I’d like a word with you over here, if I may, just for a moment in between your busy schedule of exposing the ‘reality’ of weddings to us all.

Stop it. Just stop it.

What? You don’t know what I’m talking about?

I’m talking about the way brides (and the men you identify as the ‘woman’ in gay male couples) are portrayed in your shows.

It would be one thing if there were truly any variety in how you portray us. Then it would be about individuals. But as things stand, you have two ways of illustrating what it is to be a bride in modern America, and neither portrait is either flattering or accurate to the vast majority of women getting married.

On the one hand, you show us the adorably befuddled girl (it matters not if she is seventeen or seventy-three; she is still a girl in this version) who just can’t wrap her tiny brain around all the very, very, very difficult concepts involved in planning a wedding. She can’t tell a canape from a camellia and desperately needs a big, strong wedding planner(/salon owner/cake decorator/florist/etc.) to make everything happen magically despite her utter inability to contribute thoughtfully to the process. She is patted on the head and allowed to cutely dribble in a corner while the experts figure out the painfully difficult logistics of getting her married in a way that won’t embarrass her every time she opens her wedding album (assuming she can figure out how to do that) for the rest of her life. Thanks to the experts, she gets her magical princess moment that she could never have made happen by herself, the silly little thing.

On the other hand is the vicious, sociopathic, potentially homicidal whack job (who, again, can be any age from Diapers to Depends and is gunning for a guest spot as the unsub in the reality version of Criminal Minds) who doesn’t know a canape from a camellia, but will cut you if you point that out. She is unleashed upon an unsuspecting populace and allowed to make a mockery of her marriage before it begins. But once she ties the knot, she becomes magically docile (or at least it turns out she really, really, really [maybe] is in love with the hapless mope she’s been abusing on camera for the past two episodes of the show), so it’s all worth it in the end because she gets her magical princess moment.

You see my problem here? You can’t? Let me spell this out as simply as I can: you’re telling us that all women are utterly incapable of planning a party and staying rational at the same time. That’s the bottom line of all your programming. We have the choice of being thought of as helpless or god-help-us with nothing in between.

Can you imagine for one moment if there was a reality show about planning black tie charity events where every single client who walked through the door of the planner’s business was assumed to be a blithering idiot with no clue how anything at all is done? And some of the women I’ve seen on bridal reality shows being presented as drooling, brainless incompetents say they have jobs where putting on big parties and organizing conferences is simply one of their duties.

Trust me, anyone who can throw a major charity event or put together a large conference has more than the skills required to organize a wedding reception, whether they rely on hired guns or become DIY divas.

And then you get the third layer where some of the worst antics in the history of the show Bridezillas have been committed by women who claim to be wedding industry professionals! Almost every season there seems to be at least one ‘zilla who is a wedding planner who still can’t seem to figure out why anybody should expect her to feed her guests or invite her MOH’s husband. In this case, even if you are a professional, you are still utterly incompetent to handle your own wedding plans! Why? Because you are a bride, and brides can’t do this stuff on their own.

So wedding reality show creators, STOP IT!

The vast majority of women getting married today are reasonable people of at least reasonable intelligence. Many of us have already planned major social events of one kind or another and have some clue about keeping guests at said events entertained and fed. Some of us have already been involved in the planning of one or more weddings, and understand what’s involved. Even if we haven’t done that, most of us are intelligent enough to comprehend the basic concepts once they are presented to us.

Whether we hire professionals to carry out our plans or choose to keep control in our hot little hands or – the most common approach – do a little of each, we are adults. We have our own tastes, preferences, dreams, and nightmares. We are not interchangeable dolls for the wedding profession to dress up however they see fit at the moment. We are not rabid dogs. We are not cautionary tales.

People.

We are people.

And we’d like to be treated as such, thank you very much.

The wedding was held last night and was attended by such family friends as the rest of KISS, Hugh Hefner, and Bill Maher, as well as the happy couple’s two children, Nick and Sophie.

The tune is may be bit of a wedding cliche at this point, but when the couple had their first dance to At Last by Etta James… I gotta say, it might be the most appropriate use of it ever. Twenty-eight years is a long, long time to be meandering toward the alter, but it seems to have worked for them.

