You've Got to be Kidding Me

Fiance and I have gone to far too many weddings this year. Weddings are great and all – celebrating love and all that junk – but too much is too much. And Fiance’s had it even worse than I have, since school and/or illness has kept me out of a few. He’s been to eleven since October, and I’ve been to eight and a half of those with him (the “and a half” is from last weekend, where I went to the ceremony but was feeling not so hot and so decided to skip the reception). Seriously, weddings have become like an extreme sport for us.

As I said, weddings are wonderful ways to share in the love of friends or family (and get free booze). Really, they are. But when you start going to as many as we have, you start finding interesting ways to keep from getting bored during yet another drunken Best Man speech. For Fiance, this means constantly seeking to find the perfect volume for his sarcastic comments – just loud enough to be heard but soft enough to seem like he’s making the effort not to be. For me, this means judging people’s fashion decisions.

A wedding is a veritable smorgasbord (orgasbord, orgasbord) of fashion disasters if you’re a Stacy and Clinton wannabe like myself. The most famous of these is, of course, the customarily horrendous bridesmaid gown. Now, I have to admit, to be fair, that none of the weddings I’ve attended have required the bridesmaids to dress like human puffs of cotton candy. In fact, the brides of these weddings (or someone with decision-making authority) have all had excellent taste, for which I’m sure their closest girlfriends were eminently grateful. However, many of the weddings have included at least one guest who, perhaps in a poorly-chosen act of revenge against the world, has decided to get one more wearing out of her own previously mandated frilly pink abomination. Apparently it wasn’t enough for these women that they had to walk down the aisle in support of their BFF wearing what could only be described as the love child of the Energizer Bunny and Big Bird – no, they had to make sure it got to see the light of day at least once more before being ritually burned at the hands of a licensed professional. (“Professional what?” you ask. Who cares? Just get rid of the damn thing!) I’m just glad when I have to be a bridesmaid in May (twice!), I’ll be wearing something attractive. … I will, right? … Right?

At our most recent wedding, however, I saw a pairing I just could not believe. Like, I literally had to ask Fiance to verify that my eyes hadn’t just completely hallucinated the awfulness in front of me. And the worst part was that these two people were attending together –I believe, in fact, that they were father and daughter. I saw the daughter first, and, in striving to be discreet – I didn’t want to just walk up and be all, “Hi, can I take a picture of you? It’s just that your outfit is so completely inappropriate and I don’t think my readers will ever believe me if I just describe it.” – I got only a picture of the bottom half of her legs. But I think it’s enough.

Okay, understand we’re not at the Burger King Chapel O’ Love in Vegas anymore. We’re at MemChu, a very classy location for a very beautiful ceremony. And this is what she wears? I’ll have you know, by the way, that her dress cargos and sneakers are accompanied by a very formal spaghetti-strap tank and half-zipped hoodie. Nice choice there, kiddo.

Looking to understand her unfathomable bad fashion sense, I sought out her parental units and OH MY GOD. Okay, I already know that some of you out there won’t understand how disturbing this was to me. But you have to listen when I tell you that this is possibly my biggest fashion pet peeve EVER – worse than VPL, worse than white bras with black tank tops, worse even than high waters. Tpiglette will back me up on this, I’m sure, because she had to deal with my tirades about it in Tmony. Feast your eyes on the absolute horror of this man’s insanity:

I… He… They… I…

There are no words.