To me this looks like the kind of dress a blushing bride puts on under her wedding dress, not the wedding dress itself.

I found another silver hair today – a grand long one that glinted in the light of my bathroom mirror. Finding one of those and then yanking it out always puts me in a reflective mood and makes my stepmother’s offer of a real shotgun wedding more and more appealing. Of course, at the pace things are going with The Beard, the eventual nuptials are going to look something like this:

My dad and my stepmother are obsessed with the idea of my getting married. Not that I’m not similarly obsessed, but they go about it with an unparalleled fervor. When I told them I’d be doing Manolo for the Brides, I received this note in the mail:

So maybe writing for a wedding etiquette site will inspire you and The Beard to start planning your own wedding? As always we are here for moral support, ideas, the funding of a wedding, and of course permission from the F.O.B. (father of the bride).

Thanks. Really. Thanks.

Manolo says, the Manolo he must recommend to the super fantastic potential brides this beautiful t-strap shoe from the Vera Wang. It is now on the sale, almost 50% off of the regular price!

P.S. If you are not the bride, but like this shoe, it is also available in the light brown color.

A friend of mine from long ago recently announced her engagement by way of an invitation to a party celebrating her future nuptials. I like such announcements because they give me a chance to razzle The Beard. I also love parties. In perusing the invitation, however, my joy was sullied by my finding a registry card.

Even though the couple in question has been living together for ages and both are professional adults, their registry would make one think they were each single, living in dorm-like hovels, and entirely destitute. Every conceivable kitchen implement and piece of functional crystal you could imaging was on their ten mile long list of desires.

Don’t misunderstand me. I love the concept of registries. They make it easy for me to buy a gift that I know the future bride and groom will enjoy. But I absolutely hate the registry card, which sits smugly in wedding invitations and announcements ready to remind me that the couple would prefer something from Macy’s and only Macy’s. I hate it almost as much as future brides and grooms who request cash instead of gifts right on their wedding invitations rather than by word of mouth. Seriously tacky.

A quick search on wedding registry etiquette confirmed my theory that registries are a top notch idea, but placing registry cards in invitations and announcements is just plain uncool. It is the responsibility of each guest to inquire as to whether the couple has a registry or to simply pick up something nice.

Canadian Bride went a step further:

The giver of a gift for any occasion should always give what they want to give, and the receiver should always be gracious when they receive it.
Couples who request cash are not only committing a faux pas, but they are missing the joy of receiving treasured gifts, which is a major part of the wedding experience.

Amen.

In honor of the now entirely official divorce of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston and the entirely official marriage of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, I’d like to point you toward some advice that will help you avoid looking like the wrong kind of celebrity on your wedding day. You the ones I mean…the ones who set up more matrimonial pomp than the British monarchy. The ones that get married after knowing one another for four days or less. And the ones who stage elaborate weddings for their same-sex dogs.

Jenny Colgan has written up a list of 10 celebrity no-no’s at iVillage, including:

5. Don’t have a golden, Egyptian theme and get carried in on a table by gilded slaves, especially if you’re the size of Celine Dion’s husband, Rene.
6. Don’t ask a bunch of people you’ve just met to be your bridesmaids, dress them all in black, then spend the entire ceremony giving your new plastic-faced husband graphic tongue sandwiches, Liza.

If I were to write such a list, I would have to add that one should not get married to one’s waiter or waitress after a short period of engagement. Nor should one get married at 2:30 a.m. in an all-night wedding chapel in Vegas while falling down drunk. If you must tie the knot in the grand celebrity style, don’t have your prize purebred act as ring bearer if he’s a biter and don’t fail to invite your friends in favor of saturating your ceremony with picturesque A-listers. Don’t use your wedding as a soapbox to express your hardcore political views and for goodness sake don’t get married wearing a t-shirt covered in your beloved’s blood.

Finally, try not to get divorced an hour later. That’s just plain scary.

To quote The Manolo, AYYYYYYYY!

I have this image in my mind of a crowded space full of guests. The organist begins playing the bridal march and a hush falls over the crowd. The bride slowly makes her way onto the aisle. Before the guests ever see her, however, they hear her…FWAP! FWAP! FWAP! go her dainty feet as she makes her way toward marital bliss. Does the groom run like hell? Do the older ladies cluck their tongues? Maybe. Maybe not. But what bride wants to run that risk?

Being that I like to believe that we are becoming a more thrifty and ecologically minded people, I also like to believe that the large number of used and new wedding gowns for consignment are the result of generous souls rather than divorced or cold footed ones.

Craiglist, EBAY, Freecycle, and other sites of that ilk have become a goldmine for enterprising and frugal brides, young and old alike, to find everything from shoes to dresses to favors to funny shirts for the bridesmaids. And I applaud that.

The thing that sticks out in my mind, however, is the rather large numbers of wedding dresses being sold by owners who say the dress has never been worn. The typical reason involves the blushing future bride finding a dress she liked better. While a few of the dresses in question leave no question as to why she would want to change her dress selection, such as this one, which from the back looks like an overdecorated meringue tart:

Most of them look rather stunning, like this Casablanca Bridal number:

I just don’t understand it!