Saturday, June 9, 2007

Down the aisle and over the top - LA Times


From today's LA Times opinion page:

Down the aisle and over the top

Annoyed by outrageously expensive ceremonies? Then don't have one.

Meghan Daum

June 9, 2007

I JUST TYPED "bride" into the search engine on Amazon.com and got 132,398 results. Some referred to fiction titles like "Brideshead Revisited," but the vast majority were nonfiction field guides to femininity. There was "The Conscious Bride," "The Buff Bride," "Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul" and something called "And the Bride Wore White: 7 Secrets to Sexual Purity." And that was just from the first few pages of the list. I conducted the search because it's June and weddings — along with a whole new crop of books about them — are creeping up on us like newly hatched sea turtles ambling to the ocean.


One of these books, Rebecca Mead's "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding," is a sobering and sorely needed examination of how and why contemporary nuptials have turned into bank-breaking three-ring circuses. Another is "Altared: Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings," in which 27 female writers (I'm one of them) do pretty much what the subtitle suggests and bemoan the uneasy coexistence between free will and what has now become one of the most expensive social conventions in human history. >>> Read the entire piece here.

I would love to hear your thoughts - add a comment!

No comments: