Your Special(ly Expensive) Day

While I may be a singleton, I have a keen interest in what is usually referred to as the Bridal Industry. The name alone gives me the cold chills. It typically entails a lot of hoopla about The Dress, The Venue, The Flowers, and Registering For Things Like Toaster Ovens You Should Already Have Since You're An Adult, Right? To be followed by tears and fighting between the happy couple and/or the friends and parents of the happy couple and on one memorable occasion my formerly sane friend spent an hour on the phone with me about to never talk to her poor mother ever ever again for the mortal sin of - are you ready for this? - sealing the invitations wrong. Then there are $7000 dresses you seal up and never wear again, and the engraved matches for people who don't smoke and a big formal sit down dinner you'll never eat for the grand total of $20,000. Trust me on this, I've been sashayed down aisles as a bridesmaid wearing a pee-yellow dress and pinchy shoes and ears bearing the Official Pearl Earrings, the only ones sanctioned by the bride after two hours of intense cross-examination.

I just don't get it. Am I missing an X chromosone or two?

Mind you, I was raised by a thrifty French Jew, and I am a thrifty woman. I live value. I like knowing that my dollars are going somewhere. Although I am a self-admitted fashionista, I do not want those dollars to go to a wear-once outfit that is going to make piddling before the ceremony an experience requiring two bridesmaids holding up my train in their own pee-colored dresses. I do not want a giant party that costs as much as a new Honda Accord, or if it means planning endlessly, writing lists on yellow legal pads, and worrying about whether the violets will make it through to Tuesday because the florist is out sick and it's too late to get into the flower mart and everything happens to me. About the only good part as far as I can see is sampling the wedding cakes. Now that I can get behind. I'm sure I speak for Hapa Boy on that one aspect as well. We are both happy to do any tastings necessary.

But I digress.

Nearly every single bride I've ever been around has been some variety of knife-wielding maniac. I grant you, this is sometimes amusing from a distance. Take the spellbinding television show: Say Yes to the Dress. In this brilliant social satire, young and youngish brides go to the ginormous bridal emporium, Kleinfeld's, where they try on dress after expensive dress, helped in this heartstoppingly important endeavor by some heavily accented New Yawk women who seem to have cornered the market on both platitudes and lip liner. You can hardly blame them for going in for the kill, uh I mean sale - the cheapest of the dresses will snap $2500 from your bank account. You know, if I'm going to give someone $2500, I'd like to wear it not once but daily. In fact, it leads to a totally different understanding of why Miss Havisham never took her wedding dress off in Great Expectations - maybe she wasn't psychotic, she was just trying to get her money out of it. Obviously, the women on this show are more concerned with their Special Day and their Happy Ending (and I hope their grooms are getting some Happy Endings because I would not want to spend more than twenty minutes around most of their lovely brides, as witnessed below:



But it isn't really the money that gets me about the Bridal Industry. It's the way it packages happiness and expectations. It's about how being a Beautiful Bride equals making everyone around you miserable and buying dresses that cost the equivalent of six months at a private school and having professional makeup done and your hair all poofed up in a way you'll never wear it again. It's about the effect on a marriage when the inevitable letdown occurs when you are no longer a Princess, you're shuffling along inside your life and your relationship like everyone else. It's about the way America insists that all life events must be marketed and budgeted for and expensive to be memorable. It's not the fault of the brides that they go insane, it's the pressure that comes from living up to society's idea of The Day and all the Save the Date cards and engraved invitations. As my lovely friend A. puts it: What's wrong with an Evite? It's environmentally friendly. I can promise that if Hapa Boy and I tie the proverbial knot, I'm going to supply great bread, some lovely cheeses, and a mess of fruit and cupcakes. That's my favorite food, people. Does anyone really want to eat the chicken? I'm going to put out a few bottles of cheapish wine to toast a lovely outdoor setting and the fact that I'm proud to travel through life with the best man I've ever known. And because it's His Day too, he can have the day that he wants. He can wear dark jeans or an old suit because I would plan to wear the prettiest dress I can find at a price that won't make me gasp or feel pinched at the waist and my normal messy hair and some bright red lipstick.

Unless, of course, my sister gives me her designer wedding dress. That one has already been paid for.