Well the year is off to a heck of a great start with our little game. Last week I inflicted this image on you:

and you lobbed back nine witty responses. You did not make it easy for me to choose a winner, but a winner has been chosen.

That winner is Jennie for this laugh out loud potential nightmare for a famous Handsome Guy:

The time, May 6, 2012 6:00 AM PST. The place, George Clooney’s estate.
George woke up on his 50th birthday and realized he had used the line “If neither of us is married by the time I hit 50, I promise to marry you” a few too many times.

Congratualtions, Jennie! And thanks to everyone who played.

So there I am laughing at the New York Times for jumping on the DIY wedding music bandwagon so late — it’s 2009, jeez, and even I had an “iPod wedding” — when I decided to search this blog to see what I or my counterpart had written about it. As it turns out, a whole lot of nothing. The closest I came to writing about DIY wedding music was a post about how to organize a wedding playlist in which I totally spaced on replying to a commenter who asked me to share some of my own wedding playlist. Sorry, Nadia!

To make sure we don’t have any massively jarring gaps here at Manolo for the Brides, I’m going to excerpt some of iDo, since I spend a number of pages in Chapter 14 discussing DIY wedding music and it’s Friday and I don’t feel like reinventing the wheel. Note: More and more people are calling this the iPod wedding, though you can DIY your wedding music with any mp3 player or a laptop.

Search for “iPod wedding” and you’ll come across hundreds of DJs on the warpath. The moment a bride-to-be brings up her choice to ditch the traditional disk jockey in favor of some digital alternative, pro DJs start weighing in. It’s a bad idea, they say. You can’t anticipate what people will want to listen to or read the energy of the room like a real live DJ. Guests will mess around with your playlist when you’re not looking, and the rented sound system will fall over and injure someone who will then slap you with a hefty lawsuit. Your wedding will be an colossal failure!

But there’s really no reason for professional entertainers to get so defensive, because no one is trying to permanently replace DJs and bands with iTunes playlists. The fact is that some people can’t afford either or would rather budget money elsewhere, some people have tastes that are way too eclectic, and some people just don’t care overmuch for the two standard options.

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I want to hate this Mira Zwillinger wedding gown, and not just because I love to hate things! The skirt looks like the wings of a jellyfish. From what I can see of the bodice, it looks kind of messy… or, worse, puffy. The dress aside, the model is hunched over and looks so damn sad. Maybe her middle looks bloated not because of the wedding gown itself, but because the model just drowned her sorrows in a pint of rocky road. And what’s with those dirty painter’s tarps in the background? I know! Let’s shoot our depressed, bloated model in a loft space currently undergoing renovations!

There’s so much to complain about, and yet this wedding gown appeals to the little girl in me. It’s so flowy… so much like the ballet costumes I couldn’t get enough of in my youth. I really do love it, insofar as I can see it. Note to Mira Zwillinger: Can we see some details next time?

What say you?

When putting together a wedding reception timeline — i.e., a simple schedule that lets the major players in the wedding and the emcee know when the first dance will go down and the cake will be cut — many brides- and grooms-to-be neglect one important detail. Namely, for all the time spent thinking about when they’ll get to the reception, they never consider when they’ll leave the reception. Whoops! Look at enough wedding photos, and you’ll see that the big exit makes for some great snapshots of the newlyweds. That is, of course, if the newlyweds take steps to plan that big exit ahead of time. Here are six tips that will ensure your grand exit lives up to its name:

Don’t tarry
You can always have an after-party if you’re not going directly from the wedding reception to your honeymoon destination. Unless you actually have to stick around to clean up — and some brides and grooms do — don’t feel obligated to wait around until your last wedding guest has said goodnight. People will actually expect you to cut out before the last dance, so you won’t be offending anyone.

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Sadie over at Jezebel recently shared the fact that the wedding gown she’ll be wearing when she marries her current beau is the wedding gown she planned to wear when engaged to a former beau. No, Sadie isn’t some kind of uber budget bride. It’s just that the wedding gown she already had was so… perfect. The idea of the perfect wedding gown is definitely a cliché, but in Sadie’s case, it isn’t far from the truth.

It was the dress I’d had in mind long before I’d met my first boyfriend; he’d never seen it; and, most of all, it had been made for me. It was, and remains, the only custom garment I’ve ever owned, and there seemed an unspeakable luxury to stepping into a dress I’d envisioned and having it fit perfectly. I’d long peered into the windows of the dressmaker’s small shop in lower Manhattan, and it was with great excitement that I’d first breached the doorway and explained what I wanted: Swiss Dot; sweetheart neck; full, ballerina-length skirt. I was quickly persuaded to adopt a pale pink underskirt and a dainty tulle halter that sounds slightly ugly but is, I assure you, truly lovely. Without the crinoline, the dress would simply be a pretty, retro party-frock; with, it reminded me of the wedding gown from Funny Face.

I don’t think *I* could wear the same wedding dress I’d planned to wear to marry some other guy, but I’m not about to jump all over someone who would. Especially if they’ve been dreaming of a particular dress for ages upon ages. After all, why let a less-than-perfect (wo)man ruin the perfect dress? If Sadie is cool with it and her fiancé is cool with it, who am I to tsk-tsk their decision? On the other hand, I would caution against letting the future in-laws know the origins of the wedding dress, depending on their general dispositions.

What do you think? Is this tacky? Resourceful? Overly sentimental? Not sentimental enough?

Note: If you like the dress above, check out Lynns Rags, the Etsy shop of its creatrix!

…the more they stay the same, at least where wedding vendors and brides and wedding gowns are concerned. Check out these vintage bridal ads:

Odd posture? Check. At least she’s doing something, though. I get the feeling that the photographer snapped the model between shots while she was making a necessary wardrobe adjustment on her Priscilla of Boston gown. Or maybe bridal models all had scoliosis back then, too.

Less than friendly facial expressions on bridesmaids? Check, on the left one at least. Oddly huge bows decorating the posterior region of bridesmaids? Check. Random props — in this case palm fronds — poised to devour the models? Check and check!

But lose the butt bow, and I will gladly shell out “about $40 each” for either of these dresses. Now what I need is the vintage waist to go with them, and I’ll be all set.

Welcome to the first round of Twistie’s Sunday Caption Madness for 2009!

You all know the drill. I post a photograph, you give me your best captions via the comments section, and next week I declare a winner. It’s that simple.

And so, here’s the first image of the year:

Ready…set…snark!