Damn You, Jenna Bush

From a certain Maid of Honor:

"Jenna Bush had 15 individually designed dresses made for her bridesmaids...along with an oscar de la renta dress. you are really going to have to pick things up if you want to compete ;)"

Mark Your Calendar

(When you buy one for next year.)

August 30, 2009

Just under 500 days to go...

Marketing Genius

Somebody at the Bridal Mall in Niantic must be seriously channeling me, because this came in the mail yesterday.



Large print version:

The Dress...

not just any dress, your
WEDDING DRESS

Just admit it...
At some point in planning your wedding, it becomes
All About THE DRESS!

Even if you've resisted the hype
you still need The Dress.

All eyes will be on you...
especially your Groom's!

Adventures in Dresses, Part I

Approximate recreation of Arielle in dress.

I tried on a wedding dress last weekend. It was horrifying.

You may know that I've never been the sort of girl to dream of my wedding and imagine myself in white lace or chiffon or whatever. Even as I've embraced the wedding planning process (I do love to plan), the dress has been one thing I still dread.

But I tend to like getting the things I dread out of the way, and an engaged friend had had some success with dresses at a little non-wedding-specific boutique in New Haven, so I figured I'd give it a shot when I was in the neighborhood.

Oh god.

My first clue that this might not be a dreamy experience came when I noticed that the pretty white dresses hanging in the store were all about a foot taller than I am. I know they can tailor things, but talk about a waste of yardage.

I should say here that I didn't have particularly high expectations; all those stories I'd been told about how magical it is to put on a white dress for the first time had completely gone over my head. My hatred of shopping is probably pathological and has led me to do things like buy the same sweater in three different colors to avoid having to shop for another few years. Dress shopping is particularly loathsome as I don't wear the same size in all places. I do find dresses very pretty, but as a practical matter, they're dreadful, and since I wear them about twice a year, I don't tend to buy them very often. I think at least three of the eight or so dresses that I own were purchased in middle school.

But I digress.

Being a small, non-wedding boutique, this store had exactly one wedding dress in stock, though it did have a few white ones and a nice pinkish one. Fortunately, it was a nice, simple, strapless white thing by Nicole Miller, whose dresses I tend to like. (No, I never thought I'd learn the names of any designers either, but one slow Saturday working the cops shift mixed with theKnot wedding dress gallery made me a changed women. Also I think I had some Nicole Miller stationery when I was at camp one year that I really liked.)

So into the dressing room I go. The fastidious salesman even thought the dress was in my size, so the expectations were creeping upward.

Big mistake.

Besides the three feet of extra fabric on the floor beneath my feet, the waist fell somewhere below my hips. I won't even discuss the boobage. It was sort of like being a child and trying on your mother's clothes, or at least putting on something that screamed, rather loudly, "this is not for you!"

Somehow the salesman overrode my protests and coaxed me out of the dressing room. First he suggested that I put on some high heels. This did not really have the desired transformational effect, though it did make me look about two inches taller (and worried that I'd fall out of them and break my ankle). Because grown up shoes also don't fit me.

I think what disappointed me most about this experience was not that the dress looked bad; some dresses just don't work for some people, and this one clearly wasn't meant for me. And I'm told that tailoring really can work wonders.

No, what really bugged me was that looking in the mirror in it felt like something of a dull thud. I'm not really sure what that meant, but it certainly wasn't magic.

I suppose I shouldn't have such high expectations. After all, if I never considered the bridal gown the crowning, dreamy moment of my adulthood, I shouldn't really expect to find my dream dress or expect much euphoria once I find one close. I guess the white dress thing just doesn't do it for me.

Unfortunately, the tall, beautiful Nicole Miller dress has left me with even more dread than before. I was hoping to preempt any chaperoned shopping trips by jumpstarting the search last weekend (I also don't like shopping with people; ask Rick about that one), but clearly that effort failed. I suppose I will have to get back on the horse at some point, but man, I am really not looking forward to this part.

(Things not included in this post that I meant to include: Did I miss something in girl school about the point of spending thousands of dollars on a dress you're going to wear for six hours? Seriously? Also, the allure of a train completely eludes me. If anyone would like to explain its importance to me I might reconsider, but at the moment I have no interest in growing a gigantic satin tail.)

Just A Thought

Way back when I started looking for wedding sites (all of six weeks ago), I thought chair covers provided a nice look. Now I'm starting to think they make it look like the chairs have joined the klan. Is it just me?

Last Names, Again

So I've decided to go with the feminism-be-damned option and take Rick's name.

Actually, I think I'm going to go with the logic-be-damned option and just add Rick's name onto mine, but shove my last names over to be middle names so I can both keep my names and end up with just one last name. Because how often do you really write your full full name these days? And apparently having three middle names is totally legal in Connecticut.

Which leads me to what seems to be a much trickier question: What do I do with my byline?

The personal life name-change was a pretty easy decision, especially once I realized there's a way to take his name without actually losing any of mine. It might have been harder if I had just one name originally, but this whole double-naming thing reaches its logical conclusion in one generation. And I want to have the same last name as my (imaginary future) children.

But work is trickier. I always figured I'd change my name privately and keep my maiden names for work. Aside from being far simpler not to change anything, I figured it would give me a nice cushion of anonymity once the name that appears in the paper is not my legal name. (Not that anyone but journalists and their moms actually notice bylines.)

The more I think about it, though, I start to think that's self-defeating.

If name-changing is about convenience, then it would certainly be more useful for work to have one easily spellable and recognizable name. This occurs to me every time I try to leave a message for someone and end up spelling my name four times, or every time our computer system malfunctions and I have to call our company's IT helpdesk in India (my outsourced colleagues may speak perfectly fine English, but my guess is they don't deal with a lot of people named Levin). One name, and a common one at that, would just be way easier.

Of course, I do kind of like how my byline looks. And it is the name I've used as I started my career, however measly it is. And somehow, bringing your name change into the professional world plants you firmly on one side of the name-changing debate, as if every time you have to explain to a colleague or source or prospective employer why you had a different name a couple years ago, you're also saying "and I'm one of those women who doesn't keep her name." Which I suppose in my own way I fear is not the sort of woman I tend to think I am.

But then there's the issue of identity. Can you reconcile having two different names for two different circumstances? How do you get used to a new name if most of the time you still use the old one? I'm not sure how much having a particular name drives your identity, but part of me thinks that only taking his name in my personal life, when the only time I really have to use it is to make a dinner reservation, is kind of a cop out. And doesn't having a separate name for work and home reinforce a separation, even incompatibility, between the two?

I suppose in some ways this comes back to a question raised in the great Charlin-TPerl debates of elsewhere on the blog. Perl wondered whether a woman who kept her name would correct someone who introduced her as if she'd taken her husband's name, and asked whether doing so was important or not. The way you answer that question seems to depend in part on how important you see your name to your identity, and how significant it is if someone uses the wrong name.

I'm not sure how I'd answer that. Though since I'm rarely assertive enough to correct people when they mispronounce my one and only first name, I guess I probably wouldn't bother with the last name. But that hardly answers the question.

So, any suggestions?

Special Needs

Came across this while browsing locations:

"We can offer specialties to meet your needs including ice sculptures, passed champagne, fruit displays, after dinner cordials, Venetian tables and more."

Which is good, because I just can't go anywhere without a wheelchair ramp and an ice sculpture.