stupidity of most people is really beginning to overwhelm me. thanks to the internet, i’m in touch with vast swathes of people i would never otherwise meet. and while i’m delighted to find so many kindred spirits, i am amazed at the vast quantities of sheer mediocrity out there. especually in washington dc, which i’ve started paying more attention to since obama was elected. man! some of those politicians are mind-numbingly dumb.
August 3, 2011 at 1:04 am
I forget which “Law” it is that says: “The sum total of human intelligence on the planet is a constant. The population is increasing.”
August 3, 2011 at 1:45 am
well, that would certainly explain it.
August 4, 2011 at 1:42 am
I can identify with this.
August 3, 2011 at 11:03 am
I am all for weddings, and all for love, but I find this so insensitive.
Listen, I’m all for mean insensitivity, especially when Brian can’t stop tweeting about what bitches we all are. And being that I am an insensitive cunty bitch:
You can find their wedding website and wedding blog easily by googling “hobo wedding”, where you can then come upon their WEDDING REGISTRY:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wedding/1FTOBBTLC605N
where you can still buy them a $179.00 self-cleaning cat litter box or an ipad.
But they did already get their $75 tea kettle.
hobo-chic!
I’m angriest at etsy for posting this. I understand that this couple may feel attacked at this point, however it was their choice to have it featured on etsy to begin with, and naive to think everyone was going to love it.
August 3, 2011 at 2:00 pm
i just took a look at their registry.
frankly i would feel mighty used as a person, if i were a guest to that wedding. first you have to fuel their weird wedding fantasy by entering into dressing in period costume. then you have to fork over more bucks to fuel what is obviously the continuation of that fantasy into their home life with retro cherry red appliances, etc.
if you want me to fork over a $75 wedding gift, i expect salmon mousse and champagne at the reception.
August 3, 2011 at 7:56 pm
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
August 3, 2011 at 8:25 pm
Hey Andy, “these are real people” too:
A woman stoned to death for falling in love
A video of two women buried up to their necks and stoned to death
A 13 year old stoned to death for being raped by her brother
Does that look like what your friends went through?
Grow the fuck up. No one who posts anything publicly has the right to expect unanimous positive reaction. You want that, post to a Flickr pool where only your friends can see it. Otherwise, the rules are the same for everyone. I don’t get to tell people to only say good things about this site. I don’t demand that no one be critical of what I do. And I don’t go to Amazon to shame people into removing bad reviews of my book by quoting fucking Shirley Jackson.
You and your friends continue to embarrass yourselves by appropriating the suffering of others.
August 3, 2011 at 10:44 pm
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
August 3, 2011 at 11:42 pm
These “real people” put their story out there on the internet, on a site viewed by millions of people. This is the reaction their story elicited. You don’t get to dictate how people react to the things you do.
August 2, 2011 at 1:48 pm
I’d give my right arm to half one-tenth your ability. Bravo.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 pm
a hobo would give their right arm for a meal and a warm place to sleep.
SO CUTE!!!!
August 2, 2011 at 3:46 pm
And most of the time, it was the barn. I guess that would go with the theme of their wedding, no?
What I found the most ludicrous, and I’m not entirely sure why (maybe it’s the hipster-ishness of it all) was the picture of the guy standing there with a pipe in his mouth.
Oh, and there was nothing humble or down to earth about this wedding. Looking at the pictures, there are dollar signs all over the damn place.
August 2, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Just the rental cost of the tents put them way over the cost of my wedding and reception. We got married at the courthouse and had lunch afterwards at a local Mexican place. My sister and I wore short dresses that my mom sewed up out of cotton. The end. I could not have asked for anything better and my sisters’ big weddings were horrible hot things with lots of drunks that cost my parents a fortune and don’t even ask me about my brother’s wedding-it was just as pretentious as this crap.
August 4, 2011 at 1:47 am
Best wedding I ever went to (apart from my own and I’m biased) was in a local church and the reception was in a carvery pub. I wish more people would do that rather than spending a fortune on wedding catering – it was January and we had a choice of roast beef, roast chicken or roast pork with roast potatoes and gravy. It was awesome! Also the groom was Ghanaian, so half the guests were too, and Ghanaians really know how to get a party going!
August 2, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Guests had a dinner choice of “beans in a can” or “dumpster surprise”.
August 2, 2011 at 2:05 pm
You can chuck grapes at the happy couple instead of rice, a la “The Grapes of Wrath”.
August 2, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Or to be true the ending of Grapes of Wrath, *spoiler alert* maybe the bride breastfed the “starving” guests.
August 2, 2011 at 2:38 pm
That’s what came to my mind, too, when I read the grapes thing.
I understand why they didn’t include that in the movie, but, holy crap, does that ever end the book on the most possible down note.
At least The Jungle ended with hope. Fantasy hope, sure, and hope we know never came to pass, but hope just the same.
August 2, 2011 at 6:12 pm
A lactard-hobo themed wedding…. catering provided by the bride in the barn? I’ll pass.
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Can we throw rocks at them instead?
August 2, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Make them menstrual moonstones and you’ve got yourself a deal!
August 2, 2011 at 6:51 pm
Or if you’re really into Steinbeck, “Of Mice and Men”.
August 3, 2011 at 7:44 am
Of Mice and Men? So…they have a large, mentally handicapped guy accidentally kill the bride half way through the wedding while the groom wears one gloves filled with lotion to keep his hand soft? The best man shoots the mentally handicapped guy at the reception instead of a toast. Damn, this wedding sounds awesome!
August 2, 2011 at 6:23 pm
are you making this up? Please say yes. Please?
August 3, 2011 at 6:05 am
I know quite a few people who grew up poor in the 1920′s-1960′s, and they vividly remember eating lard sandwiches.
This could be an interesting reception dinner.
August 2, 2011 at 1:50 pm
You NAILED it. I was completely horrified when I saw this. I was thinking
“thank god people who SUFFERED through the depression will most likely NEVER see this.”
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Yeah…you know…the people who were displaced from their homes and moved across country to be kept in virtual slavery on farms…owe my soul to the company store and what not…
August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
God, Hipsters have alot of time on their hands.
August 2, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Hey man, you’re just assuming they’re hipsters. They might merely be dumbfucks.
August 2, 2011 at 3:08 pm
The difference between the two being…?
August 2, 2011 at 3:16 pm
You mean those words aren’t synonyms?
August 2, 2011 at 3:17 pm
Hipsters are a special subdivision of dumbfucks who have a knack for bastardization and awkward senses of trendiness.
August 2, 2011 at 9:44 pm
Nah, being Depression-era themed, they’d have to be ‘bum-fucks.’
August 3, 2011 at 12:59 am
what’s the difference you ask?
hipsters are more self-referentially absorbed, while dumbfucks lack the ego involvement to be so.
just one opinion.
August 2, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Her/his grandmother actually assisted in this. Grandma Rose described the football sandwich idea as well as clothing design.
That means their family were hipsters before hipsters were cool. She’s third generation hipster.
August 2, 2011 at 2:28 pm
“I was homeless before the stock market crash of 29″
August 2, 2011 at 4:17 pm
“My family was jumping out of windows way before Black Friday.”
August 2, 2011 at 6:15 pm
Wow, I never knew my grandparents were so cool! Two room cabins for ten kids? Sharing a single pair of shoes with your sister? SO FUCKING AWESOME.
August 2, 2011 at 6:53 pm
“Glenn Miller was great before he went mainstream.”
August 2, 2011 at 2:34 pm
I cannot believe, even given their clueless starting point, that people could RESEARCH extreme poverty and not switch their idea to helping the hungry, perhaps by asking for donations as their gifts? What a pair of self-centered assholes.
August 2, 2011 at 2:37 pm
I am currently planning my wedding, and we are really feeling guilty about it considering that there is a famine in Somalia currently. So, we decided that instead of offering “guest favors” we are giving to a charity in the name of our guests and we are also giving a percentage of all the money we receive to the charity as well.
August 2, 2011 at 2:56 pm
This is a fabulous idea! Should hell ever freeze over, and/or the horsemen of the apocalypse gather and I get married, I’m absolutely doing this. I’ve got somewhere to live, food, clothes, and friends; why would I need presents!
Awesome way of thinking!
August 2, 2011 at 3:26 pm
I guess the Migrant Mother look is the new heroin chic?
I’m a fat, middle-class, suburbanite, and I still think this is crass beyond words.
August 2, 2011 at 6:01 pm
best comment ever, and this entire post from Etsy marks a very f-ing disturbing trend for the new “ownership” at the big E.
August 2, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Do you think Grandma Rose’s full name was Rose of Sharon?
August 2, 2011 at 3:26 pm
>_> im not quite sure how they researched this yet missed the total sense of poverty, hopelessness, or devestation of the era.
hobo= homeless.. not homeward bound
my grama lived through the era and she gets anxiety whenever the pantry isnt quite full enough or the dogs dish isnt full. she was one of the people who risked being shot or poisoned by sneaking onto farmlands and stealing food from crops just to get by.
most people these days dont drive by farm crops and say “quick stop the car im guna steal food” they just drive on by. im pretty sure the idiots who thought this was “cute” never experienced starvation other than getting hungry five minutes before dinner… pretty sure everyone had shoes too.
August 2, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Apparently the phrase “Depression Era” threw them off. In Dumbfuck Hipster Land the word “depression” must mean the opposite of what it means in here in Fat Slag Land.
August 2, 2011 at 8:52 pm
The thing is that they could have emulated the freedom of some ‘hobos’ of the 50′s and 60′s – the beat generation before the hippies came around. They were travelers by choice. Instead, they did this.
August 2, 2011 at 10:17 pm
i think you just hit on the part of whats so offensive about this for me.
the whole hobo thing how it was approached and researched the “styles and clothes” n shit. as if it was a culture of choice with a style and people had the OPTION to live that way.
people today have NO concept how bad things were then. my grama was speaking to me yesterday talking about her uncle being in the black market for stamps (for dummies, i don’t mean postage stamps). he gave her his ‘shoes’ stamp because she had none.
August 3, 2011 at 11:48 am
It was always my understanding that “hobo” referred to train-travelling migrants originating from the Hoboken, NJ railroad. But hey, that’s not what Wikipedia says…
August 2, 2011 at 1:50 pm
What’s next? A holocaust hoedown? For party games play hide and seek under the beds and in the closets!
Idiots.
August 2, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Pick your wedding ring out of a box full of gold teeth fillings!
Totes vintage.
August 2, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Oh Totes!
I’m going to start renting out my grandmother’s two-room house where she grew up with 10 siblings all piled up together. They weren’t poor! They were Depression-Era Hipsters!
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
So cool they were cold.
August 2, 2011 at 3:10 pm
My grandma really dug her Depression-Era childhood home – especially when the enormous Galveston roaches would drop down on her from the ceilings!
August 2, 2011 at 6:03 pm
anthropochick – my mom and aunt tell the same kind of stories about snakes in Virginia. we’re talking Appalachia poor
August 2, 2011 at 6:22 pm
My grandmother really dug living in the Depression Era too! …. literally lived in a dugout home in the ground during the Dust Bowl. Or maybe that was just a lifestyle “theme”.
August 2, 2011 at 9:17 pm
No, you’ve gotta upcycle those fillings to make the ring! Not to mention, using “old gold” is environmentally friendly.
August 2, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Famine in Africa after party.
August 2, 2011 at 2:20 pm
This is okay. You know hipsters won’t eat much anyway. Gotta keep that figure ya know. (I’ll eat their portion)
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Damn shame I am already married or else I would have a Holocaust-themed wedding. It wouldn’t bother my husband (named after a Holocaust survivor) or his family AT ALL.
August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Adorable personalized lampshades as table gifts!
