I was going through my closet the other day trying to thin out the herd of size 8's and 10's when I came across an old bridesmaid dress.
When the bride picked it out, she said, "Later you can hem it and wear it out to dinner." The dress is 40 years old and I have never been able to make the conversion. I do not dine at Taco Bell wearing an off-the-shoulder satin gown with buttercup sleeves and seed pearls outlining my bosom, a flower-bearing bustle and six feet of train. Bridesmaid dresses are made unattractive because they can't look better than the bride's dress.For some reason, bridesmaids save their dresses. They ensconce them in plastic and live with the dream that the VFW will give a formal dance, and they will have a dress for it that they can neither fit into nor breathe in.
These are forgettable dresses. Who remembers what Princess Di's bridesmaids wore at the Wedding of the Century? She had more of them than there were people in my graduation class. Same with the Kennedys. They have more attendants than small towns have citizens.
At my wedding, I opted for pale green. One attendant said it made her look sallow, as if she were going to throw up. I changed it to pink and she still fainted during the ceremony. Another said the green dress accentuated her large bosom and made her look like a lawn. I changed hers to pink, too. The third one said green matched her eyes and she'd stick with green. The fourth said the pink dress had a Cinderella feel to it, and opted for the green.
You'd have thought they were putting a house in escrow.
As all my contemporaries peeled off and I was driven to poverty by showers and gowns, I knew what my friends were complaining about.
A wedding dress is different. I keep mine in a box next to my cross-country ski boots and my snorkel. The entire shelf is a reminder of days when I wasn't practical and I was going to get married only once, fall and break something once, swim with a shark once.
I took the bridesmaid dress out of the plastic and pondered its future. Maybe at Halloween I could attend a party as Belle Watling, the madam in "Gone With the Wind." Maybe I could cut it into pieces and make 40 sofa pillows.
My husband walked by and suggested I pitch it. I couldn't believe what he was saying.
"You want me to throw aside a piece of history from the most important day in a girl's life? How insensitive. It's part of their photo album, the moment when they were joined in union as one. And I was witness to it all."
"Whose wedding was it?" he asked.
"I don't remember."