27 Dresses. Not.

Well, it COULD be a thrift shop purchase, although it looks more like a nightgown with mosquito netting. (Wiki Commons)

Could you put in some pew de soy?

What?

During journalism grad school, I got a job copy editing the local morning rag. Glen, one of the typesetters, who had been an English teacher before the unruly kids almost destroyed his gentle soul, was getting married and had handed me the wedding announcement.

"Oh," said I. "Peau de soie? Well, does her gown entail any peau de soie? Probably; most do. Why don't you ask Esther and find out."

He did. It did have pew de soy and some Allan's son's (Alencon) lace as well. Still, I sent him to the Community Editor with the announcement, as it was her job to marshall all the laces and silks and satins into regimented rows, always ending in, "The couple will honeymoon in Myrtle Beach." Everyone who lived in Athens, GA, honeymooned in Myrtle Beach. I suspect they thought a passport would be required if they ventured farther afield.

I missed that wedding. I even missed the one wedding for which I was supposed to be a member of the wedding party. Lord, how I did not want to do that. I managed to get a strep throat a few days before that wedding, which was to be the day before my college graduation, and two days before my husband, who was getting his doctorate, and I moved to Denver from Binghamton, NY. So I bombed out. Whew.


I think I am phobic about weddings. It might have something to do with the wedding in the movie 16 Candles. Or maybe the 1978 movie, A Wedding, directed by Robert Altman and casting funnywoman Carol Burnett in an unaccountably bleak role. A wedding, it always seemed to me, was a prescription for one kind of disaster or another. So I avoided them. Even my own...and I've had three, or four if you count the last one.


Interfaith marriage? Problem solved

The first one was fraught with peril because the groom was Jewish and I was nominally Roman Catholic, although I had, by age 20, long since abandoned that nonsense. We could find no clergyman to marry us. After much dialing, I finally found a New York State Supreme Court Justice who agreed to do the deed as long as it could be on a Wednesday morning in March. OK.

The attitudes toward this happy event ranged from horrified to OK with it. Well, maybe a bit more. For example: 

• My father, the RC patriarch, was not happy. 
• My Episcopalian grandmother, my mother's mother, was happy. She liked Paul, my fiance. 
• My brother was 15. That is, he didn't really care. Sure, it was a day off from school--two because of the trip from Long Island to Binghamton. 
• My husband's favorite aunt--and mine too, as it would turn out--flew from NYC the night before and back the next afternoon. She was a grand lady, and also the able long-time cable desk chief at Time, Inc. She was happy. I think she was as happy a my grandmother. They were much alike.
  

There was also Paul's best friend as his witness and my best friend as mine. I think they were both on the negative side of the midline between ecstatic and horrified, but only just.


But if you value your belief that weddings are a priori happy occasions, do not look at that wedding picture. We all look like we've had the word from the stormtroopers and we're next. All of us.


Next time I got married, it was in Athens, GA. I was in grad school, had just divorced No. 1, and No. 2 seemed like a good bet. He was also a journalist, and, in fact, the marriage lasted 16 years, a lot better than the scant five for marriage number one. The wedding? Neither of us wanted clergy, so we trotted over, with our two best friends, to the offices of an elderly judge. At one point, we had to quietly snake the rings off each other's fingers because the old judge had forgotten we'd done that already. So we did it again. I think he got tired after that, or he might have gone round again.


The reception was a barbecue at a friend's house. We fell out of a hammock together after too many peach daiquiries.


Third time's the charm

Marriage number three (five years and counting) was supposed to be the first actual church wedding I'd ever had. I had become a nominal Episcopalian, mainly for the coffee hour as freelancing is lonely work, and my husband was Church of England, being a Brit. We even had the de rigeur conversation with the Rector who assured us it was very important to involve the church community, who would be there for us as marriage took its inevitable toll on us (he didn't put it that way.) We nodded. Then Simon ran off to fly to Africa or someplace on business, and I went home to wonder how I could ever even get through buying some kind of frou-frou dress, never mind figuring out how to involve Simon's three grown daughters in the ceremony, as the Rector had suggested. A dilemma indeed as at least one of them hated me (and still does.) And this is supposed to be joyous?






"Why don't you just go get the license today and I'll marry you Saturday night. It will be fun. I'll get champagne," she said.