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Am I going to hell because I laugh/cringe/laughed at this?
August 2, 2011 at 2:13 pm
*GASP*, you are a baaaad person. And I kind of laughed at that.
August 2, 2011 at 2:21 pm
Yes. And I will meet you there.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 pm
We were all headed there long before this. Enjoy Hell, Devils!
August 2, 2011 at 2:35 pm
As I German Jew, I have to say…I shouldn’t have laughed at that. But I did.
August 2, 2011 at 7:23 pm
I read this whole thread to see if anyone made a lampshade reference or if I was going to get to do it.
August 2, 2011 at 9:56 pm
yep. see you guys there!! Save me a seat overlooking the river of fire
August 2, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Renew your vows in front of the clerk, have your bouquet and jewellery taken for security and you can just leave your handbag over there. And don’t forget to hand in your shoes – you won’t need ‘em in the fancy showers !
Just writing that made me feel uneasy. *twitch*
August 2, 2011 at 5:31 pm
“Honey, it’ll be great! It’ll be like your grandfather was there!”
August 2, 2011 at 2:00 pm
I’m glad you said it first, because my thoughts were, “Next it’s what? A holocaust wedding? Runaway slave wedding? How about an Irish peasant wedding, and everyone can talk about starvation and if they think the potatoes will come in next year?
I realize we do romanticize the Depression here and always have, but seriously…this is tacky.
August 2, 2011 at 2:09 pm
Sadly, the slave wedding has been done.
http://jezebel.com/5820577/colonial+themed-wedding-included-authentic-all+black-servant-staff
http://jezebel.com/5821657/colonial-wedding-pictures-taken-down-those-involved-apologize
August 2, 2011 at 2:14 pm
I was going to post about this wedding. You know, it’s one thing to want a kind of an ‘Out of Africa’ wedding theme because you think the clothes looks cool (I mean, I look awesome in khaki and I love some good boots and a pith helmet) but it’s another thing when you get the wait staff in on your crap. I already had to do a depression-era wedding way back in the early 90s. Rich people had it. So very ironic.
August 2, 2011 at 2:20 pm
oh my fucking…what in satan’s name made them think this was okay!?!
August 2, 2011 at 2:21 pm
damienma: Not only did they have the waitstaff on it, they traveled from England to *drumroll please* SOUTH AFRICA to have it.
I think I’m going to hold my Imperial Japanese-themed wedding in Nanking.
August 2, 2011 at 3:29 pm
I just about literally rolled off my yuppie exercise-ball chair when I saw that.
August 2, 2011 at 7:01 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 9:24 pm
Movie guys, I was talking about the movie.
August 3, 2011 at 1:07 am
I got it, ensoul. And laughed sardonically.
August 3, 2011 at 5:52 am
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August 3, 2011 at 9:46 am
I read on etiquettehell.com about a Civil War-themed wedding that did indeed have an all-black waitstaff. Tacky beyond belief.
August 3, 2011 at 9:50 am
@thebluebells: Yes, they ought to know better. And you ought to know better than to make rape jokes.
August 4, 2011 at 7:04 am
Holy shit – what were these stupid people THINKING?
August 6, 2011 at 4:16 pm
It’s like when I had to attend a wedding for a friend at the Whitehouse of the Confederacy. She worked there as a historian, but that didn’t make me feel any less ashamed and mortified as I walked in dressed all fancy and ready to party.
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
I attended a wedding (of two white folks) in rural South Carolina held in the chapel of a restored slave village. It definitely had a hobo-like quality about it, especially when a rat ran through and ran over everyone’s feet right in the middle of the ceremony. I was still a broody teen at the time, or I would have tried to be more offended. Mostly I was just bored.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
Will the attire be concentration camp chic?
August 2, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Pin the star on the Jew?
August 2, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Finally, the one occasion for which this would be appropriate: http://www.regretsy.com/?s=anne+frank
August 2, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Well, why not? There’s already greeting cards for the occasion. (See “Despite Everything I still believe people are really stupid.” Yes, and tasteless.)
August 2, 2011 at 3:14 pm
I was thinking a Chernobyl reception – the flashing alarm lights could be the strobe lights for the dance floor, the fallout could be represented by a fog machine and glitter in the air, and the punch could be bright green. It would be totes unique and Russian.
August 2, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Kiiiiinda actually sounds like fun, if left out of context. Or hell, just be even tackier and sew an third arm onto the bridesmaids’ dresses.
And the bride wearing the giant vaginadress.
August 2, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Or they could just fly over and get married in Japan.
…too soon?
August 2, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Party at Ground Zero, a B movie starring you…
August 2, 2011 at 7:18 pm
NO! Chernobyl is clearly appropriate for a baby shower, not a wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Oh that will go nicely with my cancer themed wedding.
August 3, 2011 at 9:50 am
Sounds inspiring! I know the perfect theme song for that party.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqJTVfyH60E
August 2, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Not holocaust related, but I’m thinking should I ever get sucked into that horror known as “large wedding” I’m definitely replacing the chicken dance with hide-and-seek.
August 2, 2011 at 5:15 pm
Hell, I distinctly did not want shit like the chicken dance or the hokey pokey played at my wedding and it was anyway. I’m still pissed over that and it was 3 years ago. The damn macarena, too. I rolled with it because it was my grandparents’ doing and they’ve been more like my parents, but I was hoping for just one event where I didn’t have one or both of those bloody tunes.
August 2, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Oh, I always hide in the attic. No one ever looks there! It’s genius.
August 2, 2011 at 9:31 pm
How about a Jim Crow wedding where all the groomsmen are in black face and all the bridesmaids are dressed like Aunt Jemima. Help yourself to the separate-but-equal buffet of watermelon and fried chicken. Run back to the table while dodging police dogs and water hoses. It’ll be sooooo cute!
August 4, 2011 at 7:25 am
I’m hiding in the attic! Oh… that didn’t play out so well. Shit.
August 2, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Holy Hobos! Did they not have to read “The Grapes of Wrath” in school? How can you romanticize destitution? Only middle class white people would have this theme for their wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 1:52 pm
They need to re-enact the part where the one brother gets it in the nads. Forever.
August 2, 2011 at 1:54 pm
And then the bride can breast feed a dying man in front of her wedding guests. You know, to make her vows more meaningful and symbolic and shit.
August 2, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Just don’t dare giving him formula!
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
ONLY if he’s circumcised.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
I was just thinking: “I hope their invitations were printed on the pages of Grapes of Wrath. Particularly the sections where people die, Rose of Sharon’s afterbirth gets burned, and she has to breastfeed the dying man. FESTIVE! KITSCH!”
August 2, 2011 at 3:35 pm
You mean they didn’t eat the afterbirth?
August 2, 2011 at 4:52 pm
I thought it was tradition to make prints with the afterbirth and mail them out as thank you cards
August 2, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Yes, and they will lose their shit at anyone who dares criticize them, too!
“How DARE you say we aren’t being ‘sensitive’? We are remembering our forefathers in every sip of faux ditchwater gin and every fly we shoo with our vintage paper fans and every bite of delicious gourmet “hobo hash” we had delivered from that quaint little place in Williamsburg that’s only open on Tuesdays and Saturdays while the sparrows are singing. THAT is sensitive!!!”
August 2, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Check out the Facebook Regretsy page to see how they lost “their shit.”
August 3, 2011 at 9:17 am
oooo, I missed it, what happened?
August 2, 2011 at 2:24 pm
No but I did read “The Jungle.” I’m surprised the book didn’t smell like hobo honestly based on the story. Man talk about De-press-ing!
August 2, 2011 at 6:59 pm
I didn’t read the Grapes of Wrath, but I watched it in Film Studies along with other Depression-era films. I hated that period. I just couldn’t take the piling on of misery. I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been to actually live through it.
August 2, 2011 at 7:01 pm
And my Dad grew up poor – youngest of 10 and even he didn’t have it that bad. They didn’t have very much, but they had a roof over their heads and my grandmother always made sure they had food and clothes.
August 2, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Of course they had to read The Grapes of Wrath- ultra condensed version..
http://www.rinkworks.com/bookaminute/b/steinbeck.grapes.shtml
The Grapes of Wrath
By John Steinbeck
Ultra-Condensed by Samuel Stoddard
Tom Joad
Our farm has been taken away. Let’s go to California.
(They do. On the way, there are calamities, and people DIE, because this is the Great Depression when times were HARD, and it was a struggle just to hold on to one’s DIGNITY.)
THE END
August 5, 2012 at 9:25 pm
I have to say, as a middle-class white person, no. Only exceptionally dumb and insensitive people who were also middle-class and white would have this as the theme for their wedding.
If I had tried to go with this wedding theme, all of my middle-class white friends would gently have beaten the crap out of me in turns until I came to my senses.
August 2, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Wow…as someone who is poor…and comes from depression era sharecroppers, thank you Hellen for mocking these asshats.
August 2, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I’m with you. At the rate my life is going my wedding will look similar and it won’t be a theme. The people of the Great Depression would fly the biggest finger to this happy couple. Celebrating complete poverty and suffering because you think the fashion is cute is so wrong.
These stupid people think this is the only way they can have a unique, down-to-Earth wedding?
August 2, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Yeah, it’s one thing to have done some of the fashion – some of the clothes in the 30s were pretty cool – but to tie it in with “hobo-chic” (seriously, wtf?) and moonshine and bindles and all that is just bizarre. A girl I knew as a kid got married a year or so ago and they did a very vintage 1920s/30s thing and it was really simple, beautiful, and elegant without making a mockery of the hard times of anyone. And I find that amazing, since they definitely strike me as hipsters.
August 2, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Yeah, just fucking “Wow”. Did they make it authentic and serve cat tacos?
My step-dad took off at 12 years old to ride the rails. It was that, or go to the work farm for trying to steal a chicken. His brothers and sisters were starving, his mom couldn’t feed them all. When the farmer caught him, he was beaten so badly his older sister had to carry him home.
Poor kid made it all the way from Ohio to Texas without finding food. Some hobos felt sorry for such a young’un, and fed him a taco. My dad, a life long animal lover, cried for two days because he ate a cat taco to keep from starving to death.
Can you even image, a little kid, beaten up, traveling alone, and going four days without food? Even as adults, these hipster douchecanoes would never have survived it.
August 2, 2011 at 3:16 pm
This is the saddest thing I’ve read in a long time. Kudos to your stepfather for surviving it!
August 2, 2011 at 3:45 pm
August 2, 2011 at 5:54 pm
Well. I’m sad now.
August 2, 2011 at 7:13 pm
Sounds like Jean Valjean…That’s so sad…
August 2, 2011 at 4:21 pm
As someone who has actually been homeless, all I can say is “fuck hipsters”. I’m still recovering from debt I accrued while living on the streets and borrowing from every goddamn person I know.
August 3, 2011 at 1:19 am
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August 2, 2011 at 1:51 pm
So much for “women always marry up”.
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Don’t worry, I’m sure that they– I mean, their trust funds– shilled out $30k for the wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 5:23 pm
What’s cute is that the blurb she wrote about them mentions their share of shallow pockets… yet the description of what each of them does for a living seems to negate that. They both have decent, stable jobs. They might not be wealthy, but it sure doesn’t seem like they’re hurting financially.
August 2, 2011 at 10:42 pm
Shallow here meaning “superficial”. Like those jeans you buy, not realising the pocket’s just tacked on and useless. Like this couple’s sense of decency.
August 2, 2011 at 1:51 pm
But, like, during the depression there were heaps of poor people. It’s just too mainstream!
August 2, 2011 at 2:37 pm
But they did it in dreamy, creamy, vintage tones with historical accuracy! :::barfs:::
August 2, 2011 at 3:02 pm
And with photogs! Dreamy, creamy “antiqued” photos, worthy of a “Life” cover!
