Do you take Traci Culpepper out on the town? You do if you’re hosting her last singles bash!

By Staci Sturrock, Staff Writer
2 Jul 1999
The Palm Beach Post

It's midnight on A1A, and bride-to-be Traci Culpepper doesn't know where her panties are.

Let's see... she had them when her bachelorette party began six hours ago with Kamikaze shots that made her wince and a sweet congratulations card that made her weep and an anatomically correct piata that made everyone positively giddy.

And they were still in place when Traci and almost 20 friends decamped for burgers and booty-shaking to Ricky Martin and Dexy's Midnight Runners.

But, at the nightclub that followed, with its raucous outdoor bar and the bachelor party from up north... Well, that's when things start to get hazy.

Which is why Traci - a bubbly 28-year-old who nurtures a vast network of friends with both her frequent shopper card at Hallmark and her practical joker's impishness - is hobbling down A1A in Fort Lauderdale, asking where her underwear went.

If you've slammed shots with a bachelorette in recent years, you know that AWOL undergarments are as common as June brides.

There's no confusing the modern-day bachelorette party with the modest bridal luncheon or proper wedding shower - pastel affairs that assume the bride is innocent and virginal and lacking gravy boats and tea towels.

Today's bachelorette bash spins off the premise that the guest of honor is a worldly woman deserving a final salute to the single life - if the single life is truly an endless blur of Jello shots and male genital bric-a-brac.

In the tradition of sorority hazing, the bride's very best friends prove their love by assigning the guest of honor a string of embarrassing tasks that often threaten to out-raunch the randiest stag party.

Farewell, finger sandwiches; greetings, vodka shots. See ya later, babyish games; how ya doing, chest-hair scavenger hunts.

So long, paper-plate bouquets. And hello, Bob.

Traci, meet Bob. Bob, this is Traci.

Quick: What's the most popular bachelorette-party motif?

If you guessed sunflowers, butterflies or teddy bears, you'd be wrong, Sandra Dee.

The correct answer is a male body part that we'll call Bob.

Bob makes his grand entrance at Traci's late May party around 6 p.m., when the bride-to-be encounters a Paul Bunyan-sized Bob piata hanging boldly in the hotel room's kitchen.

Despite several whacks with a broomstick and much encouragement from friends, the styrofoam piata stands firm, and, in a moment that Sigmund Freud surely would relish, Traci must rip it apart with her hands.

Ch-ching! Out tumbles a tiny, wind-up Bob that hops on two feet. A slender Bob toothbrush. A bag of gummy, bite-sized Bob candies. Skinny Bob straws (don't ponder that image too long).

"Who the heck found this stuff?" asks Traci as she paws through the booty. "Even I haven't seen this."

Traci, you see, has a rep for throwing a mean bachelorette party. One memorable night, she even cajoled a lasso-twirling cowboy stripper into "riding" a bride-to-be on stage. You know, like a horse.

That bucking bride is now playing host to these pre-wedding festivities, and Traci is well aware that the night has "payback" written all over it.

"I planned everything for her and her and her and her. Like five just in this room," says Traci, a human resources manager for a Boca Raton computer-engineering company. "And now I'm the one who has no clue."

Her single ground rule for tonight: No strippers. "I've seen enough naked men in G-strings and with hairy buttocks. And I've got Paul." (That would be future husband Paul Stickley, who is a mechanic, not a male dancer.)

The bride wore handcuffs

Proper bachelorette attire comes in two styles: the wacky and the tacky. Traci gets a little of both.

Before leaving their hotel room for the nearby Cafe Iguana, Traci's friends bobby-pin a tiara and veil to her head, lending her immediate "look at me" cachet that will be enhanced by the photos of naked men pinned to the veil as the night wears on.

They also instruct Traci to slide a red garter around her right thigh, slip a candy choker around her neck, and snap a pair of red plastic handcuffs on her right wrist.

Dangling from the spare cuff is her "date" for the evening - a foot-long, inflatable man (ironically Bobless).

But what will really garner double takes is the oversized white T- shirt pulled over Traci's little black dress. Painted with the words "Suck for a Buck," it bears 150 individually wrapped Life Savers, lovingly hot-glued on by Traci's friends. Any guy who gives Traci $1 can take his choice of flavor.

