Here comes the bride(zilla)

I’m sure when the day finally comes (whenever that may be), I shall stand under the huppa and feel the exuberance and gratitude wash over me. In the meantime, though, there’s a wedding to plan, and I simply don’t have the requisite will or way of doing so

By DEBORAH DANAN
It’s quite possible that I’m the world’s most underwhelmed bride. Don’t be fooled into thinking that that makes me any less of a Bridezilla. Not caring about my wedding can be just as bad as – if not worse than – caring too much.
It means that every time someone asks me the usual questions – “When’s your wedding?” “What are you doing about a dress?” – I react as if they’ve asked the details of my bank balance. With mindyour- own-business stroppiness.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited about getting married. I’m superduper psyched to have found my true partner for life, and Zed (as we’ll call him) really fits the bill. The bill, in this case, is putting up with a bride who suffers mild panic attacks with the very mention of “color theme.”
Zed does it very well. He’s patient, kind, understanding and, above all, he gets the crazy inside of me. I’m sure when the day finally comes (whenever that may be), I shall stand under the huppa and feel the exuberance and gratitude wash over me.
In the meantime, though, there’s a wedding to plan, and I simply don’t have the requisite will or way of doing so.
Let’s address the aforementioned questions: So when’s the wedding? Well, that’s a tricky one. A couple of months ago, when Zed first slipped the ring on my finger, we kind of figured that the wedding would happen around April time.
Problem is, January came and went without so much as a whisper, and February quickly followed suit. March will imminently be jumping on the bandwagon of disappearing months. We had visited a couple of halls, but none of them appealed to me. I’m not a fan of those halls that churn out weddings as if they were on a production line, where women with overly plucked eyebrows march you through the buffets and banquets of other people’s weddings. As if intruding on someone’s most special day isn’t enough, you have to smile and pretend to be fascinated as the saleslady points out the hall’s breathtaking homage to nature. By nature I mean expertly manicured miniature palm trees and waterfalls lit with blue and red LEDs.
Eventually, we found something that suited us much more. We planned to have the wedding in a hotel. Since Zed is in the hotel industry, we cut a good deal that would have meant that for a little extra cost, we could have invited our guests to stay for the night. It would be an all-inclusive gig. Instead of having our guests schlep out to a wedding for a couple of hours of meeting and greeting and trying to hear each other over the music before driving home, they would get a mini holiday.
I would have been afforded the time – a luxury that is often denied the bride – to actually hold a conversation with the cousin I hadn’t seen in 15 years, perhaps over breakfast or in the pool the next day.
We closed the date and were ready to start planning the logistics, and then earlier this month circumstances changed and it all fell through. So now we’re back to square one and what looks set to be a more conventional affair.
Short of going to the rabbinate and tying the knot there (and trust me, I suggested it, but my future in-laws were having none of it), I wanted anything that would be fun, funky and, above all, not put us in debt at the start of our married life. I thought of doing an ad hoc barbecue on the beach or in the desert, or flying out a few nearest and dearest to Cyprus or eloping to Las Vegas or Gretna Green. Sadly, said in-laws are not fans of the nature idea and neither are they particularly inspired by the idea of a small, intimate affair. And therein lies the rub.
Between the both of us, we have about 30 uncles – many of whom have a bunch of children and some of whom even boast grandchildren.
When Zed’s parents drew up his guest list, more than 200 invites were reserved for family alone. And when we delicately raised the subject of perhaps cutting down on a few first cousins, they were visibly shocked. “What, invite one and not the other? Can you imagine! It would be decades before they stopped being broigez!” At this point, I should probably make mention of one crucial fact: Both Zed and I come from Moroccan stock.
Anyone who knows Moroccans will know that they are not known for doing things by halves. Bedazzlement is the name of the game when it comes to our community. If the shoe fits, you’d better make sure it’s got enough ritz and glitz to blind all the guests.
So, short of hiring a fix-it man to abduct our ridiculously overpopulated families for the duration of the wedding, I might have to just resign myself to the fact that I will be having a Big Fat Moroccan Wedding.
So now that the “who’s” are sorted, I just have to get to get to work on the “when” and “where.” And let’s not forget the “wear.” With regard to question No. 2 – “What am I doing about my dress?” – well, that’s a whole other story. When I was first posed the question by a colleague at work, she insisted that I research bridal gowns right there and then. My research consisted of Googling “wedding dress with sleeves” (since I want the dress to be modest) and, as luck would have it, I took a fancy to the first dress that came up in the images. I clicked on the site, which looked like a luxury American bridal salon, and five minutes later my dress was purchased.
Only later did I find out the reason behind the too-good-to-be-true price.
Rather than being an upscale bridal outfitter in the US, I’d purchased my dress from a sweatshop in China. There’s no customer service number, and whenever I e-mail them, I get a response a week later that takes me hours to decipher, since the English is so abysmal. The crazy thing is that when I did the same search in Hebrew, I was led to another site that sells the exact same dress for three times the price of the original – and that’s on special offer.
Anyway, the dress was supposed to arrive a week after making the purchase. I ordered it close to two months ago, and nothing yet.
But if there’s any silver lining to this story, at least my wedding won’t be too conventional if the bride ends up wearing nothing but a veil and a pair of heels.