A Gown Fit for a Lifetime Guarantee
Standing on a stage-like riser, her image smiling back at her from a great three-sided mirror, Tara Deeds is being fitted, as far as she is concerned, for the rest of her life.
“When it’s all finished, will it be easier to walk in?” she asks.
A seamstress, kneeling as though in adoration before Tara’s 10-pound, seven-layer wedding gown, makes small marking snips in its excess hem with an orange plastic-handled scissors. “Yes,” replies Millie Annenberg, watching from the side. “There’ll be an inch of clearance from the floor. So you can walk. So you can dance.”
Along the wall to Tara’s left hangs a battalion of unoccupied wedding gowns awaiting other hopeful women who have made pacts for eternity with their men. Behind her, on pale couches in the brightly lighted Wedding Dreams gown shop, Tara’s mother and sister-in-law sit watching with inclined heads. To her right stands Annenberg, the proprietor of Wedding Dreams.
“Beautiful,” the watching women murmur. “Lovely.”
Tara’s gown, from Mori Lee of Florida, is an elaborate compilation of white satin, organdy, Venice lace and thousands of beads. A large bow adorns its lower back. The gown’s focal point is a double border at the hem, within which white flowers are appliqued. It cost about $600.
“I tried on five other ones, but once I tried this one on I knew this was just it,” explains Tara, a 23-year-old United Parcel Service supervisor who lives in Granada Hills.
Tara will exchange vows with Frank Diana, a 26-year-old L.A. County sheriff’s deputy, at the Calabasas Inn on July 12. An affable woman with a girlish giggle, she is the polar opposite of a frazzled bride-soon-to-be.
She and her fiance, but mostly she, made the nuptial arrangements--for everything from venue to flowers to photography--last year. She selected the gown in October after trying on a sample. It arrived in February, which allowed plenty of time to arrange last week’s fitting. The couple already has paid for everything.
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Millie Annenberg has been in business at Wedding Dreams for more than a decade. More than 15,000 prospective brides, she estimates, have been through her gown shop and free library, where they can get information on all aspects of wedding production, from nondenominational clerics to reception sites to cake makers to entertainers. She also gives seminars to soon-to-be newlyweds.
Annenberg comes by her work honestly. As a little girl in New Haven, Conn., she and her widowed mother, who worked in a Lionel model train factory, were in the habit of attending strangers’ weddings at cavernous old St. Patrick’s church.
“Sometimes we’d stay for two weddings,” she says. “We’d sit in the back row of the church and pray for the couple who was getting married, and hope they’d have children and a happy life, then we’d go home. And we’d have had a wonderful Saturday morning.”
Even now Annenberg admits to a soft heart in the presence of organ music and snuffling relatives and vows of forever. She receives many invitations to the weddings of clients. Before June is over she’ll have attended eight in the month.
“I go to every one,” she says. “I’m an emotional person. I get very caught up. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a wedding where I haven’t cried.”
As a male, I’ve never quite understood the emotion women bring to the whole concept of weddings. Why do so many cry so easily at weddings--anybody’s wedding? You’d think that men, creatures supposedly polygamous by nature, would have more reason to weep.
Although I’ve had my share of good times at weddings (wedding receptions, anyway), weddings themselves have always tasted to me of antiquated notions about women.
I mean, doesn’t all the hoopla have its ancient roots in marking the relieved handing over by her parents of an economically unproductive creature whose care and feeding would henceforth devolve on the groom? (Isn’t this why the bride’s father traditionally was expected to pay for the celebration?)
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And didn’t a wedding mark the point at which a paternalistic culture, satisfied that another innately wanton female had been safely delivered into the custody of one man, finally permitted a woman to have a sex life?
These are to weepingly CELEBRATE?
All right. Maybe women, mature women especially, weep in recognition of the idealism the wedding vows embody--and the gap between it and the muddy slog that typifies most men’s and women’s attempts to live together long-term. The gap, that is, between wedding and marriage.
“I suppose women who’ve had the experience of married life know the ups and downs and the goods and bads,” says Annenberg, whose own marriage ended in divorce after 35 years. “They’re just hoping for this couple to experience a lot of the happy times.”
Annenberg has helped put together weddings that have cost from $500,000 (at the Del Coronado in San Diego, with three separate cocktail hours and a lavish sit-down dinner for 500 guests) to $545 (“The bride got a dress from the half-off rack for $100,” she says, “the groom wore a suit, the flowers were from the family’s gardens, the site was a private house, and the cake was a wedding gift. Everybody brought pot luck. They had a wonderful time.”).
With about 130 guests, Tara Deeds’ wedding, Annenberg says, will be one of about average size, average these days running in the $20,000 to $25,000 range, or about the price of a new, fully equipped Honda Accord.
Tara has no doubt that the energy, time and money spent are worth it.
“This is the rest of my life and the rest of his life,” she says with calm finality. “It’s a big commitment and we want to make it in front of our families. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience--it’s going to be for us, at least--and it deserves the magnitude that people give it. This WILL not happen again.”
Well, only a fool or a skeptic would suggest otherwise to such a juggernaut. Congratulations, Tara and Frank. Long life together.