August 2, 2011 at 3:19 pm
I’ve begun to hate the word ‘creamy’.
August 2, 2011 at 3:38 pm
60s/70s style photography. Poor people certainly didn’t have acces to colour film in the 20s… so much for accuracy.
August 2, 2011 at 7:17 pm
And they used that God damn “vintage” filter! Nothing says, “I have no f3cking photography talent or abilities at all” like the God damn vintage filter!
Have I mentioned that I hate the “vintage” filter?
August 2, 2011 at 1:52 pm
I want to punch this woman (and her husband, for going along with what was probably her stupid fucking idea) in the cunt.
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Good luck punching her husband in the cunt. However I suspect is testicles are on display on the family mantle, because surely there are not two people who could actually come up with this crap. Otherwise, match made in hell.
This whole thing is a Satan sandwich with a side of Satan fries, to paraphrase one of our representatives.
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Oh, I fully suspect that he has his own upcycled, DIY hobo-chic, whimsicle vagina for punchin’.
August 2, 2011 at 2:32 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:08 pm
I bet he does have a cunt. I bet it is hand knitted from vintage wool found in an old barn, and hangs from a rough leather cord he pulled out of a pair of worn work boots he thinks a hobo may have worn.
August 2, 2011 at 2:16 pm
She probably got the idea from “iCarly.”
http://news.change.org/stories/were-not-laughing-nickelodeons-icarly-mocks-homeless
August 2, 2011 at 2:19 pm
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Sorry… I’m having html image posting derps.
August 2, 2011 at 2:40 pm
WOW. Spectacular cluelessness. Let’s mock the homeless, kids!
August 2, 2011 at 7:53 pm
My high school had people dress up for “school spirit days”, the only days you could be out of dress code. They did a hobo day, and a group of students came wearing dress code with cardboard signs around their necks saying something along the lines of “there are millions of homeless in the United States, it is not a joke and it is not cool”.
August 3, 2011 at 1:14 am
Were you on of those kids, Notthatproud?
Their parents should be really proud of them for standing up like that.
August 2, 2011 at 1:52 pm
I get the appeal of not wanting to dress up for your wedding, but that bride probably shouldn’t have chosen overalls.
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:29 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 4:01 pm
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August 3, 2011 at 2:35 pm
I am confused by the removal of my comment. Not only have I never seen removal before (except by red thumbs), I honestly and truly thought that it was a picture of two women. I support gay marriage (why shouldn’t gays and lesbians get nagged to marry by society like the rest of us?)and clearly stated that I was not being snarky in my comment. It appears that I was not the only who was confused, and I don’t think any of us were hostile,(see number of thumbs up CrossedPromise has) just surprised.
August 2, 2011 at 3:31 pm
It’s NOT????
August 2, 2011 at 3:36 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 6:33 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Yeah that’s not the bride that’s the husband, though I initially had the same thought!!
August 2, 2011 at 2:16 pm
I find it disturbing that they have the same haircut.
August 2, 2011 at 5:56 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 7:12 pm
but it was so cute when Brad Pit and Jennifer Aniston had the same haircut when they got married
August 2, 2011 at 8:07 pm
I can deal with a bunch of red thumbs down, but comment removed? And I’m seeing A LOT of them, I’m not trying to piss you off Helen/Bronc but this is a first for me. If i crossed some fuckery line I didn’t know about I’m sorry.
August 2, 2011 at 8:38 pm
Also, if all I did was piss off the people in the pic, well they can both collectively suck my “fun sized” dick.
August 2, 2011 at 10:11 pm
You have to have the same haircut when you’re mocking poverty- don’t you know hair cuts and styling takes money?
August 4, 2011 at 12:37 am
I cleaned up comments making fun of their weight and general appearance. I deemed them unnecessary to the discussion.
Sorry, it just got to be too much.
August 2, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Don’t forget, the bride has a twin.
August 2, 2011 at 2:39 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:42 pm
We’re gonna keep all the basketweavers on Etsy busy for YEARS.
August 2, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Yep, it’s going to have to be a pretty big handbasket for all of us!
August 2, 2011 at 6:11 pm
At this rate, I might have to make my own..
August 2, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Something tells me these hipsters think they’ve been doing it before it was even a “thing”. Little do they know…
August 2, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Don’t forget to put up all your guests in a Hooverville Shanty town! It isn’t a hobo themed wedding until someone gets tetanus from the “door” or dysentery from shitting in communal trenches!
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Ha! They put them up at the Sheraton.
August 2, 2011 at 2:12 pm
When I saw that, I was really pissed that they weren’t true to the theme. Stupid fuckers.
August 2, 2011 at 7:40 pm
That was the icing on the proverbial hobo cake…er, pie in this case.
August 2, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Someone on Facebook said that was the most expensive hotel in the area. I’ve stayed at the Desmond, which is actually IN Malvern, and I’m guessing it was nicer. Sheratons in the US can be iffy.
August 2, 2011 at 3:23 pm
I hear pinworms are trendy in parts of Hipsterdom too.
August 2, 2011 at 3:59 pm
I see what you did there
August 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm
There was a ” Colonial Africa “wedding I read about last week. Just as horrifying.
August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
OMG yes I read about that….truly horrifying.
August 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm
I’m betting there was at least one old great grand grandmother who lived during the Depression who RSVPd with F**k you.
August 2, 2011 at 1:54 pm
I hope so.
August 2, 2011 at 2:05 pm
I would have, regardless of age.
August 2, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Hell, my grandmother would have RSVPd with that. She got married in an office workers uniform during WWII, with the only jewelry being a string of biting fleas around her collar. She was ecstatic that she got to wash her hair for it.
August 2, 2011 at 3:32 pm
I would have.
I was a history major. Focused on 19th and 2oth century U.S. history.
August 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm
I think that is absolutely horrid. The idea of having a very different themed wedding is cute, but it is just a mockery.
Talk about fuckery. :I
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
yeah, why couldn’t they have called like a 30′s themed wedding, or a “old time” wedding..or maybe a farm themed wedding..geez.
August 2, 2011 at 4:03 pm
I was thinking either farm themed or country.
August 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm
I was trying to write something clever but having been a “hobo”, I find this utterly moronic and offensive. Yes. Of all things, this is what offends me. I can’t wait until they try to make AIDS themed weddings or genocide themed weddings. Societal issues are soooo adorable!
August 2, 2011 at 1:57 pm
I wish my period of homelessness was so elegantly catered.
August 2, 2011 at 2:23 pm
I’m sorry that happened to you. My dad’s quasi homeless (he gets disability and half his pension but it’s not enough for him to live on. He’s couch surfing right now and eats what he can fish. It kills me that I don’t make enough money to support him. Anyway…pity party, that way —->) and I grew up poor. These idiots have no idea what being poor is really like. I hope one day that they do.
August 2, 2011 at 2:38 pm
I lucked out and completely by chance met a wonderful person two years ago (who is my soon-to-be husband) that helped me get back on my feet.
And I can guarantee you, we’re not having a hobo-themed wedding.
(Also, much love to your dad! I know how hard it is to break out of a cycle like that. The worst part is people who have never been in that situation and don’t understand what it’s like. “Oh, you get disability? YOU HAVE IT EASY!” Yeah, it’s a cake walk. That’s why I fish, not because I have to but because it’s my fucking hobby.)
August 2, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Truth is if they had donated half their money (as spent on clothes alone) to a homeless shelter, it would have impacted more people.
They could have even had their reception in a soup kitchen.
August 2, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Congrats on your upcoming nuptials! I’m glad you’re back on your feet.
I don’t tell most people that my dad’s on disability because they’re judgmental. They often assume it’s laziness or that ‘he doesn’t want a job’. He worked construction his whole life and is physically unable to work. He finally got the hip surgery he needed and surprise surprise, his hip replacement has been recalled. It’s a majorly FML situation. Through it all he’s upbeat though. He has some seriously amazing friends who keep him from living in his truck at least.
March 18, 2012 at 4:03 pm
My grandmother-in-law slipped a disk nearly two decades ago because an obese patient in the nursing home she worked at fell out of their bed and, being the only person there who could help, she tried to lift him back into his bed. She had to quit and just got disability this year. She was never homeless but they definitely suffered from her not being able to work. Disability is not a magical check that you can just sign up for. It’s sad that people equate it with laziness these days.
August 2, 2011 at 4:14 pm
stephsparkle, EXACTLY! Thanks for saying that!
August 2, 2011 at 6:16 pm
@Spocktopus: Congrats! I spent a couple years being homeless, or living out of seedy motels when I could afford to, and a few more years couch surfing. I’m just finally getting my life back together, with the help of some friends and my amazing boyfriend. Hearing about someone else making it is really uplifting right now.
Good luck!
August 2, 2011 at 6:33 pm
Ahh..yes. Nothing screams elegance like that roll of toilet paper tied with rope, hung around the back of a car headrest. Oh yeah, just having toilet paper was living high on the hog!
August 2, 2011 at 1:57 pm
ETSY wedding slumming. You’re doing it wrong!
August 2, 2011 at 1:59 pm
I concur. Where is this line going to be drawn? Maybe the invitations were printed on a page from the Diary of Anne Frank.
August 2, 2011 at 4:13 pm
My mom grew up in projects, getting passed back and forth between her dad (and his second wife) and her mother (and the girlfriend du jour). Wherever she was living, she got the shit beat out of her by all adults present (grandma especially enjoyed watching her girlfriends beat mom), and from the age of 8 she was cooking, cleaning and raising her three younger siblings and her one older siblings.
So while she was never technically HOMELESS, she was poor as shit. And to this day she gets really freaked out and angry if we don’t have enough food in the house to last for like a month. She actually got mad at me once because I asked her to stop coming over to my apartment and leaving sugary drinks and snacks.
I just can’t imagine thinking “Let’s glamorize poverty by spending lots of money to make a pseudo homeless wedding, but make it more posh!”
August 2, 2011 at 4:23 pm
It’s like in Zoolander and this is the Derelicte line of weddings.
The only difference is that movie was parody and this is real life. Those are two lines that should never, ever cross.
August 2, 2011 at 8:48 pm
I grew up pretty poor, not homeless but poor. Whenever i start to get stressed now about money now i feel an overwhelming need to stock the pantry – irrational need… it can be overflowing with canned goods but i feel the need to get more…. childhood – leaves you with weird addictions for life….
August 2, 2011 at 10:51 pm
My grandmother was born in ’33. She still saves plastic forks and used containers, and even has been known to wash off styrofoam party plates and keep them for reuse later, just in case. She’s got a serious packrat syndrome from growing up during the Depression. And the food she makes! She “stretches” things even when she doesn’t need to, like putting baked beans and canned spaghetti together because the sauces are close to the same colour.
August 4, 2011 at 1:37 pm
I’m a food hoarder – but we didn’t grow up poor. I’m not sure where it comes from. My only theory is residual insecurity from losing a house when I was 3 (after taking out a mortgage and moving hundreds of miles, my parents found the house was a disguised wartime hut and completely worthless).
Amazingly we got through that without ever being homeless, but we shifted from house to borrowed house for a while, and little kids pick up stuff like that.
Howbeit, I feel happiest when I have about 4 weeks’ worth of food in the house. I’m glad I’m not the only one!
August 2, 2011 at 1:53 pm
there is no way to mock this that is any greater mockery than itself.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 6:38 pm
We can always dump kerosene on them anyway. Call it Vintage Delousing.
August 2, 2011 at 2:13 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 3:52 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 3:54 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Fuck. Trying to fix my fail again
August 2, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Italics invasion !!!!
