I've Got the Fever

Wedding Fever. I've got it, and I've got it bad. At this very moment, I know four people who are on the verge of getting married. My friend Emily will go first, then the Wily Republican, then Anne, then Steph.

It doesn't take much to get me thinking about my wedding--what I want, what I can afford, what I want but will never afford--but lately I've been really caught up thinking about dresses and cakes and reception sites and photographers and what songs I'm going to force the DJ to play.

It's just that I really love weddings. I love going to weddings, love being in weddings, love watching weddings on television. I love weddings even after the Great College Friend Wedding Disaster of 2006, where the bride forbid me--her bridesmaid!--from bringing a date because I had not been dating someone longer than six months.

It's easy to get caught up in weddings and all the glitz and glamor, and I am a sucker for all of it. All of it. Which is why I've spent extra time dreaming up my own lately. Everybody else is getting to dream and plan and design, and I want to, too. And below is what I've come up with so far. Below is the answer to the question "If you were to get married today and money weren't an object, what would your wedding look like?"

I think I've got a pretty good answer to that.


First, the dress:

It's a Jim Hjelm dress, designed by Francesca Pitera.



Next, my husband's tux:


I'm sort of anti-bow tie. I want my to-be husband to wear a tie, but it doesn't have to be black.



Next, the bridesmaids can make the case for their favorite of these three dresses. Whoever makes the most compelling argument gets her dress as the chosen one (in dark purple):











And what about the ring? Well, it's big, it's bold, it's square--which is something I never thought I'd develop a thing for, but I so have:

And here's what my mother will wear so she doesn't look like a frumpy ninety year-old, which is often the temptation of some mothers-of-the-bride:




When my sweet tooth starts acting up, here's what I'll be slicing into, but picture the color scheme involving some kind of purple:



And where will this all happen? Well, considering that I live in one of the most beautiful places in the world, it's got to happen at the source of all that beauty:

On the ocean. (This picture was taken here, in Boothbay Harbor.)


The first song that will play as the sun sets and the guests freshen up their champagne flutes will be this one:

It's the perfect first dance song. It's just the right tempo. You could easily slow dance to it, but it's not plodding and so long that your guests will start wondering how rude it is to get up to go to the bathroom while you're being filmed dancing your first dance as man and wife.

I've got other things planned, too. I've already imagined certain people taking care of certain things--for example, I hope Diana would do a reading. She also seems to be the right girl to be in charge of my The DJ Must Play These Songs List. I mean, who better to lay it on the line for the DJ, wag a finger in his face and tell him if he doesn't get his act together and play "Love Man" and "You Can Leave Your Hat On" and "Cecilia" and "Maggie May" and "What I Like About You," there's going to be a serious problem. I hope she would do that even if deep down she thinks some of those songs are sort of weird for a wedding.

So, all in all, I think it's shaped up to be a festive event, but it'll be a long time before I get to make any of that come to life, so I guess for the next few months I'll just sit back and enjoy all the other weddings around me and gather up even more ammunition I can use in those moments when I get so frustrated by a stack of papers in front of me that I raise my head, look out the window, and think about a white dress hanging on a door, just waiting for me to put it on.

Couldn't Keep It Out of My Head

Today I woke up with this in my head:

I had honest-to-goodness pep in my step today. I love, love, love the first day of school. Everyone is tan and rested. They are carrying empty notebooks and sharpened pencils. They are downright cheery.

And so was I. My cheer came from all the above and more--like, for example, the woman who flagged me down in the grocery store parking lot and said, gasping, "YOU HAVE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL SHOES."

Thank you, purple satin heels. It was a good way to start the semester.

Sorry, Boyfriend: The Rami Kashou Edition

Sorry, Boyfriend, but I'm in love with Rami Kashou.

Boyfriend, you will not know who Rami Kashou is for several reasons. The first is that you don't have cable TV. The second is that even if you did, you wouldn't use it to watch shows like Project Runway. After all, Project Runway has nothing to do with football, hockey, cars, hunting, or things that explode. And if a TV show has nothing to do with those things, you don't see any reason to waste your time on it. And I'm okay with that. Because I know that when you and I finally get it together and share an apartment, we are going to have two rooms with televisions in them. One of those rooms will be forever-tuned to ESPN, and the other will broadcast a steady stream of What Not to Wear, America's Next Top Model, and Project Runway. That room will be mine. And in that room I will worship Rami Kashou.

I have been a Rami fan from week one on Project Runway. Week one. The things I love about him are many, but one of my favorites is his voice. I mean, my God that is one soothing man. I would like to have him around on those days when everything--and I mean everything--goes wrong. I'd like to turn to him and say, "Rami? Say some words for me, would you?" And then he would let me curl up on his lap and he would pet my hair and speak the names of fabulous fabrics he's thinking of using in his next collection. And then I would fall asleep and drool on his abs, but he'd be okay with it because he has realized he is in love with me.

You know, just like he's in love with Jillian.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rami's "gay." He likes guys. Uh-huh. But have you ever seen the show? Have you ever seen how Rami and Jillian can't keep their hands off of each other? They're always standing next to, batting eyelashes at, and whispering to each other. There is something going on there. You can so totally tell. And if it's true that Rami has, in the past, wanted nothing romantic in nature with girls, it might just be that Jillian is making him rethink all that. I can't even tell you how much money I would pay to see the two of them make out. Their making out would make my day.