I called Simon at work and he agreed to meet me at the county office where marriage licenses could be procured.

On Saturday, we cleaned out part of the basement, took the stuff to the landfill, and returned the borrowed truck to its owner. It began to snow. Hard. Our return trip, from the mountains around Camp David where his friend lived, among the constant coming and goings of the presidential copter and 24/7 fighter jets on patrol, was really slow. But I really wanted to paint my toenails.

I have no idea why it was so important to me to paint my toenails.  For this wedding, I was wearing a purple two-piece dress I had gotten from my cousin's thrift shop.


Well, it wasn't really a thrift shop. My cousin manages a big apartment building in Washington, DC, and when someone moves out, they often tell him to take what he wants. One woman left a ton of books, a ton of clothing, a ton of kitchen equipment. He took it all. When my friend Noeleen and I visited, while Simon was in Africa, we each chose what fit us from the selection in Dennis's spare room. She got mainly shoes; I got mainly clothing.


Anyway, between trying to fluff up my hair after the snow experience and painting my toenails for the open-toed shoes to go with the thrift shop dress, we were late. Quite late. The cell phone call to Jane, the minister, produced ice almost as bad as what was on the roads. "If you're not here in half an hour, I won't do it," she said. "Noeleen is already here."


We got there. And it was fine. Short and sweet. Then Jane, her husband, Noeleen and we newlyweds had champagne, and then we drove through the blizzard to our favorite Indian restaurant in Baltimore.


Three weeks later, we had the reception on the date of the original, non-starter church wedding, since it was already booked and paid for. I would have gone through with that wedding itself, I guess, but when I called to tell the Rector that we had already gotten married, so it would just have to be a blessing and not a full wedding, he said that was all right. Civil weddings could be blessed.

"What? You were married by a bona fide minister? Then I can't bless it," he said. "It has already been done."


He wasn't too fond of us after that. The community seemed OK with it, though, as those we had invited all came to the reception. I wore some old black silk pants I had, a silk chemise I had bought at Nordstrom Rack, and the thrift shop Asian coat thingie in embroidered yellow silk I had found the week before. No, really. This time it WAS from a thrift shop.


But I did, the morning of the reception, decide maybe I should go have my hair done.

STD: Sexual disease? Or Save the Date...a disease in its own right

A wedding of this magnitude might rate an STD...but real royals wouldn't do anything that common! (Wiki Commons)

I am pleased to announce that from the following date onward―from June 15, 2011―any “save the date” notice that enters my house will be immediately immolated and its sender consigned to the column in my address book called “Hopelessly Crass Humans.”

The first time I got a “save the date” card regarding a wedding, I was appalled. It happened about six years ago, and to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t addressed to me, but to the man I was about to marry. Nonetheless, as I was now essentially the co-head of household, I was within my rights to deal with the thing as seemed best to me in the running of my household. I tossed it in the bin because it was so cheeky.  No, it was tacky. And crass. Mainly, it was presumptuous. Yes, that.

Still, I guess I should have figured such things were in the wings the first time I heard of a pre-engagement ring some years earlier. What the heck is THAT? When one becomes engaged, it means the man has asked the woman to marry him. (I am not dealing here with other combinations of humans agreeing to love, honor, cherish and set up house. It’s bad enough sorting out the excesses in traditional marriages in a single column; other permutations will have to wait until the oldest is out of the way.)

What, then, does a pre-engagement signify? That the man has told the woman that if she wears this semi-precious ring, later on he’ll probably get down on one knee and pop the question? Although popping, at that point, would seem the wrong image entirely. What ever happened to going steady? What about shacking up? I realize going steady has been gone since Ozzie & Harriet left the TV screens of America. But shacking up is still around, and indeed, as far as I can tell, most people who engage in pre-engagement and engagement are already quite fully engaged, so to speak.

So now there is the “save the date” card at some time before the bona fide wedding invitations go out, which is traditionally six weeks before the wedding. These days, when one’s family and friends often live a couple of plane rides away, perhaps six weeks is a bit short notice. But why not just send the invitations at, say, eight weeks? That “save the date” thing we received came in February, a week or so before our own wedding. We didn’t want too much fuss for ours―being older―so we booked a venue, ordered a cake, and sent out some hand-written invitations about three weeks before. Amazingly enough, two cousins made a long-distance trip anyway, although I was not expecting to see them. Not getting too wound up in all this does allow one some nice surprises.