August 2, 2011 at 4:27 pm
I’m sorry. I have HTML fail. Never again, I swear.
August 2, 2011 at 10:43 pm
I was wondering about that…I thought it was my lame-ass computer at first!
August 2, 2011 at 1:54 pm
My grandma would SHIT HERSELF if she saw this. Anyone who actually had to live dirt-ass poor during the depression absolutely knew that you didn’t want to be seen as poor. People might know, but you had your DIGNITY and PRIDE even if you had NOTHING ELSE.
Excuse me. I have to go fume.
August 2, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Truth. That and these sorts of themed weddings would not be invented for multiple decades to come.
August 2, 2011 at 2:00 pm
Yeah, my great grandfather’s brother had to live in a box car with his 13 children… this sounds like a joke, but it’s real… My great grandfather became the town drunk and died 30 years later of liver failure because he couldn’t deal with the fact he was unable to support his family…
August 2, 2011 at 6:38 pm
The story of your great grandfather’s brother is tragic, as is, that many American men and women are living in poverty, right here, right now, in 2011. Many American children go to bed hungry, every night.
August 2, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Stay here and fume–you’re among kindred spirits.
August 2, 2011 at 2:41 pm
Word. Mine had a slightly crazy mother on top of financial woes so they moved if great grandma suddenly decided she hated the wall paper. They had to rent out every room in the house until they were eventually living in the attic. Then they would move again and start the whole process over. Fun times.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Most of the comments in the thread are gushing about how fucking cute this wedding was with the brides sister saying how magical her twin is… I clicked on her store… I’m preeeeeetty sure she was featured in Regretsy for her lady pillow. Ring any bells anyone?
This kind of thing clearly illustrates the clusterfuck that is the hipster takeover of etsy.
http://www.etsy.com/listing/46351543/yes-she-can-can-humpastuff-plush-pillow
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
I still think that thing looks like a Silent Hill end boss.
August 2, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Best comment ever!
August 2, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Pyramid Head’s ex-girlfriend?
August 2, 2011 at 2:05 pm
The sister also says how one of the brides friends came in regular clothes and she stuck out like a sore thumb. The comment drips with disdain. Seriously? You shun someone for not coming in costume to your offensive wedding party? MAYBE she was too poor to buy some scarily expensive vintage depression era wanna-be outfit off Etsy like the rest of you twatwaffles…
August 2, 2011 at 2:09 pm
I’d rather believe she showed up in support of the couple, but dressed normal in a subtle protest to how stupendously fucking stupid the whole wedding was.
August 2, 2011 at 2:45 pm
If I had been invited I would’ve worn something in protest too but gone the other way with it. I’d make a dress out of my cleaning rags, spend the week before the wedding in the wilderness (in my new dress) hunting my own food with a butterknife and befriending a scraggly dog to follow me. My plus 1 date would be a guy I found panhandling on the street so he could enjoy a decent meal.
August 2, 2011 at 2:09 pm
It’s takes a lot of cash to look so poor.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 pm
I know, right? The comments are all, “Oh,how great that you didn’t have an over-expensive, commercial wedding!” She bought half the stuff from Etsy. That adds up.
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
”Introducing the first ever erotic pillow art, Humpastuff Plush” Someone never saw Dorothea Tanning’s work from…the 70′s.
http://www.dorotheatanning.org/images/work_image/70.5.03rainydaycanapethumb.jpg
August 2, 2011 at 3:20 pm
What the hell is this thing? Seriously, it looks like a mediocre Knoll chair with a tumor.
August 2, 2011 at 6:36 pm
these people dont know any more who dorothea tanning is than they understand that poverty is a problem. they havent seen it, they dont know it. besides, they invented everything. ie: not just menstrual art, but menstruation.
August 2, 2011 at 2:23 pm
Yep, I saw that too.
August 2, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Holy carp…I know some gay men who would KILL for one of those just for the camp value…
August 2, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Why, yes! You’re right!
http://www.regretsy.com/2011/04/23/weekend-flashback-no-head-for-you/
August 2, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Yep. I remember many fun comments about the snatch pocket.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Sounds like a White Trash Hootenany!
-_-;; Why do people like that breed?
August 2, 2011 at 9:58 pm
Oh, honey. I live in an extremely rural part of Arkansas. I can assure you that even Ozark white trash (which is its own breed) isn’t this tacky…..
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Why stop with Depression Era? Why not the middle ages, when the class system was in full effect? A little bubonic plague is just what this wedding needs! Dysentery is a popular theme you could use as well. Beat your serfs, bed their wenches and watch out for Mel Gibson in blue face paint, looking for retribution. Congrats on your big big cupcakey day!
August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
hahahahaha bubonic plague wedding day! sounds like a great time!
August 2, 2011 at 2:47 pm
There are SCA weddings:
http://www.kelthaven.org/wedding/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZG46SoUZ_4
August 2, 2011 at 4:25 pm
Ours was an SCA wedding – but it was something we already did. We were PO (the joke was, “too poor for the other o and the r”) and it was just about the only way we could afford to have a halfway nice wedding, where most of our friends could come (they’d be there anyway). We just asked a friend to officiate at an event we were already attending, nobody needed to make new clothes for it, though I loaned some of my existing outfits to my mom and grandma.
My dad wore an outfit from one of his historic music performances and provided the music, my mom took pictures, my friend Nikki made the cake and surprised me with bouquet. Our big wedding present was a set of toasting glasses and the cake cutting set. It was a potluck.
Oddly, the hobo chic wedding kind of seemed to be wanting to evoke that kind of community, without actually doing so.
August 2, 2011 at 5:08 pm
When we were active in the SCA, we had a 5th wedding anniv./ handfasting. Everyone came in already made outfits they had and the ones who didn’t have any, wore loaner garb.
We cooked the food and a friend took the photos. Even handmade the invitations myself. And that was that, spent maybe $100 on everything.
Our actual wedding itself was in front of a Justice of the Peace in the courthouse. And dinner at Golden Corral.}:P
That was 18 years ago this Thursday.
August 3, 2011 at 4:47 am
@Strangebaby – the comment regarding their attempt to evoke community makes sense to me. Our wedding was a ‘folky’ wedding, which makes sense as we are folk musicians and most of our friends are folk musicians. We had it in our backyard, my mum made my dress, people brought food instead of presents, and our musician friends bought their instruments. The session started about ten minutes after the vows had been said! (This will surprise no one who knows musicians.)
Like your wedding – it was a tradition which arose from our communities, which makes for a very natural, lovely day. This type of themed wedding, starting as it does from a really appalling choice of subject matter, could not have been natural, and was always going to be, at the very least, tacky and offensive.
August 2, 2011 at 6:20 pm
It’s not so much the themed wedding, its the dressing up in poor-drag that’s a little off-putting.
August 2, 2011 at 10:27 pm
But in SCA weddings, and Victorian/Edwardian themed weddings, and even that bizarre mess in South Africa where they wanted to be Meryl Streep, the participants were pretending to be members of the wealthy fortunate class, not the paupers.
August 2, 2011 at 3:39 pm
the best part is whoever gets to play the role of “lord of the Manor” has first fuck with the bride! Huzzah!
August 2, 2011 at 9:11 pm
As has been mentioned, SCA does Middle Ages weddings a lot. I’m in the SCA, and if I were to get married (likely to my wonderful boyfriend, another Scadian) it would be an SCA wedding, as that’s where most/all of our friends are. I bet we wouldn’t even reach $500, and that’s counting food and the garb to be made (mostly by me, since I’m lazy and don’t have a lot of garb at the moment anyway).
August 2, 2011 at 10:00 pm
My friends had a medieval them for their wedding. No plague, lice, people dropping dead at 30 of old age, bad teeth (except his brother) or inquisition.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Part of me is wondering if they just came up with the most deranged shit they could think of in a transparent bid to try to appear on OBB.
August 2, 2011 at 7:34 pm
It’s not that hard to appear on OBB, and I hope that OBB would have a bit more taste than that (Offbeat Bride, for the uninitiated).
August 2, 2011 at 8:28 pm
I really think Ariel does have more sense than that… I admit, when this popped up on here, I immediately clicked over there with my fingers crossed and hoped I wouldn’t see it. I didn’t. Crisis averted.
August 3, 2011 at 1:56 am
Though we may see a post on the shitstorm. Hell, I’ll submit it.
August 3, 2011 at 11:48 pm
Are you on the Tribe?
http://offbeatbride.ning.com/forum/topics/hobo-chic-wedding-controversy?xg_source=msg_com_forum&id=1190964%3ATopic%3A2403439&page=1#comments
August 4, 2011 at 11:26 am
http://offbeatbride.com/2011/08/hobo-wedding
Ok it’s on there. Knew it was a matter of time.
August 3, 2011 at 2:51 am
I appeared on OBB. It wasn’t that hard, and I didn’t need to do anything offensive. I jsut needed to wear purple and have a cake with skulls on.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
“We can walk just fine, but thought, what the hey… let’s act like we’re paralyzed and get married in wheelchairs! It’ll be a hoot!” Morons.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
yah…which reminds me of one of the other big problems at the time POLIO!
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Wow. This is horrible. I have nothing funny to say other than that I hate people. “We shared a single bean in matrimony.” Fuck you buddies.
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Also, did they spend their honeymoon if a cardboard box? I missed that.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Well, it’s an interesting idea. But coming from a long line of [Lutheran] clergy, I can hear multiple generations of ancestors whirling in their graves at the very thought.
Also, the question “why would anyone want to fake being destitute? at a WEDDING?” is jammed too firmly into my craw to be easily dislodged.
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Most people save destitution for after the wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Hahaha! Oh, the truth of that!
August 2, 2011 at 2:50 pm
They spent substantial cash to fake being destitute.
They required their guests to spend money to fake being destitute.
I have one dark suit. If someone dies I wear a dark tie. If someone gets married I wear a bright tie.
August 2, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Is it me, or does that guy in the overalls look like Vincent from EUREKA? Maybe Hurley from LOST? And, did someone pee on his overalls before he put them on?
August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
He probably pissed them himself when he realized what he was taking part in.
August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
If that’s the case, maybe they should just start planning the Potato Famine themed annulment.
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Over/under on the marriage? 3 years tops when he sees the credit card bills putting him in actual destitution.
August 2, 2011 at 6:11 pm
Comment removed
August 2, 2011 at 6:32 pm
Comment removed
August 3, 2011 at 1:21 am
When I read Vincent, my brain immediately supplied “Edgar-Bug from ‘Men in Black.’” Then it went, “oops, wrong Vincent.”
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
My great-grandmother’s stories from surviving in that era were never so whimsicle… :\
August 2, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Oh, I don’t know. My 90-yr-old father has some real knee-slapping tales about what his family had to do to survive the Great Depression. What a pity he couldn’t have attended this lovely themed wedding! I’m sure he would have had some choice remarks for the clueless couple.
You know, I bet someone could havea really cute wedding using the Bataan Death March as a theme!
August 2, 2011 at 2:42 pm
Trail of Tears? Those Indians had cute moccasins.
August 2, 2011 at 3:38 pm
I’m seeing a Wounded Knee pinata.
August 2, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Maybe a Custer’s last cake stand?
August 2, 2011 at 6:24 pm
I don’t know, Custer strikes me as more of a pie-guy.
But maybe that’s just because he sounds like custard.
August 2, 2011 at 6:32 pm
The wedding favors can be blankets pre-loaded with small pox!
August 3, 2011 at 1:26 am
I was too sober to make this joke earlier: Holocaust Wedding, invite 6 million friends. Mazel Tov!
I will go rot in hell forever now.
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
This woman actually says they “busted [their] butts off” for months to prepare for this wedding. And she described the outfits as “hobo-chic.”
