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  Meeting the right person only confirmed what I had concluded somewhere along the way, that a wedding is only one day. You want it to be a wonderful, memorable day, but you don't want to look back and say, “That was the best day of my life,” the implication being that all that followed wasn't, and I have been to some wonderful weddings that ended in divorce. Ours was wonderful and memorable, perhaps more so because we had to do it on sort of a tight budget, requiring more than a bit of creativity. (The words “tight budget” here defined as “Martha Stewart at the dollar store meets a hundred people in our postage stamp of a backyard.”)

  For starters, I had some ideas about what kind of wedding dress I wanted, but I did not want to spend, well, what nice wedding dresses cost. I wanted something sexy enough to thrill my groom but not freak out anyone I was related to, something elegant but uniquely me. Something striking but not super-bridey, something that would rock my groom's universe but not expose anything my parents didn't need to see, something simple and tea-length with a few special details (on this I was flexible; I love all manner of detail), something that, decades from now, wouldn't scream 11:00 to 11:05 a.m., September 18, 2004, but would be somehow current and timeless and completely me at the same time, something that turns out not to exist in any variation of the color white. It didn't seem like too much to ask. I scouted around one day and came close to putting a deposit down on a very simple, custom-fitted three-quarter-length dress for maybe $400, but in the end it was too simple. Eventually I heard about a designer sample sale at a fancy Michigan Avenue shop (you know, the kind that's upstairs?) and tried on probably two dozen dresses of every variety. One even had lace pants underneath. Let me tell you a little about this process, because it's interesting in that way that lifestyles, like let's say those of the rich and famous, that are foreign to me are interesting. You make an appointment. This, I realize now, probably should have told me it wasn't going to work out. I have an appointment book and sometimes I even write things down in it, but I don't often look at it. In any case, I actually showed up for the appointment and tried on a lot of dresses designed by names you hear at the Oscars, and I quickly imagined myself posing with my head over my shoulder and saying something like, “Badgley Mischka,” or the one I gave some serious thought to, “Richard Tyler.” The price range is fairly reasonable for the quality, considering these are dresses that are normally upward of $6,000. Very few dresses in this place were over $1,500, and most I looked at were $1,000 or under. It was nothing like my dream dress: pink it was, actually, a pink so pale you could only detect it in certain lights, satin, and mega-princessy, with a fitted bodice and a large skirt, spared from cake-topper territory by its perfect simplicity, magnificent cut, and the absolute yumminess of the satin. It had a scooped-out open neckline and a deep V in the back, unique because one side layered over the other to create the V, and the skirt had giant box pleats, which allowed for fullness without any uninvited poufiness. The price on the tag was $1,000, which is without a doubt on the low end these days, especially for a Richard Tyler dress, which the saleswoman felt the need to keep reminding me. I will probably never be the sort of person who can decide to spend $1,000 on the spot for anything that isn't potentially lifesaving, and since I couldn't convince myself that this dress was going to do that for me, I left the store, not completely sure I wouldn't come back the next day hoping it hadn't sold, but unable to drop the bills without at least sleeping on it. I kept coming back to: It's one day. All brides want to feel beautiful on their wedding day, but I wasn't convinced I couldn't achieve this for less than a grand. I looked at it for a good long while and finally told them I'd think about it.

  The appalled saleswomen (who outnumbered me by three) said, “Oh no, you must take it today; we can't possibly hold it for eight hours,” as though I'd asked them to loan me their grandchildren for an overnight. I knew it was the only one they had, but I tried to explain that this was a lot of money for me and that I couldn't just drop that kind of cash without thinking about it, and this was before I found out there'd be an additional $500 fee for alterations. (I still have no idea why it costs this much to sew a hem, even a big one, but it does.) In accordance with my entire wedding philosophy (and I should say I didn't exactly know I had one until this moment, but very simply it comes down to the “one day” thing. I can't justify the idea of amassing any kind of debt for, er, a party, albeit a special one), I just couldn't see spending that much money on something I was going to wear exactly once and that constituted a significant fraction of our budget. The single most expensive item of clothing I've ever bought was a shearling coat that I stalked at Barneys until it went on sale for half price, and it was still a lot of money, but it was in my budget, and it was at least justifiable knowing I'd wear it for ten years. At this point I got irritated and went home saying I'd take my chances and bemoaning the vast conspiracy of the evil wedding industry that convinces unsuspecting women their lives will be unfulfilled without an ice sculpture shaped like a bride and groom and a twenty-piece marching band.

