The Dress

This morning, miracle of all miracles, I found The Dress. It took four bridesmaids, three hours, two scraped knees, and one fate-induced gift card, but I found it.

 

My hunt for The Dress had, prior to this week, been little more than a sporadic day dream in my occasional spare time. Flipping through magazines, looking around on the computer at work, driving past bridal shops that I know I need to visit sometime. But this past Monday, I received an email that changed all of that.

 

"Congratulations: you've won a free wedding gown!"

 

You can imagine my surprise and skepticism upon opening this email. However, when I called the number to confirm, I found it to be true. I had registered for this 'contest' on a whim a few weeks ago, and the gift card was for Filene's Basement annual Running of the Brides event, to be held the upcoming Friday (today). I accepted the gift card and began researching this event, which has happened every year since 1947 and brings designer gowns to one location to sell for at most $699, no matter what the original pricetag. Apparently hundreds of brides storm the store at 8AM to find their perfect dress at a fraction of the cost.

 

Skepticism growing, I called my mom. She listed a wide range of legitimate examples of this event, from a clip she saw on the news last year to Monica's participation in Running of the Brides on Friends.

 

Skepticism fading, I asked her hesitantly, "What do you think? Should we...umm...go?"

 

"OF COURSE!" she'd exclaimed, and the rest of the week passed in a flurry of recruiting my 'team,' preparing my signs, and generally getting ready for the event of a lifetime.

 

Which, in fact, it was.

 

We arrived an hour and a half early, about twelve hours behind the first people who had begun lining up outside the doors. Walking in my cast (I'd abandoned the crutches), we took our place behind about 200 other people as more and more brides/teams trickled in behind us. When the time came for us to all surge forward into the store, it was a mad house of running, screaming, pushing, and for a few of us unlucky brides, falling. However we did manage to secure some dresses to try on.

 

This, however, was only the beginning of the event, for once you had a dress or two to try on, you had to begin to trade. You couldn't automatically trade for the dress you wanted--oh no. Not only was it impossible to find The Dress in the mass chaos, you also had to go through a series of trades to develop the quality of your 'pile.' High quality piles attracted high quality dresses for their trading potential, and it took us about an hour to work up the pile. And when we did, I would try on a dress, walk it to the mirror, and other brides would come up and try to trade what they had. Depending on the quality of their dresses, we would give them a dress from the 'No, it's hideous' pile, the 'Perhaps' pile, or the 'Major potential' pile.

 

So this is how, during the climax of the event, I found a dress that was Almost The Dress. There was a fairly attractive bride a few piles away from me with a soft, empire-wasted gown draped over her arm. One of my bridesmaids had tapped me on the shoulder, calling my attention to it, and we decided we MUST try it on.

 

This particular dress was one in her own 'Major potential' pile, so I had to pull out all of the stops to get to try it on, lending her not one, but TWO of my favorites just for the chance. And when I tried it on, it was maybe my favorite thing thus far. However, our bride-to-be-enemy also felt the same way.

 

I had to give it back, but my team and I began plotting how we'd steal it from her: would she take $100 as a bribe or should we just grab it and run to the register? We were biding our time, waiting for her to either discard the dress or decide on it so we'd have to steal it, when something remarkable happened. I retried on my 'Major potentials' and found it. The Dress.

 

Much to the dismay of the bride-enemy, it was categorically better (and a few thousand dollars better) than the one I'd almost stolen from her. Many women, in fact, came up to me and asked if I would be giving it up. I had liked it the first time I tried it on, liked it even more the second time, and when I ran my hands down the sides and discovered nothing less than pockets, I knew it was true love. The bridesmaids and I had let out a collective scream while I jumped up and down on my good foot, celebrating the conclusion to our long hard battle in finding The Dress.