Cutting Up a Wedding Dress
Blog 58
Today is my daughter Elin’s 19th wedding anniversary, so I pulled this entry from Theatre Is My Life! for the occasion (which was written on her 8th anniversary).
“Don’t cut up your wedding dress, Mommy... Please don’t cut up your wedding dress.”
Linda to Rosina in Arthur Giron’s Becoming Memories
To close out our season in 1994, the theatre at Samford University produced the emotive work Becoming Memories which Arthur Giron crafted with members of the Illusion Theatre of Minneapolis. He pulled together five families’ stories to fabricate a montage of American small town life throughout three generations. When I worked with The Seasoned Performers, we created several plays using this same method with very interesting results.
Today is my daughter’s eighth wedding anniversary. “Don’t cut up your wedding dress, Mommy... Please don’t cut up your wedding dress.” That line reminds me of the months leading up to her nuptials. She didn’t want to use my groovy tiered 1970s wedding dress that my mother had crafted for me. But, being the sentimental person she is, she became infatuated with using my mother’s gown.
Mom had been very thin in 1948 when she and my dad got married, and Elin was never going to fit into the bodice. We decided to cut the dress apart and have the indomitable former United States Senator from Alabama, Maryon Allen, expert seamstress and wedding ensemble specialist, design a frock from the various pieces of satin and lace.
“Don’t cut up your wedding dress, Mommy” might have been the very words from my lips. I had sewn hundreds of costumes for every character imaginable in every sort of theatrical production, but I just could not bear to carve up that gown — and I certainly couldn’t put it back together. The task was too emotional for me.
From the time I was a tiny tyke, I had watched my maternal grandmother sew. When the Depression hit, she, who was a meticulous and talented seamstress, began to make extra money stitching tutus and ballet costumes for Miss Lum’s Dance Studio. Then, in 1942, her husband Jack, who traveled in his business, died of pneumonia in New York City — literally months before penicillin was introduced to kill infectious bacteria. My grandmother had to travel up and bring his body back on the train, and was left a youngish widow with four girls sixteen and under — so she sewed more and more to make ends meet.
As I have said before, until I was five, I lived next door to my great-grandmother, Nannie, my grandmother, and my mom’s three sisters. One of my earliest memories is walking through the door one morning to discover a magical path through dozens of pale-toned tutus scattered across the floor.
Ready to be tried on and adjusted for a recital, they were on every inch of floor and piece of furniture: pale yellow, carnation, lavender, pastel blue. It looked like an enchanted indoor garden with huge blossoms swirling through every downstairs room.
The night I was going to cut apart my mom’s wedding dress, it took Elin and three of my cousins to give me the strength and nerve to take scissors to the satiny fabric and lace to snip it into pieces. My grandmother had lovingly sewn my mother’s wedding dress on her treadle sewing machine, and my mom loved her dress. But she loved her granddaughter more, and wanted her to have what she wanted. Elin’s gown turned out wonderfully, and I found out that sometimes it is fine to cut up a wedding dress.