The Wedding Dress Experience

Since the whole wedding planning thing started one of my top priorities (behind finding the most amazing and yet affordable photographer in the world) was finding a dress. Now I haven’t been planning a wedding since I was 12- so it made it a bit more difficult. I sort of had an idea in my head, but in order to see if my idea fit my body type I went to try on wedding dresses.
My first experience was pleasant enough, besides the one dress that made me look and feel like a sausage- (mermaid cut is now and never will be right for me) I found some good ideas and had some fun. We decided to do one more trying on of the enormous white dresses before buying material and a pattern.
At the Portland Bridal Show I had been very impressed with the dresses that Tres Fabu had and the people at the show were super nice- so I decided to go there. My mom and I headed out on a Saturday morning and after some arguments over directions and me firing her from ‘navigator’ we made it to the shop. They didn’t take appointments and so we found that we’d be waiting around a little over an hour just to try on a dress. While waiting and pinning dresses with my assigned gray pins I overheard a woman discussing a wedding dress event and deciding to go there. I asked them where they were going.
Turns out there was this big dress event with couture dresses and regular dresses all on sale for some breast cancer thing. So I asked them where and we left Tres Fabu to find the event. When we got there it was basically one large room at the bottom of a hotel reserved for rows and rows of wedding dresses. I found my size row (did you know that wedding dresses run 2-3 sizes larger than regular clothes thus making an already tubby girl feel like a big fat walrus huge monstrous fatty mcfat fat....fat) and chose a few dresses. We went to the back to try them on. What I saw when we entered the ‘dressing room’ was a sectioned of place where probably 100 girls were either 1)stripping 2)having a large white dress placed over there heads 3) modeling a dress 4) taking a large white dress off. This is similar to some nightmares I’ve had. Hello gym class! II immediately didn’t like it. I’m not into getting nekkid in front of a bunch of people it makes me uncomfortable. As appeased to my mom who would probably run nekkid through the streets without a care in the world- I prefer for people to see me clothed, if at all. So we wade through half naked women trying to find a corner where we can set up camp. We finally find one that is semiprivate and put the dresses on a rack. At this point my brain is working trying to figure out the best way for me to de-robe while remaining covered. This is how I work. Jean and my mom are both there which added to the difficulty. Jean went off to find more dresses which made it a bit less stressful- not that jean added stress- but having my soon to be mom-in-law see me nekkid added stress. So it was just me, my mom, and 100 other girls to deal with. The entire time my mom kept saying things like, ‘just take off your clothes’ or ‘it’s not a big deal, just strip!’ I should make this more clear- she wasn’t just saying this, she was saying it insistently, occasionally PULLING at my shirt. My brain was near exploding, I looked around as my stomach turned and I felt like barfing all over those dresses, I caught the eye of the mother of the bride in the area next to me, she looked at me with understanding, offering a smile. My mother kept insisting I take off my clothes. ‘Just give me a minute’- I kept pleading, ‘I just need a second’. This is like my worst night mare come true. Finally I lost it. I burst into tears and told her if she didn’t stop I was going to leave. At this point I was feeling awful, not only silly for not just getting out of my clothes and into a dress but now I was crying. hehehe- it was terrible. When I finally composed myself and figured out a way to be less clothed around all those strangers everything went fairly well and we had a great idea of what dress I wanted. In the end it worked out- but just a fair warning in you hear of one of these dress thing where they have ‘thousands of dresses’ on sale, avoid it...unless of course you’re the type of person who either enjoys being naked in front of strangers or doesn’t really mind it. Yep- not for me.