  A few months before the wedding, I still didn't have a dress. But on the way home from the swank upstairs store, I remembered something. I remembered that I wanted my mom to make my wedding dress. Naturally, the fact that she passed away several years before I met my husband seemed at first like it might pose a problem. (That and the fact that at the time I was still in the dating era I like to call the Marginally Disgruntled Postal Worker/Unmedicated Bipolar Drug Addict Years.) When my all-around super-awesome future husband Ben proposed, it was bittersweet for both of us on that front; both his parents were also long gone. Still, if anyone could pull this off from beyond the grave, it's my mom. No lie. Ask anyone. She was always a high achiever.

  My mother, like many of her generation, out of a combination of thrift and tradition, filled much of her available free time with a variety of needlework projects that included knitting, reupholstery, and needlepoint. She sewed many of my childhood clothes, made a wardrobe to match for my best doll, Bibsy, and created couture gowns for my Barbies, and although she taught me the basics of sewing, my abilities are limited to curtains, A-line skirts, and the like. Anything as complicated as a sleeve or a pleat would end up being handed back to her with a pitiful look and a plea for damage control. Being an incredible perfectionist was her blessing and her burden, but in this area it was always a blessing to me. (Well, except for that period in seventh and eighth grade when even the best handmade clothing did not seem cool. At that time it was Huk-A-Poo or die.)

  Fortunately, I also remembered that I never throw anything away. If you have any similar inclinations and/or tendencies to keep anything that enters your house, do not read on unless you have some person in your life to whom you want to say, “See, I told you I should have kept that broken fan from Uncle Jehosephat,” as what follows is about the best possible argument ever for this case, which, generally speaking, leads only to piles of newspapers, chipped red pots and pans that belonged to your stepgrandmother, and about a million buttons, snaps, and spools of uselessly dried-out (but lovely) thread that belonged to all of your grandmothers. My mother and father both carried this gene and passed it down, and now in addition to all the stuff I've been never throwing away, I have all the stuff my mother never threw away, and will someday have the collection of five hundred videotapes my father currently refuses to throw away. The fact that Ben (like-minded saver of things) and I had recently moved into a place with a huge attic was only a bonus for us as people who enjoy saving anything and everything “just in case” and don't mind walking in between stacks and stacks of boxes both full and empty (you know, for the next time we move).

  Getting back to the point: In the late 1980s I'd been a bridesmaid in another super-schmancy wedding in which we were allowed to wear whatever we wanted as long as it was white. I couldn't afford anything remotely like whatever the other bridesmaids were going to come up with, so I figured my best option was to have my mom make me a dress. She'd come through for
me on several occasions, like my high school graduation, when I had to have this silk Calvin Klein slip dress that cost $400, an outrageous sum for 1979. She found the exact pattern and made it for me for about forty bucks. For my friend's wedding, I picked out what was then a very stylish, mostly very simple Vogue pattern, a sleek, floor-length, off-the-shoulder column dress with three-quarter sleeves made more eighties-like by the presence of a wide, wide collar (if this collar were a trailer, it'd be a double-wide), and went down to the fabric district, where I found a beautiful satin brocade for less than sixty bucks. The dress had been a big hit at that wedding (and I've always taken a special pride in saying, “My mom made it,” especially at an event where everyone else's clothes cost a lot), but had been crumpled up in a bag in a trunk for, well, the ensuing fifteen years. Among other things I have also never thrown away, besides the dress, was a good half yard of the leftover fabric to play with. I knew before I got home that I had my dress. It would need some tweaking, but I suddenly remembered my mom saying, “You can wear this again someday if you just take off the collar, maybe shorten it up.” I made a few calls and found a local designer named Valerie, who seemed to be the right one for the job. I had heard about a dress she wore to a Björk concert made out of a sleeping bag.

  The collar gave us nearly another yard of fabric, some of which Val used to build a mini-train. She took off the sleeves and used velvet and satin ribbons for the straps, which met at a V in the back and trailed down below that. She added some sort of haphazard layers of pleated tulle underneath the train (funky part #1), and I added some of my stepgrandmother's rhinestone pins (funky part #2, and might I add, see?), two on the straps in front, one at the bottom of the V, and two more to pin up the train for the reception, revealing more of the tulle for a sort of Carmen Miranda–in-the-twenty-first-century sort of thing (funky part #3). Val seemed to be impressed that I could still zip it up fifteen years later, but it was a just-barely sort of zipping up. Fortunately, my mom had the foresight to leave inch-plus seams all around (standard being ¼ inches), anticipating, if not the inevitability, at least the possibility that it could be let out in the future.

  The result was so much better than the former dress of my dreams, and with all due deference to Richard Tyler, better than that, too. Plus the complete outfit, including shoes and earrings, still cost less than the fancy store's damned hem. It was the perfect blend of classic and new, but best of all, I got to fulfill my dream of wearing a wedding dress my mother made. I felt beautiful and so grateful to have found such a vital way to bring my mother into the day, and to feel her presence in a very tangible way. My husband said I looked “SO HOT!” about a dozen times, which is for sure the reaction I was going for and made me feel like a million bucks.