That first ever "save the date" card, arriving in the dead of winter, was for a wedding in December, almost a full year hence. We didn't attend.

Is a "Save the Date" card appropriate for a Princess Bride?

What, though, is wrong with sending a “save the date” card if one is planning a big, extravagant, expensive wedding and the last thing one wants is surprises? Simple.

Sending a “save the date” card is assuming far too much. It is assuming that seeing Ms. Kerr wed Mr. Wang is the most important thing on one’s entire social calendar for the year.

And yes, it would be announced in the paper as the Wang-Kerr wedding, which might almost make it worthy of being the most important event on one’s yearly calendar.  As an aside, I always loved the wedding announcements Leno did on the Tonight Show. (Loved them more than bits about the Stupid Criminals who demanded money from banks by handing the teller an envelope with the criminal’s own return address on it.) Other favorite weddings include the Large-Beaver wedding, the Lovegrove-Butts wedding, the Phillips-Bragh wedding, the Small-Johnson wedding….

The sniggers engendered by surnames aside, there apparently is some etiquette surrounding the execrable cards.  On the iVillage website, a short article is devoted to this. The author contends the cards developed as a way to respect guests’ time and “make sure they can attend the wedding.”

Oh? I was of the opinion that attending a wedding or declining the invitation was purely a matter of personal choice, and not something for the person doing the inviting to worry about. This making-sure aspect seems to violate the age-old conventions involving issuing invitations and awaiting the positive replies of those who choose to attend―which is true for any event, not just weddings―and the regrets of those who cannot or will not attend.

In a world in which the least desire of the Princess Bride must be catered for, the making-sure aspect of  “save the date” cards doesn’t even come under the faux pas as enumerated in iVillage.

Advice from the iVillage sage

Here is, abbreviated, the iVillage sage advice:

One is advised not to send the “save the date” cards immediately upon the engagement due to vagaries in family relationships and pressures on wedding budgets.

One is advised not to send a card that’s off-color or seems to celebrate drunkenness and so on. One is advised to be tasteful. (Hasn’t that horse already left the gate if one is even thinking about sending a tacky, obnoxious, imperious card in the first place?)

The best part of it the STD card

One is advised to boldly inform recipients of the “card” when it isn’t a card at all but a fridge magnet, lest they inadvertently lay it down on a computer component and erase memory.  This was my favorite, actually―such total tackiness―until I read the next bit of advice: Senders are advised to give complete information about the wedding venue in the miserable s-t-d card because “Guests need to know how many days they'll need to take off of work.”

My answer to that would be “None.” Regardless. None.*

Finally, one is advised not to fill the envelope with confetti or sparklies as people get annoyed when they must vacuum after opening the mail. “A better enclosure is a sheet of vellum with a poem or something that can be kept - or tossed - with ease,” says the iVillage writer.

If the sender is clever, the recipient can display that poem on the fridge, held in place by the magnet with the smiling pre-nuptial faces of Tiffany and Scott.

Or, if the recipient has any sense, he or she can toss the whole lot in the bin, and spend any time off on something more enjoyable than toting a hundred bucks worth of Pilsner glasses wrapped in white and silver paper to an event where they’ll have to eat cold food, totter in high heels at the non-free open bar trying to kill the pain of the feet and the fête, and pretend to enjoy flapping their wings when Wedding Band Willie cranks up that all-time favorite, The Chicken Dance.

If you’d like to read the entire iVillage instruction article for sending “save the date” cards, click here.

*We did take a day off to attend my nephew’s out-of-town wedding. But his fiancée had not sent the tacky std cards…and they were both surprised when quite a few of us who lived far away chose, without coercion, to attend a lovely small lakeside wedding at an historic hotel in New York’s Finger Lakes region.

Mad Hatters: 13 Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hats

Where were the household gods, of so many households, when taste in wedding hats was being handed out?

Click below....and watch early for the electric blue banana bicycle seat.


Mad Hatters: 13 Ridiculous Royal Wedding Hats

Royal Wedding, and hope for humanity. Really.

