Set 'Em Up, Me Darlin': It's not just the money... it's the fuss and bother

Sunday, September 7, 2008

It's not just the money... it's the fuss and bother

The Cousin M. sent me this link to a Washington Post piece on the "anti-wedding," a wedding planned by two correspondents for a carefully vetted couple who wanted to buck the Wedding Industrial Complex (ah... so... I'm not the only one to have made that connection, yet another extension of Eisenhower's ____ - Industrial Complex legacy. Actually, what I noted was the Guurlfriend Industrial Complex, which I have yet to see mentioned by anyone else).

The "planners" and their vetted couple, I have to note, went through contortions to come up with a wedding that would be sufficiently disestablishmentarian. They saved money on a princess gown and flowers, but the bride experienced almost as much trauma and drama as any Bridezilla specimen. Let's face it; organizing a protest on Lafayette Square across from the White House takes planning, too. And a community organizer is still someone who can rally a bunch of people together to pull off some major feat. Let's not pretend that either don't take remarkable amounts of work to pull off with any amount of success.

It's the organizing that looms as my biggest potential downfall. If anyone asks me to become their Veep running mate, remind me of myself, will you? Money? Money is no object, because we have none. Well, not "none," but sufficiently little to be able to throw at the problem so that organizing becomes less of an issue for yours truly. All that said, even if I had endless amounts of money, I wouldn't want the standard "dream wedding" that the mags pitch as the must-have of all must-haves. I just want a great party and a fabulous dress to wear to it. And I don't even care if I never wear that dress again. Will Cindy McCain ever again wear the $360,000 ensemble she donned for the first night of the Republican Convention? Doubtful. Maybe the shoes, the watch and the jewelry she'll re-run, but I'll make book on her never more sporting that cloth-of-gold dress.

I can get some great silk fabric for no more than $14-$23 a yard, and suss out a pattern calling for no more than seven yards (and that's one heck of a poofy skirt, my friends). That's $160 of fabulousness there, tops. And if I never wear it again? As long as I have photo documentation of me in my fabulousness, I really don't care.

But back to the issue at hand. Organization, not money, is my big stumbling block. When I pitched the idea of the homemade cupcakes and cupcake decorating "bachelorette" party to Ms. K, who probably knows me and my organizing skills as well as anyone (I got her bare-minimum edited wedding video footage to her in time for a big celebration of her seven year itch), she laughed and laughed...... and predicted with some degree of prophetic accuracy that I would still be working on my dress the night before the event. I can pull together a class syllabus on some random subject thrown my way in no time. Business anthropology? Okay. Web cultures? Sure. Immigration in the new Europe? Bring it on, baby. A groovy party that happens to have me marrying the man I love inserted into it? Well, that's a completely different set of thought processes.

So, the point is, just because one is eschewing the standard "dream wedding," minimizing the costs and the froo-froo and the matching maids all in a row and the various bits and pieces of kitsch and pseudo royal trappings the wedding industry says one simply must have, doesn't mean one eliminates the potential for pipe dreams and imagined "perfect" scenarios and subsequent theatrics when the dancing fairy plums in the head turn out to be ill-tempered trolls with bad breath when seen in the light of day (i.e. reality).

Speaking of dancing fairy plums, I poked around in the Mill End fabric store a bit yesterday, and got some samples of potentially promising fabrics for that fabulous dress thing I was talking about. David likes teals and purples. I dig reds and gunmetal blue. I forced myself away from those mossy greens I inevitable stumble toward, and here's what I came up with, with my apologies to those of you who just aren't that into sewing and fabrics and fashion and all that sort of rot: