201 and a bucket of thongs

It turns out that the last entry I did was the 200th entry in the faulty vision incarnation of my journal.

Imagine that.

I've started keeping track of things I want to write about in a little moleskine book that I keep in my purse. Moleskine is the brand, not the literal description of the notebook, mind, though I'm not positive that it might not have been a bluntly honest name at one point during the company's history. There's something to be said for a company that puts its facts right out there in its consumer's face. Who among us haven't wished that Jell-o would bite the bullet and call itself "Rendered Pig Hoof Artificially Flavored Goop," or that Mattel would rename Barbie, "Plastic Ball-Crusher?"

Whatever the Moleskine's possibly disreputable past, my point is that now that I have my thoughts more-or-less organized, I'll be able to write about the things I mean to write about. This will be a giant leap forward from the past, when I mostly just wrote about the stuff I'd managed not to forget.

Maturity's just around the corner. Any day now.

...except no, it isn't, because the first item on my checklist of things to write about is "Thong Underwear," and there's nothing dignified about that subject.

In order to get to that topic however, I have to go back a little bit further, to the subject of wedding dresses, something that has only briefly reared its ugly head on this site.

Be warned. Wedding-related talk ahead. Duck and cover.

The wedding dress topic came up almost immediately after I announced my engagement, unfortunately while I was still in the initial stages of hysteria and panic that so endeared me to my fiance. It was Tara who first broached the subject, and with her usual tact it should have gone far better than it did.

Tara: "So have you thought about wedding dresses yet?"

Me: silence.

Tara: "Yuhri?"

Me: silence.

Tara: "I can't hear you breathing, Yuhri. Are you there?"

Me: "I have to wear a dress?"

Tara: "In and out. In and out. Come on. Breathe, girl."

Me: "They make dresses just for weddings?"

So no, wedding dresses weren't something I was prepared to handle. In fact, I was unprepared to handle anything wedding-related at all. It took two days on the phone for Tara to coax me into visiting a bridal shop; when I finally took the plunge, I did it with the reckless abandon of someone -- someone like my sister -- finally leaping into that long-postponed root canal by doing it on the spot in a foreign country with a foreign dentist who might or might not be familiar with the concept of anaesthetic.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this whole bridal dress shopping process, it basically consists of you, an appointment, a "specialist," (notice the resemblance to a root canal?) and a boutique. It is a boutique because it is always a boutique, unless it is a warehouse, in which case there is no appointment or specialist; it's just you and the mob, in means the procedure looks less like a root canal and more like the frenzy when Doctors Without Borders shows up in your sixty-person village with only one bottle of Imodium AD in the middle of the worst diarrhea season since 1867.

The appointment is so that the specialist knows you are coming and can help you decide on a style, help you try on dresses, and determine the inevitable and expensive tailoring that will need to be done so you'll look like an actual bride and not an obese, unmarketably ethnic Barbie doll wearing Raggedy Ann's pre-One-Night-Stand-with-Raggedy Andy wedding clothes. Tailoring for a wedding dress is not an easy business; it apparently takes an average of four to six months, and requires a fitting both before and after, although the "after" is more to offer the bride an opportunity to buy a completely different dress if the tailoring turned out wrong.

As I say, a specialist is assigned to you, which is why you need an appointment, because tailoring is not an easy thing to figure out and you need a specialist to help make these measurements and make these decisions. If, that is, the specialist can tear herself away from the slightly hysterical bride whose appointment was before yours, that bride who is now six months more pregnant than she was when she first tried on the perfect dress and had all the tailoring done.

The specialist was running a little late. This wasn't a problem. Tara and me, we played with Tara's baby. It is likely we -- Tara, me, and the baby -- were the most mellow people there. We waited an hour. The baby enjoyed herself tremendously.

When the specialist finally got around to us, she was frazzled, exhausted, and slightly shell-shocked though still, the consummate saleswoman that she was, ever so charming. We went through the expected routine. Sorry for the delay. Oh, we don't mind. What an adorable baby. Isn't she, though? Really very sorry, the last person was having some issues. Yes, we heard. So, when's the wedding date?

No idea.

Do you have any idea what sort of wedding you'd like to have?

Eh.

Do you have any idea what kind of wedding dress you'd like?

Eh.

"She wants to wear jeans," Tara said with some exasperation. The baby cooed. She was on my side.

The specialist blinked a little. "So you don't really have any plans in mind? You don't have any particular preferences?"

"I have a groom," I said helpfully.

In retrospect, it's possible that we were the most mellow, easy-going people to walk into that shop the entire week. It hadn't occurred to me before, but brides and their families can be a little nervous. Uptight. Demanding. Psychotic. My issues had more to do with denial, which doesn't prevent a body from standing about amiably while people hurl dresses over their heads.

Given this possibly retarded new client to deal with, the specialist went puttering about the racks and came back with a variety of styles for me to try out. "There's a corset and an underskirt there, too," she called over the door while I tried to wrestle myself into the first dress. "Tell me if you need anything." I could hear the pregnant bride having some sort of argument with someone outside.

It took me a good ten minutes to maneuver myself into the first outfit. Wedding dresses, it turns out, are almost always sized a little larger than normal clothing. If you're wondering what that means, basically the issue is that the standard model for a bride is a seven-foot tall running back with shoulders that could span the Brooklyn river.

I gallumphed out of the dressing room. There was no walking. I picked up the bottom half of my dress, enough white satin to repave San Francisco, and did a penguin waddle out the door. Sideways.

The process of trying on the dresses wasn't very interesting. On the other hand, watching the other brides was. The pregnant bride finally left -- (All brides wear white, did you know that? Even the pregnant ones. Purity is a state of mind) -- only to be replaced by another, equally emotional woman in her late fifties who was clinging with both fists to her late teens. At one point, I kangaroo-hopped out of my dressing room to find the women of an impressively fruitful Latino family, gathered around a bride whose dress was . . . just imagine a lace factory had imploded on a mannequin dipped in marshmallow creme, and you'll pretty much get the idea.

By the third dress, a headache that had been a vague mumble in the back of my skull had matured to a full-grown Democratic primary, complete with fist-poundings and recriminations. I suffered a few more dresses and then made my escape with Tara and baby, having established a few things to my satisfaction.

1. I will never be the uptight bride.
2. Any dress designed with fairies in mind is not meant to be worn in public.
3. Women are psychotic.

Jump ahead several months to November.

Industrious Tara, who hosted a twelve-person Thanksgiving dinner party last Thursday (fourteen people if you count the babies) called me the day after Thanksgiving to ask if I wanted to go shopping for a wedding dress.

Another tangent here: Tara is, in case I haven't mentioned it yet, one of my bridesmaids. It's possible that there's some entry in an etiquette book about how one is supposed to go about asking a friend to be a bridesmaid. With me, it happened because the people at David's Bridal made me fill out a questionnaire. Question number whatsit was about bridesmaids.

Me: "Bridesmaids?"

Tara: "It is traditional. You know. What you were for my wedding."

Me: "Shit. I don't know. Look, they're even asking me what my groom's name is. How the hell do I know?"

Tara: "Yan, Fa--"

Me: "No, I know what the groom's name is. I haven't thought about the bridesmaids. Shit. Do you, uh, want to be a bridesmaid?"

Tara: "I would be honored to be your bridesmaid. How many are you intending to have?"

Me: "I have to have more?"

It occurs to me that Tara has had to put up with a lot, being my friend.

Anyway, so Tara invited me to go wedding dress shopping again on Saturday, since the Jessica McClintock outlet was having a sale. Outlet is another name for Warehouse. See above on the subject of warehouses.

And yet, and yet . . . I got my wedding dress. So that's one thing down. Thank you, Tara.

Which brings me to the subject of thong underwear. After Jessica McClintock, we went off and visited Hillsdale Mall, where I bought my very first thong underwear. Two pairs, not with the elastic wedgie, but with an actual cloth strip that still -- it's true -- digs its way between your butt cheeks like there's gold waiting for it at the bottom of the crevice, but is, I'm told, far more comfortable than the other kind.

They weren't as uncomfortable as I thought they would be. I was quite vocal on the subject at Nordstrom, though. The saleswoman had to hide behind the counter to muffle her guffaws. I presume laughing at loud at one's customers is not recommended in the Nordstrom sales training.

Wore a pair on Monday. Survived the experience. Why do we call underpants "pairs" when there's really only one underpant? Are we counting the holes?

Yes, I know that was an anticlimax. Bite me.