London dressed for a wedding (Wiki commons)

The Queen of England looked as happy this morning, leaving her grandson’s wedding, as I’ve ever seen her. I think that has meaning. Whether HRH Queen Elizabeth II is finally accepting change, I cannot tell, but I would surmise that her grandson and his bride, the very breath of the modern couple, seem to have lured Her Majesty into something of a thaw. It is possible that the sheer magnitude of their enduring love―lasting a decade and enduring vicissitudes of sorts and still ending at a traditional altar bedecked ecologically, it’s clergy enjoined to offer globally inclusive prayers written by that couple―will bring about change that is good for their subjects, even before, some years hence, they ascend the throne.

How we got here

While Wills and Harry, his children, have always been favourites of the people and the press, Prince Charles has always seemed a sort of poor stick. HRH Prince Charles was done no favours by a forced marriage to a woman he didn’t love, who nonetheless provided two appealing sons and raised them well. His marriage to Camilla Parker Bowles seemed a travesty, and it was, simply because it should have happened decades earlier, nor not have happened at all. Someone needed to be wiser, and no one was.

But what is, as the New Agers say, is best. I believe it. Princess Diana was the martyr to change in the British monarchy, god rest her soul. Prince Charles wasn’t quite ready to be dragged kicking and screaming into what I think, in fact, he wanted―marriage to a commoner he loved. He wasn’t ready to give up the throne, nor tussle with his formidable mother and father. So be it. He didn’t get to marry his commoner, rather than Diana the fake commoner, whose pedigree exceeded that of Charles himself, although the grandest title she possessed was Lady, making her almost common.

If even half what was written by Diana herself and in the tabloids was true, Prince Charles was something of a cad toward her. But think about it: He was forced to marry an incredibly young and sheltered virgin many years younger, a starry-eyed girl who had no equipment either or royal life or to either vanquish, or accept, a romantic rival.

Had Diana been French, she might have said, as so many French woman have done for so long, “Well, have your little fling. Go on holiday with her, if you like. But bring yourself and your pay check home to me.” A practical viewpoint, but one that wasn’t going to wash either with the British monarch-in-waiting or with his child bride. And so, disaster struck.

The other woman, no better than she had to be

Camilla? Well, she was the only cast member in this royal drama who could have made a tragedy into a comedy, but chose not to. Had she walked away, perhaps….but then, what is, is best.

And so, after Diana the fake commoner who was elevated to royalty, and Camilla the bona fide commoner was not elevated by the Queen (doubtless in mind of the havoc wreaked in the royal household by Camilla), we have Kate Middleton, a bona fide commoner who has been elevated to HRH status by the Queen.

It appears Kate Middleton has won acceptance by the guardian of the British monarchy’s tradition, HRH Queen Elizabeth II. It bespeaks not just a small change, I think, but perhaps a large one, all things considered. There has been no hint that HRH Queen Elizabeth was dismayed by this marriage.  Indeed, she did make a few demands―tiara rather than flowers in the bride’s hair, I think, and a traditional wedding breakfast. But despite having relatively little input to the wedding of the second in line to the throne, and a man who will almost doubtlessly reign longer than his father will, the Queen seemed genuinely happy.

Global wedding of sorts

Queen Elizabeth’s grandson and his bride wrote a prayer that was inclusive not only of his subjects-to-be, but of all the world. I think the couple take their vows to each other seriously, but I think they take their vows to humanity more seriously still. They vowed, in that prayer, to attend to the needs of others. Period. End of story. It is unclear what Kate Middleton as done to date that would demonstrate her commitment to a duty to humanity in general and her future subjects in particular. But Prince William has demonstrated his intention with actions: He is a search & rescue helicopter pilot. Search and rescue. Service and assistance. A dangerous job, a job only carried out when mortal peril is on the horizon.

If one combines Prince William’s service to others with...

The compassion he learned from his mother …

The gifts of his father’s nature (who I think history will paint with some errors, big ones, but with some genuine contributions to human welfare as well)…

And the steadfastness of a monarchy―of which he is a part―that endured the WWII blitz in situ (in comparison to the behaviour o that execrable US President George W. Bush who fled Washington, DC, in an highly fortified airplane when 3,500 of his citizens had been savagely murdered from the air and needed a leader)…

Then one gets everything one needs to bring the British monarchy forward, possibly fast forward even during the end of his grandmother’s reign, through his father’s time on the throne and into the world Prince William and HRH The Duchess of Cambridge envision, apparent in every particle of their long and thoughtful relationship and their simple and inclusive--by royal standards--marriage ceremony.