When will the idiocy end?
August 2, 2011 at 2:17 pm
I like that they had to work hard to make everything look like it was old, used, ruined, and dirty…
August 3, 2011 at 9:55 am
Next it will be “hobopunk”.
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Those were the fucking good ol’ days, man.
August 2, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Also yay, now I’m not ruining things anymore!
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
I am surprised at the lack of cardboard boxes in these photos.
August 2, 2011 at 1:56 pm
And boom. Someone linked us. Queue butthurt.
August 2, 2011 at 6:26 pm
I’m still waiting for the flounces.
August 2, 2011 at 10:25 pm
August 2, 2011 at 1:57 pm
but they called firsties!
August 2, 2011 at 1:57 pm
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
No, you’re not. You didn’t plan this wedding, or choose it to go on the front page.
August 2, 2011 at 2:07 pm
That makes you third worst, which is ok because no one remembers who comes in third. You’re safe.
August 2, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Stylistically, some of it I like. A lot of the decor is cute and the bride looks really nice in her dress. That being said, the lighthearted glamorization of homelessness and a dark time in America’s history is unconscionable. The aesthetics I can get behind, but not the intent.
August 2, 2011 at 6:46 pm
As “1930′s” themed it’s cute. As “hobo-chic” it takes a hard left into bad-taste-burg. Maybe it is more “authentic” to include the bad bits, but this is not a museum, its a wedding; and the pairing of “dirt-poor” and “happiest day of our lives” is weird at best, insensitive at worst.
August 2, 2011 at 3:13 pm
I feel like there might have even been ways to like the *style* of the wedding without going all out to make it hobo-themed and such.
August 2, 2011 at 3:57 pm
Yeah, to have a theme of 30s aesthetics could be nice… especially if you tried to do some of the things people needed to do at the time, like make the wedding clothes and food. Then you could learn about history by doing, *and* save money (admittedly, it would take a hell of a lot of time and energy).
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Reading about everything she bought for the wedding and it sounds like she paid alot of money to make a wedding look like she’s poor.
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
You know, she really feels like she can relate to the whole “Depression” thing too, because there was that whole summer after her secondhand iguana died where she felt sad every, like, three days. And that was the same time that the direct deposit from her parents’ trust fund got screwed up, and she totally didn’t know how she was going to pay for her next order of gluten-free vegan cookies. So the theme really was perfect for them in so many ways.
August 2, 2011 at 6:49 pm
The iguana probably committed suicide.
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
It’s fun to be poor!
You know, as long as it’s just pretend and I still get my trust fund.
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
My great-grandfather was a “hobo”…his mother used to beat him severely and when he was 12 he ran away from home and as he put it “rode the rails”. I didn’t realize there was such a pop-cultural significance to escaping child abuse and being homeless.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
WELCOME TO ETSY!
August 2, 2011 at 2:02 pm
here here.
August 2, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Yeah… I ran off the second I was legally emancipated and bounced from shitty, temporary housing situation to shitty, temporary housing situation, sometimes breaking the law to feed myself.
It just doesn’t get any more totes adorbs than that, amirite?
August 2, 2011 at 2:32 pm
O for sure I was totes adorbs losing weight like crazy living alone at 17 because all I ate was rice! It’s so chic to be jobless and poor!
Maybe when I get married I’ll use that time in my life as my theme! I’ll put the theme right above my registry info for Crate&Barrel on my invites.
August 2, 2011 at 5:28 pm
OMG but I bet you were super skinny and totes adorbs and ugh! I just wish I could lose weight like you! OMG I’m so jealous you skinny bitch!
LOLOMGBBQ!!1! J/K! Hugs!
August 2, 2011 at 9:41 pm
Don’t worry DesertBlooms. It’s almost 10 years later and I’m chubby chunks mcplus-size pants these days. I’m not hobo-chic wedding rich or anything, I can just sort-of afford to not live on rice and buy icecream when it’s on sale.
August 2, 2011 at 3:23 pm
Jecca – nice response on your blog. Thank you for pointing out the destruction of the vintage quilts for table runners – I cringed when I read about all that carefully constructed history being rent apart. To this day, I refuse to watch “Titanic” because they destroyed actual historic vintage garments in the shipwreck scene.
August 2, 2011 at 3:44 pm
Seconded.
August 2, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Wait- people READ that? O.O
Thank you! Also, I didn’t know that about Titanic… not that I really needed a reason to dislike it, mind.
August 2, 2011 at 4:05 pm
I read about the quilt table runners and buntings and I wondered why my sister and I spent weeks repairing my grandmother’s quilts. We could have cut them up for table decorations!
August 2, 2011 at 4:32 pm
as a former curator of textiles, I cry inside about those quilts. There is a rich and fascinating history to be learned from vintage quilts.
August 2, 2011 at 4:40 pm
I got so pissed off when I first learned of that. There’s so much we could’ve seen and learned from those vintage and antique garments. I think the fashions of the time period were beautiful and it was a real tragedy to see them destroyed like that.
August 2, 2011 at 6:04 pm
The very thing that screams that these folks have no clue or respect for actual history. Unfortunately they probably didn’t have much to go by, due to the changing of historical facts from year to year, and fortunately, because they have right to do their wedding anyway they want to, no matter how wrong they may be.
August 2, 2011 at 10:04 pm
The quilts pissed me off as well. I am insanely jealous of those who can quilt. We don’t throw quilts out in this house. They just kind of dissolve after awhile or end up grafted into another blanket or garment.
August 3, 2011 at 10:12 am
Oh, man. After struggling to keep my it together as the comments brought back memories of my own family’s Depression stories, the quilt thing just did me in. My gramma lovingly made quilts that I would give my eye teeth to have today. If I discovered some privileged brats shredding her work for their wedding decor, I’m afraid I’d go berserk.
August 4, 2011 at 6:33 am
My husband’s Gramm made us a quilt for our wedding gift – she’s been hand-quilting most of her life, and when she showed me some of her finished ones I was amazed at the time and skill and love that went into them.
If anyone *ever* cut up our quilt, I would cut *them*. Just thinking about it pisses me off.
August 2, 2011 at 9:30 pm
i clicked over to yr blog.
GOOD JOB.
August 2, 2011 at 9:39 pm
Thank you!
August 3, 2011 at 2:54 am
ps. i shouldve said that i clicked over to yr blog too. i didnt properly wade thru the previous replies. i did want people to know they could click over to yr blog via yr name, so i posted it. hope it helps.
August 2, 2011 at 1:58 pm
It looks to clean to be a “hobo” wedding. Looks like trailer trash wedding to me.
I hope they don’t make babies.
August 2, 2011 at 6:52 pm
The trailer trash would have had the decency to have their wedding at the nearest White Castle.
August 2, 2011 at 1:59 pm
And then their parents used their timeshare at the Hilton to pay for their glamorous honeymoon in the Mediterranean.
The next morning they woke up with bed bugs in their clothes from an undetected hotel-wide breakout. A sign on the doorknob conveniently read ‘Irony.’
August 2, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Maybe they’ll un-ironically lose their jobs after they get married. Then they can actually BE poor! How romantic!
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
I can’t wait for the baby shower though. I wonder if they’ll theme it even more retro, they’re going Biblical. Exodus baby! “So we, like, read the bible, not the King James but the Squire Andrew version, you’ve probably never heard of it, and during our research we came across Exodus. And we though, how whimsicle and fun this would be. Everyone will bring their first born children and all the men will dance around the room with upcycled bamboo swords, striking them down”. Ugh.
August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
My gift would be a baby’s mobile depicting the plagues. All of the frog and flies would be drawn like Hello Kitty characters!
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
I see Goatse-styled unhealable boils too! Oh this would be perfect!
August 2, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Someone has already made a Plagues of Egypt item for children:
August 2, 2011 at 3:47 pm
The one on the bottom makes it look like they were beset by a plague of those squeaky stress clowns whose eyes bug out when you squeeze them.
August 2, 2011 at 6:38 pm
My dad thought it would be hilarious to get this “Bag of Plagues” http://www.partycity.com/product/passover+bag+of+plagues+10ct.do?sortby=ourPicks&size=all&from=Search&navSet=passover
to use for Passover Seders. After the fourth glass of Manechevwitz “wine” this excellent prop makes its way out to illustrate a story otherwise dulled by an overall theme of oppression and slavery.
To fully appreciate and enjoy such things one must possess a good sense of jew-mor.
August 2, 2011 at 9:46 pm
I am getting that for my nephew, who is Jewish. (His Dad is Jewish, my sister is an athiest.)
August 2, 2011 at 10:17 pm
Wow. A plague of clowns, I don’t remember reading about that one. God must have been really pissed.
August 2, 2011 at 10:30 pm
Well, they didn’t have Amway back then.
August 3, 2011 at 1:25 am
I don’t remember a plague of clowns in Exodus.
August 4, 2011 at 1:59 am
Even the Old Testament god draws a line at plagues of clowns.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Last I checked the word “hobo” had nothing to do with being homeward bound. The word comes from the men that went around looking for work on farms and they were called hoe boys, thus hobo. Damn hipsters…
August 2, 2011 at 2:50 pm
You expect anyone these days to do any real research?
August 2, 2011 at 2:52 pm
After much research (I googled it), hobo was also a term used for soldiers that were “homeward bound” from the American Civil War (1860 to 1865). This is according to Urban Dictionary which you know is truth itself.
So not only did the romanticize a terrible period in history, they romanticized the wrong one period.
August 2, 2011 at 6:38 pm
I just learned the derivation of the term hobo at the official Hobo Museum in Britt, Iowa, and like GPepper says, it’s from the back-breaking work many of them did–when they could. Stupid hipsters.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
I understand the idea of non-materialism…I think that’s great. I think keeping materialism out of your wedding if you choose to have it that way is even better. It saves time, money and stress and I have been to some truly gorgeous low-no budget weddings.
But this…This is none of those things. They probably spent more to get this hobo fest together than the weddings I’ve been to in my adult life combined.
I understand themed weddings too. But there is a level of tact and class that is so easily tossed to the side when you bring in a theme. Celebrated being ‘homeward bound’. Make your wedding reminiscent of a ‘simpler time’ by keeping things simple.
But Jesus Christ, don’t dance around on the grave of Woody Guthrie and say it’s an homage.
August 2, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Agreed, there really doesn’t seem to be anything simple about this wedding at all.
August 2, 2011 at 5:47 pm
But, the bean! The single bean! What could be more simple and pure than that?!
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
You know, this would have been a beautiful wedding if it wasn’t for all the hobo overtones/clowns/overalls.
Everybody wants to be poor yet nobody wants to be poor.
August 2, 2011 at 10:32 pm
That reminds me of something Paul Mooney once said… something I don’t think I can bring myself to type out.
August 2, 2011 at 11:07 pm
Way to catch my reference!
August 2, 2011 at 2:45 pm
Exactly. I think people often spend way too much on weddings, but spending a ton of money to make it look like you didn’t spend money is fucking ridiculous.
I read a lot of wedding blogs since I’m a florist, and I’ve seen a lot of simple, country-theme outdoor weddings that were beautiful. They really could have gone this way and had a similar feel to it without being insensitive assholes.
August 2, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Sadly, I predict that a lot of very low budget weddings are already going on for non-hipsters. And will continue for some time. Which makes this fuckery all the more obnoxious.
August 2, 2011 at 9:15 pm
I get furious when I see all the wedding-themed reality shows where the bride’s budget is enough to buy a brand new car (or a house), and I think about people who do not have a car, or a house, or enough to eat.
And then I see these hipster fuckers creaming themselves on how quaint their bullshit “hobo-chic” wedding is, but it’s still all about showing off–but masking the ostentation in vintage poverty.
