When it comes time to pick your wedding/reception venue, we all know the choices, right? Church, hotel, charming country inn, someone’s backyard, the beach at Aruba, the local VFW hall… yeah, same old, same old. But have you ever considered your local zoo?

On a recent episode of Four Brides, one of the couples in the competition held their wedding and reception at the zoo. I was struck immediately by how charming a spot it was for celebrating. When guests arrived, they got to play at the zoo for a while before heading to the ceremony location. Once the couple had been pronounced legally spliced, the guests took a scenic tram ride to the reception area, where a giraffe peered over the wall into the festivities as if to request its own slice of wedding cake. All in all, it looked like a fun time. In fact, that’s the couple that won the honeymoon prize. I feel sure it was in significant part because of their fabulous location.
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Kevin Cotter is trashing the dress… his ex-wife’s wedding dress, that is. Over and over and over again.

You see, Cotter and his wife got divorced last year and she left her wedding dress behind. She apparently didn’t feel the need to get it back and Cotter was at a loss at first what to do with it. According to the interview he did last month with The Man Registry, he brought the question up at a family dinner and asked for suggestions.

Luckily, he rejected the first entirely crass suggestion from his brother… but he did get inspired to play with the idea of all the ways he could use the dress in non-traditional ways. Thus the blog My Ex-Wife’s Wedding Dress was born.

So far the uses have included things like: place mat (hmmm… looks more like a tablecloth), draft stopper, kite, Darth Vader scarecrow, and my personal favorite, Christmas tree skirt. Cotter even wore it as his Halloween costume last year. That’s the picture at the top, incidentally.

What do I think of all this? Well, it would seem Mr. Cotter has found a creative way of exorcising his personal demons. It’s juvenile and a bit ridiculous, but sometimes that’s what it takes to get over a sad end to a hopeful beginning. I think if his ex-wife had wanted to keep the dress safe, she would have done well to take it with her when she left. I think some people are getting a cheap thrill out of the fact that someone else is doing something they wish they could do or had done.

And I think if Mr. Cotter ever remarries, his new lady ought to think carefully before leaving a wedding gown to his tender mercies if things don’t work out.

Oh, and I’m thankful that Mr. Twistie and I remain ridiculously contented with one another.

If there’s one wedding reality show I find myself really enjoying of late, it’s Four Weddings on TLC. For those unfamiliar, four brides getting married in the same area around the same time attend one anothers’ weddings and score them on the gown, the venue, the food, and the overall experience. The bride whose wedding gets the highest aggregate score wins a fabulous honeymoon to a surprise location, and the other three, well, they get to be on TV and attend three weddings without having to come up with a gift and being utterly free to snark or gush about whatever they please for the nation at large.

The two episodes I watched last night were particularly interesting to me, in that they included some really brilliant and some really, really questionable ideas. Take a look after the cut to see what I’m talking about.
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“You can totally wear it again!”

How many times have bridesmaids been told precisely that as they cringe internally? I was told it about a dusty rose acetate taffeta (with matching polyester lace, no less!) high-necked, long-sleeved, full-skirted, tea length number once.

At least it was cheap. It never saw the light of day again. Then again, nothing in dusty rose ever would from my closet. It’s one of the few colors in the world that I detest and I look as though I’m in the final stages of terminal jaundice in it. I did, however, have better luck with the next two bridesmaids dresses I wore.

This week on Project Runway, Season 8, a group of women who were all told The Lie showed up to have their unfortunate polyester and acetate monstrosities turned into clothes they actually would want to wear again (but wouldn’t be able to after the runway show, because all designs on the show become the property of the show and are auctioned off at the end of the season).
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This is one of the most contentious questions in wedding planning, for some reason. I’m really not quite sure why it makes so many otherwise perfectly reasonable people froth at the mouth and arm themselves with the verbal equivalent of thermonuclear devices. It’s just a question and there honestly is no universally right or wrong answer to it. Even Miss Manners et al agree that it is perfectly proper to make either decision.