Oh, yeah. He gets to bite it off.

As a mirror ball scatters light around Cafe Iguana, and the Bee Gees warble Stayin' Alive, Traci gets her first paying customer.

He sidles up and, despite Traci's suggestions that he select a candy from her stomach, he aims a little higher. Wolf whistles go up around the pair and, smiling, Traci tucks the buck in her bra.

While Traci's friends round up plenty of takers inside the cafe, the real show unfolds as the party weaves down A1A toward a larger nightclub.

Three GQ-type cigar chompers pay $10, but stop at two nibbles. To the delight of the gathering throng, a hunky young waiter at H2O Mediterranean Bar and Grill impersonates Dracula to get to one of the candies. Not to be outdone, a fellow waiter chomps off one of Traci's Life Savers and then, holding it in his mouth, transfers it to her lips.

A pair of young guys from New York comes across the carnival scene. "In New York, this would turn into something stupid," says one.

Adds his friend: "Yeah, somebody would be ripping off the money."

At least this, they say, is in good taste.

Do you take these panties?

They might call it "girls night out," but the ironic-when-you- think-about-it point of any prenuptial blowout is to mingle very deliberately with the opposite sex. Preferably complete strangers, as if one last urgent night in the company of men will forever cleanse the betrothed of her desire for others.

So it must have been kismet that allowed Traci's bachelorette party to cross paths with a bachelor party from Milwaukee.

They meet at a sidewalk bar in front of Atlantis nightclub - 20 women, ages 21 to 56, and 17 men in their twenties and thirties, many of whom wear amber-lensed horn rims and bowling shirts that say "Bachelor Party '99."

Traci's panties have met their match in this gathering of boxers and briefs.

Traci removes her black underwear and, with the help of her younger sister, climbs onto the bar.

Even though she's wearing chunky heels and she's downed numerous beers, she manages to pick her way daintily across the crowded bar before descending into the middle of the bachelor party.

The bartender grabs the underwear. "Do I hear $5?"

In the midst of this, a bachelor partier helps a bachelorette partier onto the bar and they slow dance, careful to duck the ceiling fans.

Dissatisfied with the auction's course, one of the bachelorette girls ascends the bar and nudges up the price. A member of the bachelor party finally pockets the prize for $20.

Traci's panties, it turns out, are on their way to Milwaukee.

Bartender, give me a #*%@!

Part of the undeniable fun of a bachelorette party is ordering drinks with names that we can't publish.

The result: By 11:30 p.m., the party has split into two factions.

The younger women want to invade another dance floor, but Traci's older friends feel a retreat is in order.

Sandwiched between representatives from both camps at a Beach Place bar is Traci, the human Switzerland: "I'm happy to do whatever," she says, "but I do not want to go back to the room."

Wrong edict. Bitter finger-pointing recriminations ensue, with Traci's friends challenging each other's loyalty to the bride. "She's having fun and wants to keep going," says one. "If Traci was sober, she wouldn't want to be seen like this," lobs back another.

One returns to the hotel room; another follows, crying. Some disappear onto the Cafe Iguana dance floor, and others take off to parties unknown. A few holdouts stick with Traci.

She and her matron of honor lean on the Iguana bar and, through tears, order another round. "The problem is everybody cares just a little too much," Traci says.

Her future sister-in-law isn't surprised. "You know how it gets with women," Lorraine Stickley says. "These nights always end up like this."

The tiff has even knocked the wind out of the inflatable man. Folded in half, he sits, defeated, in someone's lap.

But after eyes are dried, eight women bravely limp back down A1A, and one of Traci's friends gently explains the fate of the missing underwear to the bride.

On the Atlantis dance floor, they form the kind of circle women form when they aren't dancing with men, shifting their weight from foot to foot while a remix of Stayin' Alive blares overhead.

After a restorative trip to the restroom, Traci has her game face back on. Shed of her veil, handcuffs and heavy T-shirt that still bears a few dozen candies, she smiles and declares the night, on the whole, a success: "I had a blast."

And, thanks to all those Life Saver suckers, she's added more than $100 to her trousseau.

Enough to buy a honeymoon's worth of underwear.

Culpepper Ancestry. Traci is Traci Renee Culpepper (Stickley) in the family tree.