The Bridal Dress

As do many who buy a wedding dress, mine has a story. I had been looking around and had started to get an idea of what I did and didn't like. It was January 1998 and about a week before I was going to Long Island for a week, specifically to find and order THE DRESS, there was a bridal show at the local mall. I went with a couple of friends and after the fashion show, we walked around the mall checking out the vendors. There was a bridal salon that had a couple dresses on maniquins. I stopped and looked at one of these dresses and I thought to myself, "That's a really nice dress." Knowing what the answer would be, I went to the women behind the table and asked, "You don't happen to know who the manufacturer of that dress is, do you?" Sure enough, the answer was, "No, I don't know. That's a new dress. Do you know?" looking at the other woman, "No, I don't know." OK, since I am vehimently against bridal salon practices of ripping out tags and not letting customers know the manufacturers of the dresses, I was not going to shop at that salon. Instead, I carefully noted in my head the details of the dress and I would scour my bridal magazines in hopes of finding it there.

Fast forward a week and I'm on Long Island with my Mom looking for a dress. I wasn't able to find that dress in the magazines. Already, one of my favorite salons was The Wedding Center in Commack NY. Their prices were great, and they never rip tags out. I had been there before and we decided to start the week there and see if there was anything new. I tried on about 6 dresses and as the last dress was on, my Mom suggested I ask the attendant if she knew the dress in question. She didn't but suggested I look at some of the new spring catalogues. The second catalogue I looked at, there it was! It was Mon Cheri! HA to the first salon! I showed the picture to the attendant and she said, "Oh, yes! I remember this dress. We sold it off the rack last month to another bride." Groan. Well, at least we got the manufacturer so we could track it down better.

Mom started making calls and (suposedly) got all salons in our area that sold Mon Cheri gowns. One by one we found out none of these salons had that particular gown. A message was left at the Mon Cheri warehouse in Manhatten telling them our plight. Thursday night we get back from dinner and there's a message from the warehouse. It said the public was not allowed to buy from the warehouse, but even if we could, they didn't have that gown. They did have the names of 2 salons that had THAT DRESS. One was The Wedding Center (who sold it off the rack) and the other was a salon that was not on our original list! Mom immediately got on the phone to that salon. For some reason she was on hold for almost 45 minutes, but she refused to hang up. Finally someone got on the line and THEY HAD THE DRESS!!! We made an appointment for first thing the next morning.

By this time it was almost going to be a disappointment if this wasn't THE DRESS, but I wasn't going to buy it if there were others I liked better. I tried it on. I liked it. With that in mind I wanted to compare that dress to the others that were still in contention so we went back to The Wedding Center. That dress was the winner and The Wedding Center said they could order it for us! Yea! I had my dress!

My "old" was my Grandmothers first anniversary ring (she never got an engagement ring since the wedding was rushed because of World War II.) My "new" was the dress and a pearl necklace. My "borrowed" was a silver Minnie charm borrowed from Laura and my "blue" was both my Grandmother's ring (star saphire) and I had my toes painted silver and blue!