This wedding dress looks like the floor of my hallway on laundry day. Nothing like exchanging vows with your beloved looking like a prostitute wrapped in a comforter.
My latest guilty reality TV pleasure is Platinum Weddings. With each episode, obscenely wealthy couples spend the national debt to plan their wedding as if to say, “Our love is greater than yours because our wedding cost more than your’s and your parents’ houses combined.” Ain’t love grand?
As I type this, I am watching Sajid, a therapist, and Gabe, a physician plan their Miami New Year’s Eve nuptials at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Her color is fire-engine red, and her dress is a bell-shaped, heavily seamed sheath from the house of Seuss, with an enormous black sash bifurcating the upper third of her body from her ribcage down, emphasizing her boyish, sparingly endowed figure and stringy blonde hair.
The reception celebrated an Asian theme, with paper umbrellas hanging upside down from the ceiling. One word – Hot. Guests of Sajid and Gabe enjoyed such delicacies as a paella station, a sushi station, a pork station, a chocolate spare-rib station, and a Pepto Bismol station. According to the lovely bride, there was no budget – if they liked it, they got it! Total budget – $150,000. I think the biggest waste of money has GOT to be the flowers. How the hell are you going to spend $75,000 on some carnations that have been ripped from their stems, hot glued to a dirty stick, and arranged in a three-dollar glass vase with a scallopy edge from Michael’s and given a generous application of glitter?
Trust me, sister, it’s all downhill from there. The bigger the show that people put on to profess their love for someone, the more warped the reality of the situation.
I tried to have a big wedding once and it turned out like shit. I had a pretty dress, but the wedding (and subsequent marriage) were both hideously disastrous. The year was 1993, and I had really big tortoise-shell framed glasses. Much bigger than they needed to be. If I remember correctly, I got 12 free dinners from some local restaurant just for getting those glasses, but I digress.
Some highlights of my first wedding include two knocked-up bridesmaids not fitting into their dresses, the rehearsal dinner at the ELKS Lodge decorated with Emmet Kelly clowns and featuring a drunken stranger slurring his good intention and splashing his gin and tonic all over the wedding party, and my irretrievable beast of a mother-in-law showing up at my parents’ house the day after the wedding to shakedown my terminally ill mother for half the cost of the wedding.
Not exactly a Platinum Wedding. More like a Crushed Aluminum Wedding. I spent the next nine years of my life trying to escape the banjo music and lifestyle that followed me everywhere. Thank God I came to my senses.
As soon as the ink on the divorce papers was dry, I beat a hasty retreat to Vegas and did it the right way…50 bucks for a marriage license and a limo ride, and the rest of the trip gambling and eating with the love of my life. Now THAT is a Platinum Wedding.
Viva Las Vegas!
Editor’s Note: 12 free dinners… hmmmmm…
I did my first wedding all out and was frocked in an overdone garb as you show here. and I HATED every minute of the nightmare right down to the chocolate cake my mother unilaterally decided needed orange and red roses plastered all over it, y’know… because a chocolate cake wasn’t good enough to leave alone! My parents, being very good southern baptists had never imbibed alcohol (at least in my presence anyway), yet they got roiling drunk and my father had to pick up and carry out my 300lbs mother after she went ‘down, down, down’ to Rock Lobster by the B-52′s and couldn’t get up again. This was a telling start to my marriage in a formerly orthodox Jewish family who still make it a point, even now, to remind me that I am trailer trash when they see their sole heir, ehem… grandson.
The second time around I refused to plan anything excepting my promise to show up at the appointed time and place. I was about 40 minutes late in getting to the chapel where only 25 people including the whole of the wedding party were allowed in the alter-shack built by DeGrazia to honor La Virgen de Guadalupe. I walked down the aisle with my feet firmly planted on the ground kicking off my stilleto’d sandals and was barefoot while carrying a bunch of wildflowers wearing a 60′s sheath dress I picked up on 4th avenue… it was a lovely dream with no fuss and no muss and has outlasted the nightmare of my first marrying effort!
Thank goodness for 2nd chances and our will to overcome – or we’d be living to the tune of banjos for the rest of our miserable days!
I am telling the world right now…when the time comes that my children should want to waste money on that BS, I am going to offer them a lump sum NOT to have a big, fancy wedding…
I can’t stand the idea of someone subjecting them to that ridiculously shallow ceremony…
I actually worry about stuff like this.
hey Katie,
I found you on google. Your sense of humor cracks me up! Weddings are a racket! But maybe with today’s economy people won’t go so crazy. It’s seems like it’s all about outdoing the last wedding. Still, I don’t mind attending the overdone affairs and enjoying the food and drink… just wouldn’t want to pay for it! Stacy (aka trade show displays)
PS. I wonder if the wedding dress designer ever read your blog post and what they would think of “looks like a pile of laundry)
Thanks, Stacy Trade Show Displays! I bet the designer of the wedding dress would laugh heartily at my post as they deposited their check for 15,000 dollars that they made off of the sale of that dress…Hell, I bet it costs MORE than $15,000!
I have always wanted to crash weddings. I think it would be a lot of fun to show up with a gift and insinuate myself into every single picture, so that – for the rest of their lives – the bride and groom are forced to wonder, “Who the hell is that lady? My parents don’t know her, YOUR parents don’t know her…did you WORK with her somewhere? Oh well, at least she gave us some nice towels.”