The booming business of divorce parties

What we have come to, via the BBC:  

After finalising a painful divorce Wendy Lewis decided there was only one way to celebrate – by blasting her wedding dress with a machine gun.

To get the job done the newly divorced American gathered her female friends – and the dress – and flew to Las Vegas, Nevada for a long weekend.

Upon arrival in Vegas the trip to a shooting range was arranged by a small firm at the forefront of one of the city’s fastest-growing business sectors – divorce party planning.

And while what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, the planner in question, Glynda Rhodes, 51, is happy to take up the story.

“Ms Lewis had never picked up a gun before, but she brought her wedding dress into the shooting range and hung it up,” she says.

“Oh if you could have seen the look on her face when she was shooting at her dress. You could just feel that she was letting all that anger out.”

A long-established Vegas-based events planner, Ms Rhodes was historically more used to organising bachelor and bachelorette parties for the hordes of young Americans who fly into the city for one last celebration of single life.

Estimates vary as to the proportion of marriages in the US that end in divorce but some analysts put it as high as half, and Ms Rhodes (herself a divorcee) started to receive a growing number of inquiries from people – both women and men – wishing to celebrate the end of their wedlock.

So in 2012 she launched a new company – The Divorce Party Planner – and the business has boomed ever since, a situation mirrored at similar firms in Vegas and across the US.

Read on.