Thingys 101

I don’t know the business side of running a wedding and formal gown shop, but there seems to be an overwhelming belief that each shop should exist in a black box. All information shall remain within the doors. No word of what you saw or heard should be passed on, and pricing is done mostly by witchcraft.

Because I was such a wonderful fiancé—and because our entire bridal party lived two thirds of a country away—I was given the pure thrill of accompanying Christa on several trips to bridal shops in San Diego. The layout was similar in almost all the shops. The most prominent feature was the goddess pedestal, where brides-to-be stand to be fussed over and view themselves in 180-degree mirrors. There were a handful of admiration chairs for blood-related opinion givers to sit in, and approve or disapprove of the gown options.

One half of the store usually contained various bridal gowns; the other half held the rainbow of bridesmaid dresses. The great difficulty was separating the color from the style. Instincts tell you not to touch anything in lime, but sadly there was a dress in lime that didn’t want to be lime, and it was just waiting to be snatched up by a colorblind bride, without prejudice against color, tassels, or bedazzling. The odds are against finding a dress in your color scheme and style to try on for an exact trial run. Instead, you must refer to the book of swatches, try the dress on in the wrong size, and project the body types and sizes of the bridesmaids into them. Meanwhile, across the country, the bridesmaids were all looking for dresses in the same way. They let Christa know what they’d found and wanted her to view and critique, thereby instigating the great bridesmaid dress scavenger hunt.

I tried to help with this search, but without a make and model number, it was a crapshoot. My choices produced the following responses:

“Honey.” The one where the second syllable gets lower, like I had just been told three times “not that one.” It was probably one I picked on color. Lesson learned, for at least another fifteen minutes.

“I don’t like the thingy.”

Was it the class of thingys or this specific thingy that was bad? Was it the thingy in combination with this other thingy, one too few, two too many? I guess I overslept the day thingys were covered in all the fashion design courses I took. I tried to learn the thingys to avoid, but they were all so similar, yet so different. Cursed thingys.

“Why don’t you just hold the ones I’ve picked out?” she finally said.

Your skills are not worth my time. You really help more by not helping. Did you not get the memo?

Once the options have been selected, you head off to the dressing rooms. Some stores have dress Nazis who personally attend to you, meaning they don’t let you out of their sight for fear that you might try and document what you look like in the dress. They wait by the dressing room, sometimes inside, at the ready with many large pins to create the illusion of an altered dress or to penalize those who attempt to escape with the knowledge they have gained. Fortunately, there was time for secret-agent photo reconnaissance. Given my previous field experience, this was really not a challenge. Let me see if I have any chewing gum in my pocket…“Oh, did I just take a picture?”

I’ll admit a waist-high shot of a fuchsia dress, two sizes too big really didn’t help the decision process, but it was one of the only victories I could salvage.

I was thanked for my efforts afterwards, since Christa knew I genuinely tried to help. But in my frustration, I translated it to, “I know you’re not a woman or aware of elegant style, but you did manage to drive here without getting lost. Way to go.”
- Drew Lloyd
From "Will You?" to "I Do.": A Groom's Tale of Survival