Overheard by Relarela: “I want to get married so that my friends will make me shtick.”
Well, granted, shtick is when you find out exactly how interesting you are, or how interesting your friends think you are. Don’t you ever wonder what they’ll come up with for your wedding? Sometimes I’m terrified that I’ll get married and people will show up with some lame maypole and arches and that’ll be it, and then and there, on my wedding night, I will learn how truly boring I am.
Wedding-night suicides happen outside of The Princess Bride too, you know.
It’s a depressing possibility. Almost makes me want the opposite: not get married so that I don’t see whether my friends make shtick or not.
Bad for Shidduchim 
HA someone actually said that as a legitimate reason for wanting to get married? Throw her a birthday party and call it a day.
I DO NOT want shticks at my wedding!! where i come from, there is no such thing as shtick and i have a hard time getting used to it
@Yedid- AGREED! I think it’s kind of tacky
I’ve resigned myself to not having any shtick at my wedding..the later you get married the less interesting you shtick gets.
Ew, shtick? Cannot stand it. Despite my love for dancing, I’ve decided to keep the dancing at a minimum (I like to plan ahead. Nothing on the horizon). I find that percentage-wise, very few people are dancers and would rather the meal move along.
Yeah – most of it is tacky. Running around with signs and pictures and whatnot. But I have actually heard it cited as a gauge of whether a person has friends or not. Which made me wonder if it is more than it seems. Personally, I’d rather skip the dancing altogether and just play charades.
I made my friends swear that there would be no shtick at my wedding, just arches to run through, and an umbrella (nice picture and a good excuse to dance on tabletops). I don’t get why every private joke the kallah ever shared has tobe memorialized here; this is not the time and place; do it by the shabbos kallah. The kallah usually ends up looking really ridiculous, because let’s be honest here, most private jokes, when summed up in the word or two as a reminder like “Boogy Woogy Two Shoes” makes you sound like a moron, a moron by your wedding, how nice
Schtick is one of the biggest turn-offs for me; both at weddings and in people.
Coming from a community that never does wedding shtick I was soooooo confused the first time I saw it. Such a strange custom and very childish for a wedding. I just came from a wedding where they had a man dance around in a giant elmo costume…ummmm OKKKKK- there are other (more NORMAL) ways to be mesameach chatan v’kalla
Many of my NMFs requested shtick for a few reasons.
1) It gives you a chance to sit down and get a break from dancing for a few minutes.
2) Reliving good memories is surely mesameach chatan vkallah.
3) Since we all know that one friend getting married changes the nature of a friendship, shtick is sort of like writing in a yearbook at the end of the school year. Acknowledging the memories from the past chapter of our life as we move on to the next chapter.
I am from Brooklyn (Flatbush, to be exact) so shtick is definitely the norm yet I do not want any of it- guess that makes me boring. I agree with the above posters who describe it as tacky. Arches, and maybe an umbrella, are enough for me. Well and a fog machine for the dance floor 😉
It doesn’t make you boring…it makes you classy 🙂
I like shtick, but I can see it leading to comparisons and ill feeling.
Shtick is such an interesting thing. When you’re among the first in your group to get married, it can be fantastic. I was one of the early ones, and the shtick was memorable and wonderful and made us feel really beloved by our friends. Not that we wouldn’t have felt beloved without the shtick, but there’s something really special about personalized dances and tshirts and signs that your friends worked on specially for you.
That said, it gets trickier as your group of friends gets older. My group tried pretty hard to keep the shtick going as the years went by, but it gets harder and harder to do, largely because, once you’re married, you’re not living in an apartment with a bunch of other girls, so you can’t sit around and create shtick well into the night. It requires actual planning, and scheduling.
So there’s no question that our shtick output suffered as we got older–not because we loved our friends any less, but because the energy and opportunity to create it had faded somewhat.
Wow. I’m actually kind of surprised by how many commenters hate schtick. Maybe it’s just because I have a silly personality, but I always love wedding schtick. Much like Penina, I was among the first of my friends to marry, so the schtick at my wedding was great. One of my prouder moments was when I was told that my wedding was the only one many people had ever been to where the schtick on the women’s side was better than that on the men’s.
I guess it depends on the kind of schtick you’ve seen, but in my experience it’s wonderful and really sets a Jewish wedding apart from a goyishe one. (My cousin had never been to a frum wedding before and was very concerned about the whole separate seating/dancing thing. She thought it would be boring. She ended up having the time of her life.)