August 2, 2011 at 9:35 pm
if yr not being materialistic, you dont house yr guests at the sheraton.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
Oh, no I thought the hobo clown picture was something HK added to this. Oh no oh no they did not have that as actual decoration.
August 2, 2011 at 2:04 pm
Wait….seriously? That was real? I just assumed that was a bit of added fuckery. That does it. I’m done with people.
August 2, 2011 at 2:24 pm
I thought it was April’s touch as well. But if it’s authentic then I suppose I can totally go for a good ol’ southern style plantation wedding for myself and my partner. Little mammy figurines as table decorations, bouquets hanging from nooses, whipping the guests as they come through the door?
August 2, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Don’t forget randomly disappearing guests as they’re “sold off” to plantations far away…
August 2, 2011 at 3:36 pm
Oh, what a cute parlor game! “Sorry, Buffy – you drew the short straw! You’ve been sold “Down the River! Buh-bye, now!”
Now go sit in the corner and read “Pudd’nhead Wilson” until you come to your senses.
August 2, 2011 at 2:01 pm
They had popcorn in paper bags and peanuts in little burlap sacks, awww how quaint!
If they REALLY wanted a cliche ass hobo wedding they would have had hooch in paper bags, people in burlap sacs (o wait, that was the maid of honour in custom burlap overalls) and beans in a can fresh out of the fire!
Fucking hell… some people have no shame
August 2, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Better, Jamaica Ginger extract in bags … BEST if you could get real TOCP for it and give everybody Jake Leg.
August 2, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Thank you! I couldn’t remember Jake Leg. I was stumped. That would be a true party favor here.
August 2, 2011 at 2:21 pm
I had to Wikipedia the exact additive that was the neurotoxin in Jamaica Ginger extract.
August 2, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Most hobos take months to plan their weddings— its always worth the amount of work tho because they always turn out to be super cute. I hope someone was playing a harmonica with an overturned hat at the gift table.
August 2, 2011 at 5:53 pm
15 months, to be exact.
August 2, 2011 at 2:02 pm
I’m not sure who I’m more annoyed at, the people who put this wedding on or the people commenting about how ‘creative’ and ‘awesome’ it is.
August 2, 2011 at 2:05 pm
I blame Etsy for putting it in the front page. The commenters can’t help themselves, they’ve been trained to only respond to palettes.
August 2, 2011 at 2:07 pm
The commenters still need a boot to the head.
August 2, 2011 at 3:03 pm
And one for Jenny and the Wimp!
August 2, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Yeah, I read a few of the comments and nearly threw up the wonderful non-vegan gluten, dairy, and cruelty-filled cupcakes I made for myself.
August 2, 2011 at 2:02 pm
Get your wedding photos done during a real dust bowl storm! Watch as your make believe lives are ruined. Live off of boot soup and unwary squirrels to make this a truly authentic experience!
*Warning – Dust Bowl may cause dustiness
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
**And the early death by choking of your first born.
August 2, 2011 at 2:46 pm
If they only did their RESEARCH enough to know that the Great Depression was a nasty time to live, especially for farmers in the Dust Bowl area.
I wonder if they could even imagine what it would be like to wake up with grit in your teeth, in your food, in your clothes, in your hair, in what you’re drinking, in your bed, every damn place? People DIED because of the dust storms that engulfed the region.
The insensitivity of these hipsters is astounding. Thank you for posting a picture of this. Not many people know what the Dust Bowl is.
August 2, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Public school history classes gloss over so much. Curriculum is all about cramming names and dates into kids’ heads so they can score higher on a standardized test. Augh.
August 2, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Trust me, I understand (I’m a teacher). Much of what is read in English/Literature classes is based on historical fact. History and English go hand in hand, so I saw to it that my students had basic historical background knowledge before we started reading.
August 2, 2011 at 5:53 pm
English teachers fight the good fight. I was lucky enough to have two majorly awesome English teachers in high school.
August 2, 2011 at 4:02 pm
“Not many people know what the Dust Bowl is.”
Which just makes me even more annoyed at the dismal state of education. I mostly mean in the US but I know we’re not the only ones. Still.
I could write pages about how sick it makes me that we don’t seem to value education at all. But that’s for my blog, not here.
/endrant
August 2, 2011 at 10:44 pm
The average U.S. classroom may be lacking, but at least there’s show choir. That’s right – kids are learning about history with jazz hands. I wonder when Glee will do a Dust Bowl themed episode?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD9MnFzjxT0
August 2, 2011 at 11:18 pm
You mean the Dust Bowl doesn’t have anything to do with football?
August 3, 2011 at 3:25 pm
“You mean the Dust Bowl doesn’t have anything to do with football?”
That’s what my students thought when they first heard of it.
I used to have one of those “Think Different” Apple posters of Charlie Chaplin behind a camera on my wall. I lost count of how many times I had students ask me, “who’s that guy?” One even thought it was Hitler because of the mustache.
Speaking of Hitler… I was introducing the Holocaust to my students because, you know, their parents don’t teach them anything, and in order for them to understand Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, I needed them to do research. They started complaining, so I said, “OK, tell me…. who’s Hitler?” A student blurted out, “didn’t he invent something?”
All wasn’t completely lost because the students who DID know who he was gasped.
Oh, the stories I could tell about education!
August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
You know that famous picture of the migrant worker mother and her small children? Here’s what the little girl had to say a couple of years ago:
August 2, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Off topic: As a birthday present I bought myself a book titled The Contact Sheet edited by Steve Crist. It’s yet another collection of famous photos, but it includes the contact sheets from the shoots—the almost famous. The picture of the migrant worker mother and her child is included with four other shots taken of them taken at the same time. Fascinating book.
http://www.amazon.ca/dp/0978607694
August 3, 2011 at 7:28 pm
Fascinating article, thanks for linking.
August 2, 2011 at 2:03 pm
As people who organize steampunk events, we became fed up with romanticizing imperialism, sexism, classism, racism and all the other wonderful -isms that came with Victorian costuming and re-enactment. We decided to fight back at one of our bigger events by making the overall theme “soup kitchen”, basing everything on How the Other Half Lives. We did it not to romanticize that fantastic, creamy period of debtors prisons, rampant infant mortality, & overcrowded conditions for those who could afford any housing at all. We did it to say “F*ck You” to all those costumers who think Victorian is just about as fluffytastically romantically yummylicious as you can get. Somehow I don’t think this is what the bride was going with here.
August 2, 2011 at 9:18 pm
I’m not into steampunk, but this summer a friend took me to a convention. Throughout the day I just got more and more uncomfortable with all the -isms, especially the glorification of the British aristocracy and colonialism. I left with a very strong desire to not bathe for weeks, wear unwashed clothes, and then go around touching all the people in fancy dress and asking for spare change.
August 5, 2011 at 9:02 pm
I find that at the Dickens Faire, and such, they DO have the underclass running around–and it’s supposed to be cute as hell.
I hate the Victorians.
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Did any of you see the colonial africa wedding? All the servants were black and there was even a picture of them ‘humourously’ oppressing one.
I mean, this is fucking terrible and offensive- would it really have killed them to have a 20′s wedding, or a farm-themed wedding which would have allowed them to do a lot of the same things?- but the horribly racist wedding still takes up all my ire.
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Level 5 Insensitive Jackassery?
August 2, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Oh, those levels only go in the negative direction.
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Here’s a thought. If she’s so damn enamored with the idea of hobos, why doesn’t she hie herself and her groom down to an inner city shelter and spend a few days volunteering there. I can guarantee that afterwards she will find nothing glamorous in the life of a hobo–and maybe she’ll pick up some sensitivity and tact along the way.
August 2, 2011 at 2:06 pm
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
August 2, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Somewhere I read this piece of advice for young women making their way in the world, and it’s never steered me wrong: “Just wear a bra. It’s not like you’ll look back and wish you hadn’t.”
August 2, 2011 at 6:35 pm
THAT is the most offensive thing you find about this entire debacle? I think your rose-colored glasses need a good scrubbing.
August 2, 2011 at 10:38 pm
No, I just meant in addition to everything else. Trust me, I’m shocked that someone would feel that this theme would work for anything, let alone a wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 10:42 pm
*would be appropriate for anything, whoops, hit the button too soon.
August 2, 2011 at 2:08 pm
“The Only Sane Person In The World says:
While creative in its own right, I find this new “style” tasteless and bourgeois. There is nothing trendy about the great depression nor abject poverty.
20 hours ago”
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
they get extra points for using the b-word.
August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
I think I want them to have my babies.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 pm
I want this person to be my new best friend. Someone tell them they’re always welcome here.
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Someone should actually sign up for an etsy account with that screenname, and use the picture Helen uses.
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Someone has, its smallandpissed’s vintage shop: http://www.etsy.com/shop/theonlysaneperson
August 2, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Flippin’ awesome!
August 2, 2011 at 2:09 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
A few years ago I had a dog who was found by people in a homeless camp. I named him Hobo. People thought I was TERRIBLE. I don’t seem so bad in comparison.
August 2, 2011 at 5:59 pm
Shout-out to The Littlest Hobo?
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
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August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
I believe the correct term is “faux-bos”
August 2, 2011 at 3:31 pm
In France we have an actual expression for this style of hipsters, Bobos, short for “bourgeois-bohème”. Speaks for itself I guess.
August 2, 2011 at 5:11 pm
http://www.amazon.com/Bobos-Paradise-Upper-Class-There/dp/0684853787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312330259&sr=8-1
“Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.”
August 2, 2011 at 2:20 pm
There’s plenty to mock here without resorting to their appearance…
August 2, 2011 at 4:19 pm
…I know there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit here and all, but could we leave their weight and faces out of it?
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
My kids are obsessed with the (romanticized) idea of hobos, but they’re 7, 10 and 11. And they volunteer at the food pantry and comprehend that vast gulf between that silliness and the reality of being poor, rather than “playing” poor.
Tacky.
August 2, 2011 at 2:21 pm
You’re doing one hell of a job raising kids! They’re probably more grounded now than the cupcake brigade will ever be.
August 2, 2011 at 2:10 pm
While the whole thing is a mockery… My heart just dropped when I read this ” I also found perfectly worn quilts that I cut for table runners and buntings.”
They have to be as insensitive and tasteless as possible, then they go and destroy thousands of hours of likely hand sewn quilting? OMg, can I cunt punt them both!?
August 2, 2011 at 2:18 pm
WHAT.
I couldn’t read the actual Etsy article. As much as I love looking at wedding porn on sites like Offbeatbride, this one is just too fucking much.
Good thing, too, because I probably would’ve died in a fit of rage-apoplexy if I’d read that quote in its native habitat. Perfectly worn, likely antique, hand-sewn quilts… and she… cut them up… for her white trash hootenanny?
August 2, 2011 at 3:40 pm
Again: WHAT?
She could have probably spent a lot more on her wedding with what those quilts might have been worth before she destroyed them.
Reading the Etsy fluff piece just made me even more sad and confused.
August 2, 2011 at 3:45 pm
^^THIS^^
I see red and get all stabby when people mutilate antique quilts
August 2, 2011 at 7:41 pm
The sad thing is there was more handmade about those quilts than there is the vast majority of things on Etsy.
August 2, 2011 at 2:53 pm
That part kills me. In the spirit of TRUE thrift, those quilts could have been donated to those in need following the wedding. Now, they’re unusable.
August 2, 2011 at 3:31 pm
A friend of mine who owns a fabric shop refers to heavily damaged quilts as ‘cutter quilts’ and often trims away the shattered silks/rat hole/water stains to turn what’s left back into something beautiful.
I have an inkling that this is not what was done here.
