The Hunt for White October

So, clearly I'm an idiot when it comes to weight loss.

I weighed in Sunday morning at 165.0 pounds, down 86.0 pounds from my starting weight and about 1.50 pounds off last week.

You’ll note that I weighed in on Sunday. Saturday’s weight was 167.0 pounds, which was up from last week, and also up from my mid-week low of 165.25. I should have posted right then, while the rage seethed until I wasn’t speaking English so much as I was speaking F***.

I also should have gone to my meeting, because it’s important to remember that this is a long-term situation, and one bad weigh-in doesn’t matter. It matters even less when I know I’ve been good, and I know that I haven’t succumbed to the chocolate miniatures that chase after me in the hallways at work. Going to a meeting when I’ve had a ‘gain’ is a good time to remind myself that this is lifelong and not week-to-week. But I didn’t go, and Howard didn’t go either, in solidarity to me, and now I’m irritated with myself for making us both miss.

But as I noted above, I weighed in on Sunday at 165.0 and this morning, I weighed in at 164.0. On Thursday, I bought a Calvin Klein suit in a size 8. No stretch, just 8. It’s so obvious now that my body was doing rearranging and opted to shelve the weight loss for the reconstruction, as it were. If I’d only had the sense to see it on Saturday, I could have laughed my way through the meeting, rather than burning adrenaline over nothing. I don’t understand why I flip out when this happens. This is at least the second time in 2007 that I’ve had a ‘closed for renovation’ week, and I always wind up smaller and lighter when it’s over. I can be such a dork sometimes.

I did rally, and then Howard and I had a good day out dress-hunting. We found a silver/champagne jobbie in a size 10 at the first place. It’s lovely, but it’s strapless, naturally, (grrr!) and the back is cut very low, so I just don’t know. My back isn’t nice enough to expose, even through organza or lace, and so I’d have to have a jacket made, and that’s on top of the alterations charge and $900 price tag for the gown.

We found 4 more at stop #2. We forgot the digital camera and so had to take pics of the finalists on my phone. They were teeny and grainy and the octopus had a starring role in a couple of shots, so those dresses are out. The lone finalist from Trip #1 is out, too. I liked it because I looked better in a close-fitting dress than I thought I would, but I don’t like spaghetti straps, and it didn’t have enough action in the bodice to suit me.

This is getting easier, in that I know what I don’t want, which takes out most of a salon’s inventory. Nothing pouffy in the skirt, nothing slutty in the torso, and it has to be long with a train. I like the lace trains over the satin, and the satin over the taffeta, and anything non-white gets my vote before the Victorian costumes. On the advice of my friend Jean-ius, I am no longer listening to sales clerks who blather about how I can affix sleeves to strapless dresses, yank out layers of tulle to ‘slim down’ the silhouette, and/or carve up the train to make a ‘modesty wrap’--as if some rectangle of sheer fabric is going to ‘modest up’ a dress that stops 2 inches above my gravity-challenged décolleté. But there’s been nothing that leaped out at me and said, “Here Comes The Bride!” and that’s a little disturbing.

We’re going out again in 2 weeks, the next time DS spends the weekend with X. I hope I find The Dress on that trip, or at least decide that something I’ve seen already is close enough to be ‘it’. The next time I’d be able to shop after that is in April, because we’re heading back down to Florida for vacation at the end of March. The upside is that, by April, I’m likely to know what my true bottom-weight is, or at least be close enough to it that I could really shop in the size I’ll be wearing at the altar. The down side is, that’s only 6 months from the wedding. If I wind up buying a gown from some place that has to order it (rather than just handing me the dress from the inventory), then I’ll have to wait 16 weeks while little boys in Asia go blind sewing the appliqué and seed pearls to the bodice.

Frankly I think all that blather about taking 4 months to make a dress is just a load of crap. It just isn’t possible that a bridal gown displayed in every commercially-available magazine is so unique that each one must be made by hand. I think that the manufacturers deliberately wait months to process ordering, so that the bride feels better about shelling out hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a dress she’ll wear for about 6 hours.

