The Case of the Slippery Wedding Dress (and oh yeah, I got married last weekend)
In the sixth grade, which was my last year attending public school, I took dance as my elective. The gym teacher, who was somewhat of a visionary (despite not being properly liscensed to teach in the state and eventually getting fired) devised a rendition of “Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing for the finale of that year’s holiday concert. She broke our crew into two groups: the good dancers, who would get to dance with a male partner and get to do a lift, and the not-so-good dancers, who would do the section where Patrick Swayze jumps off the stage and does his little sexy dance with the rest of resort staff following behind.
I was deemed one of the “good dancers,” meaning I got a male partner and the chance to do a lift. But among the other good dancers was a seventh grader named Alexis who caught me cutting across the line of traffic when switching between classes once (the school had a rather Draconian counterclockwise traffic pattern for switching classes and it had taken me months to get muster the courage to jump the line like the rest of the upperclassmen) and later threatened to “kick me off the stage” quite literally if I accidentally kicked her again during lift practice.
I was terrified of her. And it wasn’t even my fault. My partner sucked. Everytime we’d get ready ready for our lift (which wasn’t even the iconic Dirty Dancing lift pictured above, but rather a modified version simplified for the intermediate school crowd), he’d swing me around sideways and I’d accidentally kick Alexis and she’d go ballistic and I’d spend the rest of the day worrying that she and the rest of her seventh grade friends were going to jump me in the parking lot.
Very few people got jumped in the parking lot in Freehold Borough but in the fifth grade, a fight had broken out in the cafetorium that landed the elementary school gym teacher in the hospital with a concussion when she stepped in to break it up; she never fully recovered. So I had seen things.
At any rate, when the time for the holiday concert came around, my parents were in the audience in all their home video glory. They knew about the lift, and they dutifully zoomed in- way the heck in- to capture my ascent into 80s dance film stardom. But my partner dropped me, as usual, and I fell flat on my butt. The only saving grace was that I managed not to kick Alexis on the way down.
I mention all of this today because, oh yeah, I got married on Friday. And I’d decided, in my infinite wisdom, that the best way to add to the stress of planning a wedding while navigating the oh-so-delightful intricacies of orthopedic surgeons, physical therapy, and a frightening number of narcotics while an HMO health insurance plan would be to redeem my sixth grade self on my wedding day.
During our first dance.
To an edited version of our music that we’d never actually practiced to.
While wearing a rather slippery (and backless) bias cut silk gown in which I’d never previously danced.
In front of a hundred of our closest family and friends on the patio of the eighteenth-century river front estate where we held the ceremony…
A bit of background before we continue:
I told PIC that the only gift I wanted for Christmas this past year was ballroom dance lessons with him for the wedding. He interpreted this to mean that I would select a studio, and the type of classes I wanted, and sort out the purchasing of said classes and that he’d just fork over his credit card and show up. I, on the other hand, interpreted this to mean that he would do all the legwork, and that I would get to be the one who just got to show up.
By February or March we’d reach an impasse. I was freaking out about my upcoming trip to Iceland, the fact that we hadn’t even booked our honeymoon, and to top it all off, my fiancé wasn’t taking me and my first dance desires seriously when ballroom lessons were the only thing I’d asked him for that Christmas and didn’t he know he was marrying a dance and that the first dance is important?
This led, inevitably, to the requisite “should we call of the wedding?” conversation (except we were both too terrified of the prospect to use the words “call off” and instead tiptoed around the idea of “postponement”); I threw myself on the kitchen floor in front of the fridge, which is where my very best and most dramatic displays of emotion generally take place, and spent a good seven or eight minutes mulling over the fact that there were people coming to the wedding from London and wondering what would happen to them if we called off and/or postponed the wedding.
Fortunately, the seven or eight minutes I spent pondering their fate gave me just enough time to get hold of myself, and to realize that I perhaps needed to be a bit more clear with PIC regarding my desires for our first dance, our honeymoon, and so on and so forth.
He, in turn, stepped up to the plate and purchased a series of classes for us, then won another at a charity auction, and lo and behold, suddenly there we were a few months later, a freshly minted married couple, halfway through our foxtrot, stepping into a promenade position to prepare for the moment of truth…
But you’ll have to wait for the rest until next time because we’re about to land in Venice, people.
Fieldwork in Stilettos 
17 Responses to “The Case of the Slippery Wedding Dress (and oh yeah, I got married last weekend)”
congratulations!
🙂
I knew that your wedding would be memorable in many ways. So happy for you! Venice! Wow! Can’t wait to hear the rest of your wedding dance story!
We had such an amazing time, I kept telling my non-married friends “You all need to have a wedding because this is just too much fun!”
Congratulations!!!!
Thanks 🙂
Wonderful!!!!! Looking forward to all sorts of blogging goodies during your honeymoon, as you have to perfect the “married person telling story” spiel 😉
Gaaaawd, I know. Those beach stories on my part were pathetic.
Congratulations!! I can’t wait to hear the rest of the story. I hope your first dance lift was much more successful than in sixth grade!
Have a wonderful time in Venice! 🙂
Thank you! And yes, I’m sure you can imagine (from the fact that I dared post about it) that there’s going to be a much happier ending here than there was in the sixth grade 😉
Congrats! For some reason it never clicked in my head that your wedding was the same freaking day as mine! So from one newlywed to another, congrats! I hope the day was what you were planning for but that your marriage will be even better. Enjoy your honeymoon.
From Elle in Winnipeg
Ooooh! Congrats to you as well in that case 🙂 I was intentionally vague about the actual date (ahhh the joys of having acquired an Internet stalker over the years…) so no worries on that count. Hope your special day was fab and that you’re enjoying your first few days as a Mrs. 🙂
Congratulations! Have a wonderful time in Venice 🙂
Thank you! So far, so good.
Hi Kat! When we were driving up to your wedding my mom mentioned how you’d been on good morning america and how I should google you. I love a good internet stalking session- especially of brand new soon-to-be family members, so I did just that and managed to stumble upon your blog.
Kat. I’ve been reading your blog like a damn lunatic all weekend. It reads like an amazing book that I literally CANNOT put down. Hope you don’t think I’m a weirdo. But I seriously love reading about your life- especially all your trials and tribulations with online dating because that is something I find myself in the throes of as we speak. Reading your extremely well-written, hilarious, and wildly relatable thoughts on your misadventures in dating and knowing that you managed to come out on top with a happily ever after has been, for lack of a better word(s), absolutely freakin fabulous. Thank you for being you and thank you for marrying my cousin!
Hope you’re both having an amazing honeymoon!
Jessica
Awww, thanks Jessica! Except you’re probably the one who thinks I’m a weirdo at this point, not the other way around- I had some pretty crazy adventures back in the day 🙂 Hang in there with the dating- as the saying goes, you’ve gotta kiss a few frogs before you find your prince! Thank you so much more joining us on our special day and I’ll look forward to seeing you again and getting to know you better in the future 🙂
[…] so sporadically over the past few months that it occurs to me I’ve said very little about the actual wedding, hardly anything about our honeymoon, and completely skipped over the fact that last month found me […]