Say Yes to the Dress

There's not much on the telly on lazy Sunday mornings, so I found myself watching Say Yes to the Dress: Atlanta this morning while I checked my email and took care of some things with my internet business concerns.

Wow. That show made me so glad we're doing things the way we are--I can totally see why a friend who recently got married told me that she just went to the bridal salon alone, without telling any of the females in her family she was going, and found the dress that she wanted. I couldn't handle having to arrange an expedition with like 5 other people so that no one in the close family or friend circuit got offended at being excluded, and then finding what I thought was my dress only to have a mother or grandmother shoot it down. Bad enough if they were just there for company or for advice, but even worse if the parents are actually paying for the wedding and therefore, perhaps, entitled to help with the planning of it.

To hell with that. We're paying for it ourselves, which is of course part of why it's so ghetto chic and down-scaled. Also my parents are just not that concerned about such things. I think they're also, well, not particularly taken with any romantic notions about our day. Like, when my brother got married, it was after a normal courtship time period of 2 or 2 1/2 years, and he's the older sibling, and so on. Enter me, after an 8-year relationship and living quite separated from my extended family--they're not even invited to the wedding separated--and in the meantime my brother's got two kids on the ground, so my parents just aren't feeling too concerned about my actual wedding. Which is a boon. I don't have to have anyone telling me what to do or even offering opposition to what he and I decide. Basically, we're doing exactly what we want--at least insofar as we can manage to arrange it with the options we have to choose from--and the people we invite can come, and enjoy, or not.

And the limited guest list also means that if every one of our close friends wants to make a long speech, no extraneous guests will be rolling their eyes and complaining later about how long the toasts were, because everyone who will be there are those who care the most for us and would be pleased at such toasts. Or simply too inebriated to care, and that works just as well. Also, given that our entire wedding budget is less than what most of these women are allowing for their dress alone, we won't be putting ourselves into debt (either literally or just in the figurative sense of owing parents emotional favors for paying for a huge gala) to get married. Considering that we thought really hard about just going back to Venice and speaking vows in an echoing empty church with no one to witness it but the stones, we're pretty happy with this as a compromise.

So basically what I'm saying is, all the wedding shows on TLC just reinforce to me how non-traditionally I think about such things at this point in my life!

My Mardi Gras Wedding

I am getting married on Tuesday, March 8, 2011. For most of America, that date will have a vague significance of "Fat Tuesday" only because it is the day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. Few places actually celebrate Mardi Gras for itself. I happen to live in one of them. And, yes, I'm getting married right in the thick of it.

We didn't choose the date in spite of the holiday; we chose it because of the holiday. We're not native to this region, but since we moved here, Mardi Gras has become our favorite season. We love the revelry, and the excitement, and the community, and the craziness. The costumes. The fact that he'll be able to remember our anniversary (because we're calling Mardi Gras Day our anniversary, whenever it falls on the calendar), which will make our anniversary more special to him, for falling on his favorite holiday. The obvious truth that when we have an anniversary to celebrate, we can go somewhere really fantastic and watch their Mardi Gras--Rio, Venice, Paris.

We are getting into the spirit of the holiday with our wedding plans. The guest list is limited to immediate family and closest friends; basically the people who know us best and won't merely not judge us for getting married by a man dressed as Jean Lafitte and quite possibly still drunk from the night before, but will in fact actively enjoy such a scene. I've probably offended 2/3 of my family by doing this, and a good many friends as well, but ultimately we want a day that truly celebrates us. Having a family reunion with all its inherent awkardness, or the attendent stress of trying to catch up with friends we haven't seen since college, seemed like it would only detract from that celebration. Also, if we had more than 40 guests, we couldn't use the only space we could find that didn't require us to either belong to the church or take 10 weeks of premarital counseling. (We've been together for nearly 8 years; we know this is for the rest of our lives.) We're also getting into the revelry of Mardi Gras in our theme: it's not a Mardi Gras wedding, it's a masquerade wedding.

Here's how that happened. I warned him, when we moved here, that I was going to start making costumes like crazy, because I have always loved playing dress-up for Halloween, the Renaissance Festival, anything. He said "okay" and moved me here anyway; then he said, "I've always wanted to have a few styles so if you get good at sewing can you make me...?" One of those styles was 18th century gentleman--basically, Mozart from the movie Amadeus. His purple and gold get-up, so it could be worn tailgating at LSU games.







I love Stanze's matching day dress (see my profile picture). We've been daydreaming of wearing such full-on period clothes from Louisiana's founding years, complete with paniers for me and a white wig for him, since we lived in Baton Rouge. So when we finally decided to get married, and we were searching for something that would be meaningful to him so the day wasn't just for me, and settled on Mardi Gras, it seemed very logical to add costumes. And to add, specifically, those costumes. If they're done right, they will provide us years of enjoyment with tailgating and parading on Mardi Gras Day--and every additional wearing is both a reminder of our wedding day, and a justification of whatever it costs to make them, versus a dress that I wear literally once in my lifetime and then leave to rot in a closet or a box with scented sachets in the attic.

We're pretty laid-back, low-key people, so our wedding plans are simple. We're not bothering with flowers, as the space is already decorated with antiques (maximum decoration on our part might be providing tulle for them to drape over the ceiling to cover their Vegas-wedding-shack style dollar bills); we have 13 households getting my self-designed and home-printed invitations and a current maximum of 35 guests, so even if it goes up a few people it's still within our 40; we're not doing a formal reception but champagne and cake right after the ceremony to end our formal revels; then we and anyone who wants to come are going to second-line out of the chapel and into the hysteria of Mardi Gras Day in the French Quarter and party till the police drive everyone out at midnight.

This blog is meant to be a place for me to express my frustrations, anxieties, triumphs, and challenges throughout the planning and executing process. It will for the most part be about my sewing projects, as that is the bulk of my time and energy in this whole scenario, but I will occasionally talk about the other parts. And I will probably include headless photos for those of my friends (all of you, lol) who are not here to help me drape or fit or cut, or to laugh at me when I bring a piece of my dress out with me to the bar on Saturday afternoon to sew away at what can only be accomplished by hand while we sip our sweating drinks and watch the river roll.

If I don't know you, feel free to take this journey with me. I'm chronicling it as much to help me keep track of my rookie costuming mistakes as to help me remember my wedding planning with clarity; perhaps one track, or the other, of my learning curve can help you on your own journey. And if I do know you, thanks for caring enough to come by!