But even if it’s a fake wait, I have to factor that in. I could just go to places that sell off the floor and/or only buy things in current inventory. It’s a smart move, because the dresses are discontinued and so are much less expensive than those ordered ‘fresh’. It’s also a good risk, since I’m a size 10-12 now, and most of the try-on dresses are ordered in that size. I don’t have the need to have my dress custom-made or special-ordered. What I do have is a need to choose a dress. I’m holding up selection on attendant wear and flowers, both of which need My Dress as the standard-bearer before anything else can be done. Maybe we’ll all just wear tuxes.

After we finished at salon #2, we decided to make an impromptu stop at one of those cattle-call ‘salons’ that send brides down conveyor belts and stuff them full of Bridal Fear on their way to the ceremony. Those places are designed for the younger, ‘blushing’ crowd, as it were, and seem to cater to a more manufactured, cookie-cutter wedding, but we were in the neighborhood, they have a dress that’s of interest to me, and we figured there was no harm in trying.

Wanna bet?

First of all, it was a reprise of the bridal expo: give me your information, go stand over there, you should have made an appointment, and are you the mother of the bride (that’s my favorite one). Second, it’s sort of a Sam’s Club of wedding paraphernalia, so there’s ‘booths’ of other vendors smashed into the lobby, with card tables overflowing with wedding kitch and registration forms. It’s a big, big place, but it’s stuffed full of dresses and women, and so the tux ‘booth’ is competing for space at the entrance with the videographer and the disc jockey, and everybody's blaring their ‘come buy my crap’ music, so the whole place sounds like a county carnival.

Most everyone there was a twenty-something bride, and there were tons of them. The places I’ve been so far are one-appointment-at-a-time salons that don’t open unless they're expecting someone. It’s very different at Bride’s Zoo. I saw no fewer than 6 women in wedding gowns, all of them standing at attention with a ‘don’t shoot my puppy!’ look on their face, nodding in time with the finger wagging, clipboard-toting "Zookeeper" who was hard-selling them into whatever gown the bride happened to be wearing. I’m trying now to figure out the dress designer so I can go somewhere else. It’s worth it to me to pay more, just so I don’t have to go back to that place. I half-expected to see someone walking around with one of those trash scoopers, just like at the Zoo.

I think what I really need here is some girl-help. Howard is awesome and I really need him there, but he’s not much of a critical eye. It’s great to hear him say, ‘honey, you look beautiful’, but it isn’t helping me decide on what dress is going to be The One, and which one should be laughed off my shoulders and talked about over cocktails once the Try-On March is over. Don’t even think that the bridal ‘consultants’ are much help. Those are the beasts suggesting I create my own dress out of their $900 fabric. They have their own sales code that I’ve already figured out, and that makes me want to slug them with my pearl-crusted evening bag. Whenever I put a dress into the ‘maybe’ pile, someone from the salon invariably says, “Oooh, that’s my favorite dress!” It’s the bridal equivalent to ‘our manager has that same bed at home.” I need someone estrogen-based who is not on commission and who can tell me if my shoulders look good framed with nothing but atmosphere, or if I should really consider something in an A-line.

No, no, no!

It’ll all come together. Like Howard said, the dress is a tough thing to nail down, because it requires old-fashioned attendance to do it. We did most of our venue shopping over the phone, most of our photographer screening on the internet, and all our musicians came by referral, so it was basically a one-call, ‘are you free/what’s the charge?’ conversation, and we’re finished. The dress requires hours in my underwear and drives between shops, and lots of frowning and fussing once all the crinoline is in place. It’s a huge help that I can actually get into the dresses I’m considering, and now that I have made my peace (kinda!) with the Naked Gown, it’s going better. But 2 trips a month is going to make this a long, long process. I’m super-glad now that we didn’t wait until May to start shopping, as we'd originally planned. I’d be standing in the dressing room at the Barn of Barrington, barking orders at my seamstress to get the pins out of my dress so I could walk down the aisle. So, it could be worse.

I mean, at least I’m still losing weight.

A the B(uild-A-Bride)