And yet one side claims that allowing children in the door is tantamount to turning your wedding into Romper Room, leading to social disgrace and a miserable married life while the other side claims that anyone who wants a kid-free celebration hates all children and therefore has no business getting married.

Both sides have blown the thing entirely out of proportion. That’s right, I said it and I stand by it. I’ve been to a metric buttload of weddings in my day, and you know what didn’t determine whether or not it was a nice wedding? Whether or not children were invited. On this question, I am Switzerland… and a Switzerland that feels way too many other countries are being entirely too overwrought to make much sense.

The fact is, there are plenty of reasons to make either choice that do not include failing to take your wedding seriously or hating children. Even if you do have a preference for the less adult things in life or really do think children should be put into stasis from birth to age 21, it’s really your decision. You get to make it, and it’s okay.

But what if you’re not sure which way to go on this one? How do you decide? Take a look after the cut and see.
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(Note: this was meant to go up on saturday, but clearly I am made of fail and hit the wrong button, because I found it this morning lurking in the depths of the saved drafts. Sorry.)

So.

We’re two weeks into a new series of Bridezillas over on WETV. So far the horror entertainment has included a bride choosing to believe that the groom’s concerns about people not wanting to wander from table to table searching for clues in the reception game of Clue meant that his family was far to stupid to follow the directions; a bride who demanded that all her bridesmaids weigh a minimum of 200 pounds in hopes that this would make her (the bride) the only pretty woman in the wedding party (no hope there, because mean is the ugliest thing on any person); and a psychobunny from the depths of perdition who crashed the bachelor party, socked a woman outside the club in the head because she just felt like hitting someone, is willing to change lanes into one going the wrong direction in order to avoid a) traffic and b) a bridesmaid trying to have a serious conversation with her, and will tomorrow night throw a hissey fit about chocolate cake that may put last season’s veil-ripping drama junkie to shame. Seriously, she’s going into her third week on the show while the other brides profiled thus far have only lasted one ep each. The standard is two episodes. I’m beginning to think Valerie may wind up being in every episode this season.

These people are making my hair itch.

There is, however, one WETV wedding-related show that I’m seriously enjoying. Amazing Wedding Cakes is a fun look behind the scenes at several different wedding cake designers/bakers across the US. Each week the viewer gets taken through the steps from initial client consultation to delivery of the finished product.

The fun is what happens in between. You get to see how the design is developed, how many hands get involved in creating each cake masterpiece, and sometimes even the fun of getting a multi-tier cake to the venue on time in a taxicab.

As a longtime cake junkie who makes ‘em tasty, but not that pretty, I’m fascinated by this show. I love watching the cakes come together, the in-jokes, the meltdowns in both buttercream and emotion, the pride taken in a job well done, and the frustrations when things don’t work out as planned.

Also, seriously, if you’ve hired someone to make an elaborate wedding cake for you, don’t try to change the design a couple days before the event. One bride called the bakery two days before her wedding just as the head designer was smoothing that gorgeous terra cotta colored fondant over the second tier of her cake to say she’d decided she wanted white instead.

Don’t do that to your baker. It’s Just Not Nice.

If you haven’t watched Amazing Wedding Cakes, be sure to check it out. It’s a lot of fun! (WETV Sunday, 10pm/9 Central). As they say: No guts, no ganache!

Can we talk about father/daughter and mother/son dances for a moment?

I don’t have a problem with the tradition at all. I’m not about abolishing it outright, though I do think it’s up to couples and the parents involved whether they really want to have these particular dances. They make no difference in the legality of the ceremony, and etiquette more or less shrugs its shoulders and says it’s up to you whether or not you’d care to dance with your parents under these particular circumstances.

No, it’s not that they happen, it’s more the fact that so many people think the only possible choices for the dance are things like Thank Heaven for Little Girls, Daddy’s Little Girl, Butterfly Kisses, and other such sentimental, oh so expected classics. It isn’t even the fact that I detest each one of these songs with a purple panting passion. I wouldn’t mind yet another mother/son dance to Wonderful World as long as I knew they both had a soft spot for Satchmo, or that she wanted to dance to that because it’s the song she used to croon him to sleep in his crib days.

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