I hope you’ll all join with me in wishing Gene and Shannon every possible joy as they begin a new chapter in their relationship. Mazeltov, you crazy kids!

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford both won that coveted statuette… and then had their marriages end. They aren’t alone, either. The same can be said of: Sanrda Bullock, Liza Minelli, Halle Berry, and Faye Dunaway.

In fact, the Best Actress Oscar curse has been much discussed over the years, with observers noting that winners of that particular award are more likely to divorce within the next few years than any other Oscar winner. But now the rumor has been investigated and found to be true by Sue Moon and Tiziana Casciaro of the University of Toronto and Colleen Stuart of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for their paper The Oscar Curse: Status Dynamics and Gender Differences in Marital Survival.

Moon, Casciaro, and Stuart have found that Best Actress winners are about 1.68 times more likely to divorce than non-winners. Winning the Best Actor Oscar doesn’t seem to have a similar effect on men, incidentally.

So what does that mean for this year’s nominees? Well, the only one who is actually married (though Natalie Portman is engaged) would appear to be Nichole Kidman. If she wins, we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed for her and hubby Keith Urban.

And I certainly hope that she loves the purportedly eight-carat diamond ring she’s been sporting in honor of the engagement.

Now, with that out of the way, I clearly need to send a copy of Miss Manners to writer Chris Chase for penning this ‘whimsical’ piece on how Mr. Vujacic has cheaped out on the ring by not spending Chase’s estimate of Vujacic’s two-month salary. Chase estimates that two months worth of Vujacic’s salary comes out to $912,000.00, making the mere $250,000.00 he’s reported to have spent a pittance.*

Sigh.

We’ve been over and over and over this point here at Manolo for the Brides. Two months’ salary for an engagement ring is not etiquette. It was an advertising slogan for DeBeers. You know, the people who sell diamonds. Etiquette considers it painfully rude to even enquire as to the price of someone’s jewelry, let alone a piece so imbued with symbolism. Etiquette would also be appalled at estimating someone’s salary, even when it’s a matter of public record, for the purpose of shaming them into spending more of it. Seriously, these are things over which etiquette has a painful attack of the vapors.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when choosing an engagement ring, the gentleman should consider the taste of his lady and the state of his bank account (and credit rating). The lady, given the choice, should be thoughtful of his wallet. Everyone else in the universe should just butt out. Er… with the possible exception of the jeweler who is sort of required if the ring is being bought new or adapted from a not-so-new source.

Besides, if Mr. Twistie had followed the two months salary ‘rule’ I would never have gotten the engagement ring I wanted. It didn’t cost nearly that much.

*(I know the article is meant to be humorous, but it’s still based on a crass assumption that needs to be deflated at every possible opportunity. Way too many people think that ‘rule’ is a real one, so I continue to tilt at this particular windmill.)

Compared to other royal brides of the period, Victoria dressed simply. She kept the jewels to a minimum and had her wedding clothes made of English products, including her lace. In fact, it’s widely believed that she ordered the Honiton lace ensemble of wide skirt flounce, narrow sleeve flounces, veil, and a fichu before she even proposed to Albert. Whether or not that’s true, she certainly did have the lace made in the village of Beer under the direction of one Miss Jane Bidney. It took some two hundred lacemakers to create the set. When the lace was completed, she ordered the patterns destroyed so that it could not be replicated.

But that’s not the end of the story.

You see, Queen Victoria was both a practical and a sentimental woman. She hated waste and she adored her husband. Lace was also a very different beast at the dawn of the Victorian age. Machine manufactured lace was in its infancy – or possibly its early childhood, since the first lacemaking machine was invented in 1809. Most lace was still produced by hand. Handmade lace took a long time to make and was tremendously expensive to buy. Lace would be temporarily attached to clothing and unpicked from the garment when it was wanted for another outfit.

Queen Victoria used nearly any excuse she could come up with to reuse her wedding lace. She wore it every year on her wedding anniversary, a tradition she kept up even after Prince Albert’s death in 1861. She wore it to state occasions. She wore it for official portraits. She even wore it to the weddings of all but one of her children. She did not wear it to Princess Beatrice’s wedding because she had loaned it to the bride.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to get a good look at the lace itself in these pictures, but there’s one where it’s much easier to see. After all, by the time Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee rolled around, photography had gotten pretty darn good.

