Moo

This weekend is the weekend when I will be doing wedding flowers for a big fancy sit-down dinner hotel wedding. I cannot even express how excited I am that I get to do this. I'm still working on a name for my business (floral design and consultation - wherein not only do I want to do wedding flowers for people, but I want to help DIY types either by working with them to do their flowers or by teaching them how to make the things they want (bouquets, bouts, etc.)). Any business name suggestions are more than welcome, and I need to pick something soon because Dan is designing business cards for me to have available for the weekend.

Anyhow, not only am I doing flowers for the wedding but we're invited to the wedding as well. It's a fancy evening sit-down dinner hotel wedding. I've never been to one of those before. Almost all the weddings I've been to have been daytime ones, and the ones that weren't were not swanky formal affairs. I had no appropriate attire for this wedding, so this past weekend I informed Dan we were going dress shopping. He grabbed his ipod and we headed out to the racetrack mall.

There's a store in this mall that makes me cringe every time I see it because of the name. There are other branches of this store in other parts of the city, and since it's a chain I bet you've seen it too. I actually have looked in the windows of the store and thought they had some cute stuff, but have refused on principle to ever set foot inside. Because I hate the name of the store: it's called Dress Barn.

Because who doesn't want to buy their clothes in a barn? Oh shucks, Betty Sue, let's go down to the Dress Barn and find something to wear to the hoedown.

Really? Dress BARN? I - I'm sorry. I don't want to buy any clothing in a barn, or a shack, or a gazebo, or a coop. To me, a barn is where the animals live and where you store the hay and the farm implements. It's where Wilbur and Charlotte lived their lives. It is not where I want to buy cute clothing, or where I want to buy a swanky dress for a fancy wedding.

Knowing my limited options (and my limited budget, as I do not have millions of dollars to spend on fancy dresses), I knew I had to get over myself. So when we got to the mall, I marched right in to Dress Barn, just to see what they had.

And, I'm ashamed to admit, they had a lot. Lots of cute dresses. Lots of cocktail dresses, little black dresses, summer wedding-appropriate dresses. I had no idea what size I would wear (thanks to my embiggened chest), so I grabbed dresses in a couple of different sizes and ended up with at least ten in the dressing room. I modeled each in turn for Dan (except the first one I tried on, which was way unflattering). Four of them, I believe, were Little Black Dresses (something I've never owned). One was black-and-white, one was green, some had patterns. The dresses were well-made from nice fabrics. And then I looked at the price tags and was pleasantly suprised to discover that they were all in the $30-50 range. Seriously!?! Cute, well-made dresses for a few bucks more than the crap sold at the teeny bopper stores, and the only thing holding me back from shopping at this store was the name.

Well, I got over it. I actually bought two dresses (they were having a "save $10 if you buy two dresses" thing), a little black dress and the black and white one. I'll probably wear the latter to the wedding, as the bridesmaids are wearing black. I'm still looking for a pair of fabulous brightly-colored shoes to go with, and if I don't find what I'm looking for I already have black ones and silver ones that would work just fine. And I have to admit that next time I need a nice dress I might just have to look in a barn.