I'm not really blowing any of this out of proportion. I didn't think anything of the two of them at first, but a few weeks into the show, I caught myself thinking, Just what the hell is going on here? And it's not just me thinking and wondering about these things.

Of course, even if they aren't in love--oh, but they are--they still please me. I bet they have slumber parties. I bet they get drunk on expensive wine and watch Casablanca. In the morning, I bet they get bagels and watch many hours of E! and say catty things about, say, Lindsay Lohan and her sad leggings.

Oh, what I wouldn't give to have that kind of sleepover with Rami. Or the other kind of sleepover. Either way, I want to spend many hours considering Rami's jaw, his stubble, his fantastic eyes. I want to lay my head down on his arm. I want him to tell me it's all going to be okay, that we can sleep in late and then, after breakfast, he'll make me a nice spring dress.

You know what else I really like about Rami? Just looking at him, you can tell he would look good wet, that there is no one else in the world who would look as spectacular coming out of the shower. I'm fairly sure he would glisten.

And I hope his glistening self wins Project Runway, and that's saying something because I love every last one of those final four contestants. I want to be Christian's roommate. I want to be Jillian's sister. I want to be Chris's date to every New York drag show. But Rami? I want to be Rami's go-to girl, his muse, his love. I want to spend many days watching him work, watching him cut the next most beautiful dress I've ever seen in my life.

It would be a pretty spectacular life.

A Rat-Tail, Maine? Really?

One of my students has a rat-tail. No kidding.

This, among other things, concerns me. I'm not seeing any bright spots, fashion-wise, here in lower Maine. The mall in my town actually scares me. It has a Payless Shoe Store, a Sears, a Chinese restaurant, and a scrapbooking store. There is piped-in music (Christopher Cross and Michael Bolton) in the common walkways, but the stores are eerily silent. The place is lousy with power-walking senior citizens. They buzz by empty stores and little pagodas in that sell discounted perfume and sun catchers.

To call it a mall seems audacious. To call it a mall is to mock good shopping everywhere.

The closest decent mall is in Portland. On Saturday I drove down there and stood in Macy's for a few minutes, running my hands over shiny fabrics, smelling the new fall lines, listening to the thump of dance hall music coming from the MAC cosmetics counter. The luxury of all that was overwhelming.

So, there's no fashion up here, and there's apparently very little good sense or taste. When my rat-tailed student turned to exit class and I first saw the skinny whip of hair that trailed down the back of his black t-shirt I cringed. My hands itched to reach out, grab that snakey-looking thing and snip it right off. I wanted to ask him what possessed him, what made him think that a rope of hair dangling down from a modified mullet was a good look, a look for 2007, a look that would get him a woman or a job because, contrary to his belief, it would do approximately none of those things.

The girls here aren't any better. I'm not seeing any pop, any pizazz, any glitzy purses or earrings or shoes. Most of my colleagues seem resigned to neutrals, to soft clothes without any discernible cut. Most students show up wearing oversize t-shirts and jeans.

This is pretty different from the places I've been lately. When I was teaching in Minnesota, my classrooms were filled to the brim with itsy blond things with tight tops and those sequined purses that were all the rage a few semesters back. Those purses were awful, and I spent entirely too much time glaring at the stores that sold them in the Mall of America, but even their awfulness was something, some sort of trend or fashion.

My university in Buffalo drew a considerable section of its population from the Burroughs of New York, so my female students (and even a surprising number of male students) often sauntered into class looking glossy and lush, like they had just stepped out of a spread in Vogue.

Here in Maine there's less gloss and lush and more hardy and plain.

Maybe it's too early for me to be passing fashion judgment on Maine, or to be making assumptions, but it just seems that for a state that is so invested in all things Boston (see also: the Red Sox, the Bruins), there should be a bit more glamor here. We are, after all, only two hours from Boston, which is a big city, a big city that I imagine has a lot of fine places to shop.

I guess I'll just have to resign myself to being one of the only faculty members who clicks down the hall in high heels, who considers fabrics other than cotton when she dresses in the morning.

Once, one of my coworkers in Buffalo sighed when she heard me coming down the hall in my high-heeled boots. I was swinging my wool trench coat on my arm and reading an armful of campus mail. "You'll get tired of all that," she told me, gesturing to my shoes. It was possibly the saddest thing I'd ever heard. There she was, a big lump of frump, wearing slouchy pants and a shapeless shirt that went right up to her chin. She had pictures of cats on her coffee cup, on her wall, on her computer, on her door. It was clear that she'd given up years ago.

"Maybe," I said, smiling and unlocking my door. It was true--maybe I would get tired of waking up in the morning and actually caring about what I put on my body, but for now I was going to enjoy it.

So maybe I don't have as many options as I used to in Buffalo, or in Minnesota, where I lived for three years only a short distance from the mecca of all things shopping. I'll be fine with trips to Portland, to Bangor, maybe even across the state line and into New Hampshire. I'll be fine with looking at so much hardy, so much plain, just as long as this state keeps washing me in ocean air and keeps stocking me with an unending supply of Whoopie Pies, its most famous dessert.