They tied the knot, obviously! The pair hit up the famous Little White Wedding Chapel (along with Al’s mom) after what amounted to a few hours of hardcore wedding planning and said their vows.

Can I just say that I’m just a tad jealous? Oh, I’m a lot happy for the resplendent Ms. Harding — don’t they just look lovely? — but still a little jealous. It sounds like she had a joyful, absolutely stress-free wedding, though there’s no word on whether she ever did get to see the Hoover Dam.

Now go check out the Wedding FAQ and wish the newlyweds all the best!

Forget the fact that it’s such a damn fine photo — lucky celebrities, looking gorgeous 95% of the time — and think about how far things had to advance for us to even be seeing it. Yes, we still have a quite ways to go before gay couples can enjoy all of the advantages of legal matrimony, but pics like this are a testament to the fact that things are moving forward.

Now, for the deets. The 20- person affair took place on the grounds of de Rossi and DeGeneres’ Beverly Hills home. Both brides wore designs by Zac Posen…de Rossi in a beautiful cream and pink halterneck gown, and DeGeneres in a cream ensemble of vest, shirt, and pants. The happy couple sat on pillows while exchanging rings created by Neil Lane before they sat down to an all-vegan meal followed by a vegan red velvet cake.

I wish both of them all of the happiness the world has to offer!

Whether you give two toots about Jenna Bush’s May 10th wedding to Henry Hager (I don’t, oddly enough), it’s beyond cool to see all of the potential dress designs. As Style Scoop tells it, the first lady (hey, should I be capitalizing that?) asked twelve notable designers to submit sketches of the gown that may just clothe her daughter on said daughter’s special day.

The twelve designs sprang forth from the minds of the following designers (from one to twelve): Vera Wang, J. Mendel, Arnold Scaasi, Carlos Miele, Amsale, Carmen Marc Valvo, Angel Sanchez, Badgley Mischka, Nicole Miller, Lela Rose, Marc Bouwer, and Oscar de la Renta.

My personal favorite is number nine, but I have always fancied those Nicole Miller ruffles. Number one looks like it ought to be in the annual toilet paper gown contest. Three gets a big ol’ yawn from me, but all things considered it does look sort of right for a White House wedding. Eight is too daring for the same, and I have nothing to say about seven other than that the cartoon model looks entirely undead.

Which, pray tell, do you favor?

The part of this particular site that rather tickled my particular sense of humor was the section of Celebrity Vows. Yes, you can now choose the same wedding vows used by Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, or Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. Actually, most of them are pretty much standard forms from various protestant denominations, and not that unusual.

There was, however, one part in one ceremony that caught my eye. I’d like to share it with you. It comes from Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s wedding. While it’s not the vows, per se, it strikes me as a particularly wonderful way of expressing what marriage is really all about:

Happiness in marriage is not something that just happens. A good marriage must be created. In the Art of Marriage: The little things are the big things. It is never being too old to hold hands. It is remembering to say ‘I love you’ at least once a day. It is never going to sleep angry. It is at no time taking the other for granted; the courtship should not end with the honeymoon, it should continue through all the years. It is having a mutual sense of values and common objectives. It is standing together facing the world. It is forming a circle of love that gathers in the whole family. It is doing things for each other, not in the attitude of duty or sacrifice, but in the spirit of joy. It is speaking words of appreciation and demonstrating gratitude in thoughtful ways. It is not expecting the husband to wear a halo or the wife to have wings of an angel. It is not looking for perfection in each other. It is cultivating flexibility, patience, understanding and a sense of humor. It is having the capacity to forgive and forget. It is giving each other an atmosphere in which each can grow. It is finding room for the things of the spirit. It is a common search for the good and the beautiful. It is establishing a relationship in which the independence is equal, dependence is mutual and the obligation is reciprocal. It is not only marrying the right partner, it is being the right partner.

And I think that sort of says it all.

You want to hear a pet peeve of mine? Well, here it is: Bosom cups that stand up of their own accord when empty. I’m totally feeling this Vivienne Westwood gown (worn by the vivacious Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw) from the midsection down, but looking at the uppermost part is making me want to scream, “Alter the cups! The cups!” Unflattering things happen when you don a dress you can’t fully fill out. Observe…

I don’t care how perky your personality is. It’s bra time, honey.