Every now and again one of you sends me an e-mail that is so perfectly succinct that it needs no explanation or exposition. My good friend Jenny — whose own words, I must point out, are featured prominently throughout iDo — wrote this:

I’m watching one of those nanny shows, which is bad enough. But even worse, they just showed an advert for “Rock the Reception“. It’s a reality show…about people who are doing an unconventional first dance.

Let me say that again. A REALITY SHOW. About people who are doing an unconventional first dance. It’s an hour-long show…about a three-minute event.

Americans are complete whores for this crap.

I would have loved to have attended the concept meeting for this show. I’m picturing a member of TLC’s creative team, the wedding division. He’s late and he’s unprepared, and he’s hiding behind his laptop trying to look serious but secretly watching YouTube clips his deadbeat housemate e-mailed to him at 3 a.m. When the big boss looks in his direction, our ideas man draws on the first thing his eyes light upon, which is the video of a bride and groom dancing to U Can’t Touch This.

He’s saved! Saved by the Interwebs!

I was recently interviewed for an article in the NY Post, and it’s looking like I will be jetting off to NY tomorrow to film a TV segment. It was a false alarm — the network decided not to do the story. Ah well, better luck next time!

News of iDo: Planning Your Wedding with Nothing But ‘Net is getting around, thanks to my ubercool publicist at Simon & Schuster and the word getting around. The sweeties over at Aisledash called me a “wedding guru,” which made my entire weekend. I was quoted in an article on Smartmoney.com, and I’m being interviewed for an article in the NY Post tomorrow. And there was an entire article based on iDo in the NY Daily News!

If you’d like to see what all the fuss is about — or you already own one copy of my book and you’d like one for a friend — tell me in the comments what you think I should call my next wedding planning book. Be as silly or serious as you want to be — there’s no guarantee I’ll ever cop your title, but you never know!

At noon EST on Wednesday, June 25, I’ll use a random number generator to pick the lucky commenter who will win an autographed copy of iDo.

One: Remember how I made soap using a soap kit from Bramble Berry? If you read the whole post, you may recall that I used regular old food coloring (the sort in the teardrop shaped bottles) so I could enjoy a little more sudsy variety. Because I didn’t want anyone who tried the kit getting mad at me, I wrote: “I don’t recommend you do the same because I’m not yet sure the resultant soaps won’t turn you blue or green.”

However, I am now happy to state that I’ve been using one of my dyed-with-food-coloring soaps for a while not and have not yet turned green.

Two: Check me out over at iVillage! In honor of iDo‘s official release, they asked me to create a list of five web sites I think every bride-to-be should visit while planning her wedding. The result is up on the iVillage wedding blog From “I Will” to “I Do”.

I got all excited as I was preparing for this post because, hey, it’s finally Thursday and that means it’s time for LOVE/HATE and I have a picture of an uber gorgeous short dress that I’ve been sitting on for weeks now! At least I thought it was so gorgeous as to be beyond reproach.

Maybe I just wanted to love it so badly that my mind played seamstress?

You see, this dress has so much going for it: It hails from the gray matter of Ramona Keveza, who I utterly adore. It’s short, and I like when bride’s switch it up with something abbreviated. Plus, it’s sort of ruffly but not too ruffly, if you know what I mean.

And yet I just can’t shake this weird feeling that if the camera angle was just a tad different, we’d all come face to face with the model’s right nipple. I mean, where exactly do bosoms go in a dress like that? Once they get to wherever they’re supposed to go, are they in danger of falling out during bouts of serious boogying?

In conclusion, there’s a part of me that does love this dress, along with its more colorful cousin. There is, however, an even bigger part of me — a part that measures in at 36DD — that hates this dress and all dresses like it for being a forever unattainable ideal.

FYI: My book, iDo: Planning Your Wedding with Nothing But ‘Net (Paperback) is arriving on people’s doorsteps! This is neat both because it is happening slightly ahead of the June 10 schedule and because, duh, it’s my first book! I’m just a tad excited, and I do hope you’ll check it out…whether that means buying it or asking for it at your local library.

Grays, gunmetals, pewters, and silver are hot right now. So here are two dresses for two bridesmaids who are taking part in what are obviously two very different weddings:

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Writer and filmmaker Elise Mac Adam certainly knows her stuff, if her essays on Indiebride are any indication. Those quirky columns were my introduction to her sharp, spot-on way of schooling brides-to-be — and everyone else — in the fine art of etiquette. I remember looking through the site’s archives (Dear Indiebride, Update your site more often, Kthnxbye) and being tickled by these words:

“Bridezilla” is a special kind of insult — too cute to mean anything serious, yet devastatingly demeaning. To call a woman “Bridezilla,” even if her prima donna antics put Diana Ross to shame, categorizes her bad behavior as a comic “syndrome.”

So when I was offered an opportunity to check out Mac Adam’s new book, Something New: Wedding Etiquette for Rule Breakers, Traditionalists, and Everyone in Between, I naturally said, “Heck yeah! Send it over!” Then, of course, life intervened and I had no time at all to read, which is why the book has been sitting on my coffee table for the last month.

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