Because I’m the Practical Sort

Here is a picture of me in my wedding dress.  Also in this picture are my three best friends, whom you should hope to be lucky enough meet one day because they are all extremely clever and funny and lovely and great.  These ladies have been my friends since the second, sixth and ninth grade and I am so grateful to still have them in my life.

This picture was taken on my wedding day, because I am not a nutter who wears wedding dresses on days that are not her wedding day.  Do you like my dress?  I liked my dress very much.  I liked the lace and I liked that it wasn’t strapless because strapless makes me paranoid I’m going to flash people.  Strapless was very in that year, or maybe that decade.  To be honest, this actually was a strapless dress and I made the lady add straps.  And I made her take off the big honking jewel that was in the middle of it.  Because I’m just not that kind of girl.

I had a hard time finding this dress because I had set a budget.  I did not think it was an unreasonably meager budget.  In fact, I thought it was unreasonably grand.  It was a number that was several times what I have ever paid for a dress.  And ever will again, I should think.   But apparently white and ivory fabrics cost much more than other fabrics, because wedding dresses are obscenely expensive.  I remember going into one store and telling them what I was willing to spend and they had one dress in my range and it was ugly.

But in the end I found this one within my budget in the part of town where they have bars on the windows and all was well and I got to feel pretty on my wedding day even though I was wearing white.  (I pretty much never wear white.  I wear black and occasionally red or purple or navy.  But mostly black.)

See! Bending forward - no flashing!

White tends to make me look vitamin deficient or something.  I do not look that way in these photos because I had spent the previous six weeks going to tanning beds.  I couldn’t believe I was doing that as I did it and I still can’t believe I did it.  For one thing, it just seems so very vain.  For another, I am a worrier on an epic scale and one of the things I worry about is diseases that might result in doctors taking a scalpel to me.  Skin cancer happens to be one of those diseases.  Generally speaking, I am vigilant with the sunscreen.  But it’s amazing what you can justify sometimes.

Anyway, why am I yammering on about my wedding dress when my wedding was a few years ago now?  Because a few nights ago, I got a call from the dress shop where I bought it and they’ve sold it again and they have a cheque for me.  Hurray!

I had sort of forgotten that they even had it.  I gave it back to them to re-sell a few months after we got married.  I know there are all sorts of options for other things you can do with your dress – you can dry-clean and vacuum-pack it, you can frame it, you can make it into a quilt or a tablecloth if you are crafty, or — in a trend that I actually think is pretty wasteful — you can destroy it during an artsy photo shoot.

But I suppose I am something of a mercenary soul.  No.  Actually, that’s not true at all.  If I don’t feel like doing something, you can’t pay me enough to do it.  Regardless, I wanted to try to recoup some of my losses.  I have photos to remember the day and I tend not to be overly sentimental about things.  It was, after all, only a dress, however pretty and expensive, and storage is at a premium when you live in a 700 square foot apartment.  So off it went to the shop.

And now, over two years later, someone else gets to wear it and I get money.  This makes me so much happier than having it in my closet.  I hope whoever bought it has a wonderful day and a wonderful marriage.