the wedding pt 3: the dress

The absolute pinnacle of a woman's life: the purchase of a wedding dress. Or so I hear.

About a month after our engagement, I had the hall and church booked, and it was around this time that I realized that wedding planning probably wouldn't be my cup of tea. I ran out of steam. I decided that only 1-2 months should be allotted for wedding planning, not 11-12. Total waste of brain space.

I bookmarked two pictures of flower bouquets I found online. I made a folder on my desktop called "Wedding". I made many sub-folders within the Wedding folder which remained empty. I signed up on theknot.com because that's apparently what brides are supposed to do and got annoyed by their constant wedding countdown emails. I'm fully aware that my wedding is six months away. Please stop reminding me. As a side note, they're now sending me emails from thebump.com. REALLY?? Give a girl a break, sheeeez!

Anyway, point is, I managed to do zilch in terms of wedding planning over the next three months. Now that is a high level of procrastination that many only dream of. Then my mom said, Suzanne, you probably need a dress, and I said, yeah, probably. So I booked an appointment and went here with my mom and younger sisters:

It's a non-profit organization that receives dress donations from salons, magazine shoots, and brides, and sells the dresses for very reasonable prices, using the money made to assist other organizations in the research and fight against cancer. Kinda cool.

There is a completely random variety of dresses to choose from. You can't really go with something specific in mind, which worked perfectly for me because after browsing a couple of Maggie Sottero slideshows online I got sick of waiting for the pictures to load and gave up, resulting in Suzanne still not knowing what she was looking for.

While there I think I tried on every dress in my size. Since I'm over 6 feet tall, skirt length was kind of an issue. We prevailed, though, and found one. I didn't have an "aha" moment, and didn't weep when I saw myself in the mirror. It was more like "Will I be able to dance to MJ's Thriller in this? Yes. Yes I will. This is the one."

It needed some alternation, of course: several inches of extra fabric sewn along the bottom and some straps added to make the Thriller dancing more of a reality -- and finally, the dress was had. I put it in my closet and hoped it would still fit six months later.

Very soon after all this, I was wandering the aisles of Payless Shoe Source (well, at least the size 11 chunk of the aisles) and found my shoes. They were 11 dollars and too small. But only 1/2 a size too small. I bought them. Outfit completed! I tried to stretch them with ice in the freezer. I wore them around the house to stretch them out more. I was DETERMINED to wear my bargain wedding shoes. And I did. And by the end of our wedding day my right big toenail was a little bruised. But it was worth the pain.

Total disaster of a bride. More successful in the wife department, I think. Right Wayne?