Tags
Bride Wars, champagne, diamond ring, engagement, fairy tale, Father of the Bride, film, literature, marriage, purity, retail, stress, The Wedding Planner, tradition, wedding planning, weddings, white, wine
This is a picture of the cookies my sister-in-law made for my engagement party last year! So cute!
Before I begin the main point of this post I would like to note that I dictated this text to my computer using the Dragon Naturally Speaking software. I did this while watching figure skating with my mother who made certain to tell me that I sound like an angry robot and it creeps her out. However, I cannot give this program a higher recommendation. It really works and makes few errors despite my lispy, angry robot voice.
Ahem.
I’m getting married in June, just a short five months from now. This happy occasion is proving to be the singularly most stressful event of my life. For some reason, I wasn’t expecting this. Foolish mortal.
My fiancé and I got engaged just before my final semester of college and planned for a leisurely year and a half engagement. During that last semester I completed my senior capstone, a project in which I used film to break down the American Big White Wedding. I analyzed several wedding movies (Father of the Bride, Bride Wars, The Wedding Planner etc.) to estimate costs of various wedding elements, what pitfalls a bride might run afoul of and I pursued the big question of why? Why do we mark and celebrate marriage in this lavish way? As a side note, my favorite scene out of everything I watched was from the original Father of the Bride starring Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor. At one point in the film, Tracy and his wife hold an engagement party for Taylor’s impending nuptials and he spends the entire time preparing mixed drinks for the guests who are not happy to drink the pitchers of martinis he had prepared in advance. Consequently, he runs through his private stock of high quality liquor and is unable to give his carefully written speech. This is hilarious and also disheartening because it starts to reveal the backwards priorities of modern wedding planning.
I bring this up mostly because I cannot escape it. Today, I helped a young couple from Boston who were enjoying a day off together. After we completed their shopping and were ringing up the purchase the young woman noticed my ring. It started the usual questions: When are you getting married? Where is the reception? Aren’t you so excited? And then she leans in close and whispers, “Has anyone ever offered you a free makeover and day of pampering? I’m a Mary Kay artist and I’d love to give you a wedding day look and $25 of free products.” Lady, I know a sales pitch when I hear one. I work in retail. The problem here isn’t that she was trying to drum up business under the false pretense of a free makeover. The problem is that weddings are no longer the celebration of the sacred union. They have become a consumer driven marketplace judged by the designer of the bride’s dress and the artisan cupcakes served at the reception.
Movies like Bride Wars exemplify this obsession with the retail value of a wedding. Both brides crave a June wedding at the Plaza. They consider white glove service, Vera Wang gowns and enlist the help of NYC’s most sought-after wedding planner. Pair this sort of movie with the hundreds of romance novels that end with big, fancy, outlandish weddings and you get a recipe for insanity. Every teenage girl and twenty-something in America dreams of Prince Charming (enter generic, too perfect male model here) showing up on a white horse to give her a white dress to wear to their extravagant white wedding. And when I say white, I’m not really talking about the racial stereotype, although that is worth considering; I mean the whole purity and virginity thing. If you think that this tradition isn’t important to modern women then you are sorely mistaken. Even if it isn’t literally true of most couples in this generation, brides still want the illusion and the representation of a new beginning. And if Say Yes to the Dress is anything to judge by, brides will shell out thousands of dollars to make their childhood dreams a reality.
At this point I find myself wondering why champagne is the wedding drink of choice rather than vodka.
I suppose what bothers me so much about all of this is the fact that I feel like my engagement ring is just a big dollar sign to some people. My ring is beautiful and my fiance put a lot of thought into it, but If one more strange woman walks into my store and tries to pry into my wedding (and this will happen, worry not) I’m going to tell her that the stones are paste and they represent my forever commitment to my 27 cats. Cheers.
Tonight’s wine pairing is provided by Alicia Giuffrida, CSW. I love this because the wine in question comes in gorgeous pink and blue mini-bottles complete with sippy straws which could not be more appropriate for brides-to-be and those who must deal with them.
Pommery Pop! Champagne
“Extra Dry (Cerulean Blue) – with notes of baked apples and pastry this is an elegant take on a more easy going, traditional style
Rose (Pink!) – a fresh bouquet of strawberry and candied rose petals make this sparkler a shoe-in for the hip and trendy crowd
These perfectly portioned, single serve champagnes, complete with straws, are made for convenient consumption and minimal lipstick smudging.”