The Bro Whisperer: Life As a Bachelor Party Planner

Topless beer pong, jello in tubs, naked basketball—it's all in a "good" day's work for Oren Bornstein, 35, who proudly calls himself a bachelor party planner. I always had a curiosity for the job these guys do, because my ideas of what could go wrong always came from the self-starting knuckleheads in films like American Wedding , Bachelor Party , or The Hangover .

Over the course of six years, Bronstein AKA "BIG OH", a Rob Ford fan originally from Boston Massachusetts, has been runningConnected Montreal—a bachelor and VIP service starting at $89 per person for the basics, all the way to $2,000 for special requests. With the endless-summer wedding season currently underway, he's been in demand, and VICE decided to interview Bornstein about his lifelong bro job. VICE: Becoming a bachelor party planner isn't exactly your typical job. How in the world did this happen for you?
Oren Bornstein: One day I went to my guidance counselor, who told me I can't party for a living, and I wanted to prove him wrong. I guess you could say that I fell into it, working the nightlife scene at the end of university. As I stuck around, other people were getting married and more and more bachelor parties were coming to town. As you know, it's a pain in the ass to plan a bachelor party so that's where I stepped in. I made it easy for them and tried to make it memorable.

I came with an assumption that being a bachelor party planner would be a dream job, just off of the lifestyle. What makes the job actually difficult?
Many of the same problems that come with general hospitality. But my problem is usually compounded because we got guys out here drinking. The bachelors always have this pressure on them because they want to make their friends happy. You'll have the unreasonable types or the random trouble maker that decides to set off a fire alarm. It really stems from people managing their expectations and what they want. With all hospitality, you'll have people who think they could get whatever they want to the point of being a pain. They won't show up on time or just don't plan things properly. I mean, we had guys call off the wedding, which has happened multiple times. More than you think. I also had instances of a bachelor having an epiphany that he was actually getting married, and he fainted in the club. It's all crap like that.

So like I had my ideas with the job, did any surprises come to you also when you first started?
Yeah, it was the response I was getting. The receptiveness of people who seem to trust you explicitly to take care of their bachelor party. You have a big responsibility to make sure everything is perfect and goes well. You come to realise that it's never really about the bachelor himself, it's more about the other people going. The bachelor is already in a good state of mind because he's getting married and it's the best time of his life or whatever. For the guys, the bachelor celebration is just an excuse for themselves and the guys that are usually the most excited are honestly the married guys.

Tell me about the good or crazy moments that come with the job.
The best client that comes to mind was this guy that came in from the south. Flew in private, which is always a good sign. Turns out this guy owns a chain of chicken restaurants in the south, so he goes nuts and spent money like crazy. Kept coming at me with crazier and crazier ideas and we put them all together. He went to the best steakhouse in town and had multiple girls there. So he buys $10,000 dollar bottles of wine and at one point he says 'I want them all to eat naked,' so done. They were all eating caviar and drinking campaign naked at the best steakhouse in Montreal. It's the kind of things you get but at different levels. As for crazy, it depends on your idea of crazy.

Well your idea.
Well if I could find little person strippers, I could retire by now and they're in short supply.

Uh huh. And the weirdest or funniest moment?
Well for an NBA player, and I'm not gonna say his name obviously. But for his retirement party he wanted to play basketball against strippers. So we had him play against five naked strippers and this guy was dunking on them and everything. It was hilarious. Gotta be the funniest thing I'd ever seen. They were trying so hard out there too and he was wiping the floor with them as they just played naked.

You make the job sound easy in a way, you obviously have the glowing reviews to show for it.
Ha, I wrote them all by myself.

So what exactly makes a bachelor party planner like you good at his job in the first place?
I think it's a combination of being on every single detail. You gotta think ahead and know what could go wrong and what could go right. It's a basic formula to make their life easy by taking care of the planning and the hustles under that and I try to make it epic and memorable by doing those out of box ideas. Topless beer pong or a little person bartender. Those things they couldn't come up with themselves. It's a unique job and I have 12 years under my belt. There isn't much I haven't done and seen myself, so it allows me to read situations better than most.

You're a planner afterall, does it ever get old?
No, it's always different. The cool thing about my job is that you never know who is going to come in and who they are. We cater to the stranger requests and we get all kinds of ones, like last week, I had this guy that wanted to do jello wrestling against strippers, and we arranged that. So I went to buy industrial sized tubs of jello, and I spent my time…setting up jello. So you never know, there's all sorts of weird stuff with this job.

What is your bachelor party going to be like?
Myself? Man…I don't know. I think at that point, I wouldn't even have a bachelor party. I've done it so many times.

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