  The actual day of my wedding was pretty sweet. My dad and stepmom very generously offered to pay for it—and okay, we went a bit over budget, but if I told you the actual dollar amount you might say it couldn't be done. Flowers alone can cost what we paid for our entire shebang. I want to be up front about having blatantly ripped off my dear friends Sue and Frank, whose wedding was one I will always remember as being in the top five most creative and poignant weddings ever, in spite of the rain. Ben and I had sun. And 72 degrees. We might have special ordered it, but we didn't.

  What I Stole From Sue and Frank:

  their minister

  creative decorating

  handmade invitations

  creative music

  participation of friends and relatives (including Sue and Frank)

  actual film vs. video

  sewing at least some of the bridal party's clothes

  To qualify some of the things on this list, David, their minister (ordained in the Universal Church of Life), is also a mutual friend, and I could also have had Frank marry us but I temporarily spaced that he was also ordained, and if I'd had Frank marry us then our wedding would have been less Sue and Frank–like and we and our guests wouldn't have gotten Sue and Frank's Top Ten Reasons to Get Married and Stay Married. David got everyone to yell “YES!” that they were in favor of our wedding, and it only went up from there. Since we had the ceremony in our tiny backyard, I hung strings of pearly-white paper from the trees, and my cousins and friends decorated whatever they could with tulle, flowers, and candles. We purchased all of our flowers from Trader Joe's, and Lisa, one of my bridesmaids, spent the entire day before the wedding arranging the multicolored bouquets featuring many hydrangeas in the mismatched ninety-cent vases I'd collected from thrift shops in previous weeks and tied with tulle, and damned if those arrangements weren't as beautiful as any I've ever seen, and I once went to the wedding of an actual florist, a schmancy one, who outmatched Lisa only in sheer numbers.

  Eager to avoid putting my bridal party in anything heinous and allow them room for their own personalities while still trying to have some sort of coherence, I sewed an entire dress for Ruby, our flower girl, and simple wraparound skirts for the women (as well as ring pillows of the same vintage reproduction cotton), with which they could choose their own top. It was hard not to feel connected to my mom while I was at the sewing machine that summer. I had heard many stories of important events in her life that she'd made her own clothes for: prom, concerts, her own wedding trousseau. In the end, sewing for my bridal party was another opportunity for me to feel her presence in a tangible way. Although my elderly machine wasn't my mom's own, it had been in the family, as has my entire vast thread, button, and notion collection, and for me it's kind of impossible to avoid feeling the complex maternal history attached to these physical things, not just to my mom but to her mother before her, who also spent time teaching me the basics of the sewing arts. Our friends Tom and Piper played drum and concertina, which I have to confess I wasn't certain about until I walked down the aisle, and was blown away by how perfectly us it was. Another friend, Anne, sang a song during the ceremony, accompanied by her husband, Chafe, on guitar, and she chose a song by Nick Drake that, well, gahh. It was about finding love after a long time. If there was previously some hope that I might not weep during the ceremony, it was gone about thirty seconds into the song. Seeing Chafe looking down at his guitar just smiling and knowing he was smiling both because his wife is awesome and also because they were so super-happy for us just put me over the edge. Ben's sister Amy honored all the people who couldn't be there, my friend Bob spoke about how depressed I used to be back in New York and now I have everything I've ever wanted, and Lois (my stepmom) read a beautiful poem. Ben and I wrote our own vows but also read traditional ones. The most money was spent on food, and we almost didn't have a cake, but at the last minute found someone to do it and I gave her a picture and we got a totally Martha Stewart–looking cake that also tasted really, really good (not so much on our anniversary, though, after a year of being in the freezer).

  For many years, I doubted I'd ever get married. I'd fantasized about the wedding, but as a child of divorce, I waited perhaps longer than some, more interested in finding the right person than settling down for the sake of it. Plus in my twenties I was too tied up being miserable, in my thirties I was too busy recuperating from the damage I did in my twenties, so it wasn't until I was forty that I was like, “I'd marry me! Where's the guy?” When I met Ben, I knew the wait was worth it, except for the part about Mom being gone. The wedding was everything I wanted—family and friends gathered to celebrate our commitment. Doing it on a budget took a little more time and effort on the part of the bride and groom, but I never lost sight of the idea that it was one day out of our lives together. I know for sure that if we'd served coffee and Ho Hos to the same bunch of folks, with a boom box and a mix tape, I'd have been just as happy. Maybe when we renew our vows… And you know, now that I've written a few pages, I think I know what marriage is now, a year and a half in. It's everything that's us.