August 2, 2011 at 8:23 pm
That is saving, repurposing, respecting the work put into them. There’s nothing respectful about hobo-wedding-folk.
I may knit, spin, crochet, and sew (novice) but I cannot yet quilt and the whole epic-ness of it just amazes me.
August 2, 2011 at 9:10 pm
I’ve been collecting feed sacks (the colorful printed ones, more or less), and I can’t make myself cut into them. And they are just squares of FABRIC.
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Wow- I planned my wedding in 14 days and funded it with my student loan refund. It looked kind of like that except the groom actually wore a suit and we didn’t have tents or a room block. I thought it was a pretty nice wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 4:14 pm
I don’t believe that for a second.
…you got a student loan refund?
August 3, 2011 at 5:42 am
Well yeah: $250 for books and art supplies that semester was spent on a dress and an officiant. I’ll be paying for that with the rest of my school loans for the next 40 years.
August 3, 2011 at 5:44 am
and I almost forgot- we had a 6 foot hero for the guests (but I think my parents paid for that).
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Have any of you seen the pictures from the “Colonial Africa” themed wedding? An English couple went to Africa to have an authentic Colonial Africa wedding, complete with an all-black staff dressed in colonial staff costumes. It’s horrific.
http://jezebel.com/5820577/colonial+themed-wedding-included-authentic-all+black-servant-staff
The original blog post by the photographer with the rest of the pictures was taken down after it went viral, but this post on Jezebel has a couple of examples. The one at the top pretty much nails it.
August 2, 2011 at 2:14 pm
I’m glad you had the link, I couldn’t find it. Fucking disgusting, isn’t it?
August 2, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Can you imagine if I, as a Midwesterner, went down to Atlanta to have an authentic prebellum wedding, complete with African-Americans dressed as slaves serving us?
People have no fuckin’ common sense, as both these weddings prove.
(is prebellum a word? I know antebellum is, but… fuck it. I’m owning it.)
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
The possibilities are endless. Imperial Japanese-themed wedding in Nanking, anyone?
August 2, 2011 at 2:33 pm
I think I’ll have mine on the rez! Those little red skinned people are just *so* cute.
August 2, 2011 at 5:25 pm
They don’t dress the staff as slaves, but there are a lot of antebellum mansions in the Atlanta area that serve as event facilities.
And yes, some of them do wear hoop skirts and serve mint juleps.
August 2, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Antebellum is the word you’re looking for, actually.
(Don’t get mad. I’ve been called a know-it-all, but I do it out of love!)
August 2, 2011 at 10:50 pm
Katastrophe, Ok, thank you, for some reason I had it stuck in my head that ante- meant after and referred to the immediate post-war South. But it totally does refer to the pre-war South.
I blame my muddledness on my irritation with this wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 8:26 pm
… speechless. I’ve laughed quite a lot on this site. Lots of fuckery. But these “themed” weddings just leave me without words.
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
This is the wedding of hipper-than-thou cartoonist Brian “Box” Brown. He was on one of my favorite podcasts, going on about the awesomeness of the hobo wedding. Super douchey. Here’s another blog about the wedding: http://adelaideshomesewn.blogspot.com/2011/05/sarah-and-boxs-hobo-wedding-sneak-peek.html
E
August 2, 2011 at 3:19 pm
fuckery. ’nuff said.
August 3, 2011 at 9:34 pm
One of the comments on Adelaide’s blog was about how like “omg it was so sweet, herp derp”, the usual bullshit. And then this:
“We even had a few authentic hobos – some neighbors just strolled into the party!”
ARE YOU SERIOUS. SERIOUSLY.
August 24, 2011 at 1:13 pm
(because I am late on this business….)
Your link, merelywords: I think what pisses me off about this site/wedding is that she’s calling it “Hobo era”. It’s the thirties, woman. There is no such thing as “Hobo wear”. This would be properly termed “Whatever a lower class working citizen wore.”
I didn’t read the etsy article, because Helen’s post just makes me bang my head against my desk. Who gets excited about people who were homeless and poor?! I’m sure, that if time travelling existed, that a hobo from the 1930′s would be just THRILLED with her wedding.
Christ. I don’t mind themed weddings– hell I’d like one Regency style– but for God’s sakes, BE CLASSY!
Oh wait. This is Etsy we are talking about. Nevermind.
August 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm
As someone who was actually forced from my home to live on the street as a teenager – I can’t say how many times I have been sitting in my air conditioned home that I now mercifully live in and think, Gosh I REALLY miss washing out my armpits in the Greyhound bus station.
You know what though? I totally had super cute boots.
Fucking serenity now.
August 2, 2011 at 2:12 pm
The bridesmaids had to resort to prostitution in order to afford rouge. Hey, at least it was accurate.
August 2, 2011 at 2:13 pm
Did she give her dog back its bandana after the wedding?
August 2, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Oops – just read some more; Did HE give his dog…..
August 2, 2011 at 6:58 pm
I am going to refrain from making the joke that I’d like to make here because it would be in poor taste.
See how that works, hobo wedding people? When something is in poor taste you just DON’T DO IT. Quite a novel concept, really.
August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
And they sailed off to their honeymoon in a boxcar. Friends and family saw them chug away slowly, expressing their wishes that the couple wouldn’t get beaten half to death by a railroad bull.
August 2, 2011 at 2:15 pm
I’m not getting married yet, but when I do, I’m going to have a retro 2010 themed wedding, complete with oil-covered sea creatures, actors hired to play unemployed workers waiting in line for government checks, and a snow machine to cover my guests cars in a blizzard while they’re at the reception. I can’t wait for the pictures!
August 2, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Aside from the usage of the words “totes” and “adorbs”, you just made my day. I saw that ridiculous wedding earlier and was…somehow not surprised.
(I do realise that the aforementioned words were used sarcastically…oh gawd…I HOPE you were using those words in jest…)
August 2, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Oh, and while we were never homeless, my family was so dirt poor we were close to it a number of times. This couple has never experienced real poverty, the bone-grinding desperation of it, or they wouldn’t take it so lightly.
August 2, 2011 at 2:17 pm
She also annoys me talking about how they wanted to be simple and non-fussy and how they had a limited budget. I can guarantee that this travesty, buying antique clothes and quilts and accessories, costs easily 3 to 4 times at much as my actual simple wedding is costing me.
(sorry to repeat Anninyn’s post with mine above. It wasn’t there when I clicked “Comment” I swear!)
August 2, 2011 at 2:24 pm
Our wedding cost £3000 including the honeymoon. It didn’t look simple, but it bloody well was. Because we had no fucking money.
I’m a believer in ‘the right budget is what you can afford’ and if you can afford 7,8,9k, go right ahead.
But something about spending thousands of pounds emulating the grade of poverty people claw desperately to escape seems wrong to me.
No, you know what? It’s sick. It shows a fundamental lack of empathy and understanding. And people say we’re heartless, cruel and evil.
August 2, 2011 at 3:47 pm
Our wedding was a 2 hour road trip to Elkton MD courthouse and a weekend at the Long Branch Hilton. Cost maybe 300 dollars.
August 2, 2011 at 4:58 pm
My dog ate my Mum’s $300 shoes and she found ones for $30 she liked more in a second hand shop the day before her wedding. Her wedding was gorgeous and she doesn’t even remember what those expensive shoes looked like.
August 2, 2011 at 2:18 pm
I mind dove into some layer of hell and skidded to a stop at “entwined bootlaces.”
No one needs that picture in their head. I don’t know that manscaping was in fashion at hobo camps, but somethings just shouldn’t be discussed. Especially at a wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 2:18 pm
A “depression-era inspired” wedding could be beautiful. A “hobo-themed” wedding is just kinda tacky. As soon as you bring the word “theme” into it, you’ve gone too far.
August 2, 2011 at 7:13 pm
I have no plans to get married at any point in the foreseeable future. However, I’ve always said that my wedding will be “wedding themed” with a girl dressed as a bride and some guy dressed as a groom and flowers everywhere with a fun party after. So unique, I know. Clearly I should change my vision to something more PC… Like a Pearl Harbor themed wedding.
August 2, 2011 at 2:19 pm
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
August 2, 2011 at 2:25 pm
It’s ‘even evil has standards’.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 pm
There is a definite “feel for the room” on Regretsy. I guess it might be best explained as the difference between “Laugh to keep from crying” and “Laugh because you don’t know what it means.”
August 2, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Totally agree. There is a string of holocaust themed wedding jokes above. Those people (myself included) know the holocaust was horrific, and would never actually make light of the holocaust. Rather, they’re using it as an example to point out the lack of tact in this hobo wedding.
In comparison, the Diary Anne Frank wedding card was just clueless.
August 2, 2011 at 2:30 pm
Because there are many POOR fat ugly jealous losers on here?
I’ve never been homeless. But know people who are close to it now and this just… grinds my goat. It would be cute if it wasn’t so ripe with the pompousness.
August 2, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Its because it is not only offensive nonsense, its Etsy endorsed offensive nonsense. This is so WTF for me it stops the snark train.
August 2, 2011 at 2:37 pm
I’m slightly scared of the thorough thumbs-downing I’ll get for this, but I’ll say it anyway: I think a lot of times where we direct our outrage is influenced by where HK steers the good ship Regretsy. If she makes a post that makes fun of something, we jump in and make fun of it. If she makes a post that criticises the social injustice of something, we jump in and criticise the social injustice of it. I’m not saying we’re always mindless sheep, I’m just saying that’s the nature of this blog sometimes.
August 2, 2011 at 2:48 pm
You zagger you. You get a thumbs up.
The Internet. The land of mobs and genitals.
(I’m still grinded by this though.)
August 2, 2011 at 2:57 pm
On the other hand, I’d have found this morally offensive wherever it turned up. And if I disagree with HK I just don;t post, so I imagine other people do the same, which is probably why it seems to go that way.
It’s just where the ‘bad thing’ shows up moderates exactly how I react to it. I have the same emotional reaction, I just express it differently according to where I am.
August 2, 2011 at 3:11 pm
I’m pretty confident that I’d find this repugnant even if I hadn’t seen it on Regretsy… I’ll make the argument, though, that it’s not so much “steering” as it is her knowing her audience, and what it’ll respond to.
August 2, 2011 at 3:43 pm
I thumbs up you for saying this, response be damned. I do, however, have to disagree with the sentiment. In a case such as the I’m-a-dumbshit-dressed-as-a-hobo wedding here, the social injustice begs to be mocked and HK just gives us the venue. Etsy’s happy cupcake police wouldn’t allow for such discourse. I’m all for someone else rooting through the sunshine, rainbows, and other forms of general fucktardeness there for point out the truly lame. I haven’t the tolerance for b.s. that requires.
August 2, 2011 at 3:54 pm
I did see this earlier, and I was offended. My great-grandfather rode the rails to escape an impoverished, over-populated and underfed household, leaving to support himself and leave more resources available for his siblings. Until her death, my grandmother worried about the banks collapsing and returning to poverty. (I thank heaven she died before she could see it come true.)
I was upset and offended by the tastelessness of the event. I groused and again threatened to move to another planet if one became available. Then, like I believe many of us do, I decided to quit wasting time on tacky, clueless behavior and I QUIT LOOKING AT IT.
As the saying goes, I may not agree with what you say (or do) but I’ll defend your right to say it. I just reserve the right to disagree.
August 2, 2011 at 5:22 pm
I can totally see how it might look that way – and maybe sometimes it is true. But I think Regretsy is what it is because we can think for ourselves.
Dror is a perfect example. When HK first introduced us to Dror, she was mostly neutral. It seems it would have made more sense for us to all jump in and mock him. And look how that turned out!
August 2, 2011 at 6:29 pm
I saw it on the front page before I saw it here, and wondered how long it would take to get here. It turned my stomach too. I get so tired of fake bullshit and PCness that it isn’t even funny and I truly believe it is the spreading source of the mediocrity we are forced to endure in our daily lives by these people. I guess Mz Killa is rubbing off on me.
August 2, 2011 at 8:12 pm
I saw the cover photo for this on the Etsy blog this morning and felt angry. I found it offensive from the get go. You don’t glamorize homelessness as some light-hearted lark about people traveling home. It’s disgusting. I didn’t need HK or anyone else to inform that opinion.
August 2, 2011 at 2:51 pm
I’m just going to repost infidelicity’s brilliant quote from above: “It’s takes a lot of cash to look so poor.”
These people are clueless, tacky, and hipster-stupid, and Etsy endorsing this obnoxious behavior is reprehensible.
August 2, 2011 at 4:47 pm
I agree. I mean, I get that these are people who probably never faced poverty wasting a bunch of money to play hobo, but I don’t see it as morally offensive, just vapid and tasteless (hobo-chic?), and I just don’t get the seething that’s going on.
I mean, people have been dressing as hobos for decades. It’s Americana, though I do think it could have been done with more sensitivity, and without cutting up old quilts–that part does offend me.
August 2, 2011 at 6:46 pm
My first “Hidden due to low comment rating.” I have arrived. =)
August 2, 2011 at 2:20 pm
Oh christ they’re from Malvern (according to the invite in the article thingy). When I lived in Philly, I used work virtually down the street from their block of rooms Sheraton hotel. Yeah, trust me, they probably haven’t heard of poverty. It’s very “ladies who lunch” there. I can’t tell you how many times some soccer mom almost ran me off the road in her Land Rover because she was late for her spa day. I’m kind of bitter about the whole area.
August 2, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Romanticizing events can be a way of coping with a tragedy. We do it with WWII, the Depression, The Spanish Civil War, but theme weddings clearly cross the lines.
This is a big fat shit sandwich wrapped in a Dorthea Lange photograph and hung in an old timey outhouse.
Bravo! Marie Antoinette would be proud.
August 2, 2011 at 2:22 pm
God, this is so ironic because I’m spending an inordinate amount of time and money planning a Pompous Hipster themed wedding. You should see my vintage upcycled raw hems dress. It matches my pygmy-skull fascinator perfectly! And when I see my man in his skin tight blue tux that makes his crotch a toxic jungle of sweat, I know I’ll tear up behind my oversized red plastic glasses.
August 2, 2011 at 2:22 pm
I really hate the idea of making weddings performances. I don’t mean people picking a fun theme that suits them and making it fun. I like the idea of funky weddings for funky people. I mean the people that want their wedding to be different just because. It should be about the couple whether that means a wild party or a simple thing surrounded by family. If you are not a hobo I do not see why you would want a hobo wedding, and if you actually had to deal with homelessness I would hope your wedding would be focused on more positive aspects of yourself.
I can see why Etsy doesn’t give a shit, because the wedding as performance is likely big business for them with all the handmade stuff and level of personalization that is accessible through them. What they fuck do they care if that means people start spouting off about offensive stuff, its all about being eweneek and speshul just like everyone on Etsy.
August 2, 2011 at 2:47 pm
It’s ironic — I’ve helped plan a wedding for a homeless couple (they met at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting our church sponsors), and we all pitched in to make sure they had the best day ever, with no reminder of their homeless state. (Last I heard, they were still together, still clean and sober, still looking for work but had a room in a local facility for homeless/at risk adults.)
August 2, 2011 at 7:50 pm
arelkay, this warms my heart. This is the antidote to offensive hipster hobo-posturing
August 2, 2011 at 3:14 pm
That’s a big part of what blows my mind. I love Offbeatbride, I love unique weddings, but those weddings showcase the personalities of the two people coming together.
This is just two hipster dipshits who heard a (probably inaccurate) etymology for the word “hobo” and decided they liked the idea one day.
August 2, 2011 at 2:25 pm
I am so glad you posted this. I saw this earlier today and cringed. When I scrolled down thru the comments to see who the first nay-sayer was among all the hoo-haa cupcakes, I cringed even more when, alas, there was no clear light of day to take away the darkness.
August 2, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Let’s hope that it is the not only the first, but also, the LAST hobo-themed wedding in history.
August 2, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Sometimes, when you think of something no one else has done, it’s because it’s a really bad idea.
August 2, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Like that friend of mine who mixed coffee and tea together to make a new drink.
For example.
August 3, 2011 at 12:17 pm
My son did that, but then again he was 8 and he has aspergers.
August 2, 2011 at 6:21 pm
This will be my new mantra.
August 2, 2011 at 2:27 pm
“throwing out the book” on traditional weddings means you just do the exact same things as traditional weddings, but with a unique, more insensitive style!
August 2, 2011 at 4:29 pm
You don’t hire some stuffy florist to make trendy flower arrangements, you emulate the look of wildflowers in a tin can by ORDERING FLOWERS AND VINTAGE CANS ONLINE!
We should run with the idea of taking a simple, cheap concept and making it expensive and complicated. Maybe people can start buying those oval pearls to throw instead of rice? Make sure someone hand sands them so they have that authentic dull finish!
August 2, 2011 at 2:29 pm
I’m just upset that “Freddie the Freeloader” wasn’t invited.
August 2, 2011 at 2:31 pm
If one of my progeny happen to decide to have a recession wedding… No joke, I’m writing them out of the will. That’s along with the if you become a republican or if you buy a Brittany Spears album riders.
August 2, 2011 at 2:35 pm
My brother joined the Young Republicans when he was a freshman in college. My dad said “I know kids experiment a lot in college, but couldn’t he do drugs or have some gay experiences instead?”
He’s healed now. Praise Jeebus.
August 2, 2011 at 9:12 pm
You’re allowed to do both.
August 2, 2011 at 3:29 pm
Aww, come on, look what you did. We were having a great snark-fest against these faux-bo idiots and YOU had to bring politics to the discussion. Republicans aren’t bad people. They just have different ideas of what is right.
So, anyway, thumb me down if you want.
August 2, 2011 at 2:32 pm
I love how they “took the rule book and threw it out the window”, and then they had save-the-date cards and printed invitations, party favours with custom labels, flowers and flower arrangements, a professional photographer, “cocktail hour snacks”, and it took months to plan and to redecorate the house. Way to really challenge and defy those traditional wedding customs, guys.
August 2, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Never in my life have I felt the urge to defend the noble hobo, Helen. It’s not so much that I love hobos, as it is that I hate stupid theme weddings that get inflicted upon people.
August 2, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Charlie Chaplin is not amused.
August 2, 2011 at 2:37 pm
“Fuck you guys, I was a tramp before it was cool. I did it even BEFORE the Depression!”
August 2, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Chaplin is the original hipster?
August 2, 2011 at 2:40 pm
“And the mustache? It was my trademark first! Fucking Hitler was just a poseur wannabe!”
August 2, 2011 at 7:21 pm
@RosieB – They’re the same person if you were to believe the history themed ride at the end of Idiocracy.
August 2, 2011 at 2:34 pm
I so hate middle class fuckwads who romanticize poverty I can’t even think of anything funny to say. This is a huge thing here in hipsterland, guys with ZZ Top beards & suspenders, bars blasting hillbilly music. I clawed my way out of a trailer in Ripley County, Missouri too get away from that shit, and these idiots think it’s cool….
August 2, 2011 at 8:05 pm
These idiots don’t think “it’s” cool. They think it makes them cool to make fun of, or have fun with, lesser people than themselves.
It also allows them to add some superficial color to their bland collective monologue without being in danger of actually developing an interesting personality.
August 2, 2011 at 8:49 pm
I don’t think they think they are making fun of or having fun with lesser people.
It seems to make them feel as if they are suffering with these quaint people of old, but in a painless way. You know – “We are newlywed poor, circa 2011, we don’t own a house yet. At our wedding we celebrated the poverty of our grandparents – now let’s watch Netflix while checking facebook and blogging. Let’s order in.”
August 2, 2011 at 2:34 pm
what i want to know is this: why are the first 200+ comments singing praise for such an insensitive themed wedding?
August 2, 2011 at 3:12 pm
Because it’s bad to call out on Etsy.
August 2, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Because there are a plethora of sellers on Etsy who use that as a form of promoting their stores.
August 2, 2011 at 2:34 pm
Gasp, gag … did you read some of the comments?
This looked like so much fun. I love Hobo Style
Congratulations – love the Golden Coffee Tin! Monica TheIDConnection
“Brown bags of popcorn and burlap sacks of peanuts”…I absolutely love it…..”
With the exception of handbags, when the fuck did Hobo become a style!?? And doesn’t “Golden Coffee Tin” sound like one of those websites we were scaring ourselves with last night?
August 2, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Like so many other things, the internet has ruined the word “golden” for me forever.
August 2, 2011 at 2:35 pm
When my husband and I were married 15 years ago, we had the wedding in my parents’ backyard on an Iowa farm, it was decidedly casual with a lot of sentimental, vintage elements. Cattle came up to the fence line during the reception, there were flies everywhere – including the punch bowl. I had no idea it was hip. I just thought we were rural and budget-conscious.
We did include plastic flies from Archie McPhee in the thank you cards. I can’t even think of anything snarky to say about this wedding that hasn’t already been said. So I’ll just shake my head and weep for today’s youth.
August 2, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Today would have been my grandma’s 100th birthday. She married my grandpa in 1929, her first baby was born in 1931, second in 1933. They lived in a shack in a fruit orchard, and they gleaned the trees after the harvest season to feed their family. My grandpa was a carpenter, and would travel for hundreds of miles to find work, to mail home a few dollars to support his children. My grandmother sewed baby clothes from flour sacks, and took in mending to help pay the bills. His brother came to California on the bottom of a train car, he would lash himself to the undercarriage and pray that belt would hold. Once he got here he found little work, and in order to stay warm at night he would go down to Santa Monica beach, dig a hole in the sand, line it with newspaper, and bury himself. Things eventually got better for them, but there were years of just barely scraping by, wondering where the next dollar would come from.
So, to sum up, FUCK YOU AND YOUR DUMB ASS HOBO CHIC!!!
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
I hate people.
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
I cry bullshit on authenticity, unless the bride and groom’s first dance was to a washboard and jug rendition of Reba Mcentire’s “Fancy” sung by the mother of the bride.
August 3, 2011 at 12:44 pm
Eh, Bobbie Gentry did it first and did it better.
As for the bride and groom. My great grandmother, at the age of 16, had to drag two small children-my grandmother and great uncle across the country, alone. She didn’t do it to become fodder for some asshole hipster wedding. She did it because she had to. I think I’ll ask her what she thinks of it.
They didn’t call it The Great Depression because it was fun.
August 2, 2011 at 2:36 pm
I was poor and unemployed and unable to pay my rent before they had their wedding. Posers.
August 2, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Oh man, this inspires me to invite all of my friends over for a homeless themed sleepover – Remember BYOB! (Bring your own box)
August 2, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Hamletta – the photos you’re talking about are by Dorthea Lange. It’s sad to hear that the little girl felt so ashamed about them, but at least Lange’s heart was in the right place. She used them to raise awareness of the situation, and I think she did influence the govt to help. She didn’t take the pix b/c she thought it was chic or cute… More than can be said for this couple, eh?
August 2, 2011 at 5:30 pm
The mother was most ashamed of them – that’s why the most famous picture from the set has her turned away from the camera.
August 2, 2011 at 5:32 pm
Sorry, got that backwards (see post below) – the mother had the children turn their faces from the camera.
August 2, 2011 at 2:39 pm