WEDDING COORDINATOR

My mother hit her stride as a wedding coordinator when her eldest daughters married in the 1950s. It was clear that she expected to hold for her daughters the church weddings that hadn't been hers. Even when I suggested my wedding (1975) might take place in the backyard, Mother insisted on a church wedding.

When Joni married in 1956, Mother made the bride's gown as well as those of the attendants. She wrote to an eastern fabric house requesting swatches of satins and sheers in shades of pink ranging from baby pink (the flower girl -- my dress) to deep peach (Harriet's dress – the matron of honor). They complied and Mother ordered the fabric accordingly. She was proud of the fact that she had reached beyond her rural Idaho world clear to New York City to achieve her vision for the wedding.

At 5'2", the bride weighed 96 pounds and thus was stylishly tiny. (Think Audrey Hepburn.) Her gown was a beautiful embroidered crystalline over satin in the "wasp-waist" style of that day. The gown was so small that 25 years later when the dress was worn at a vintage wedding gown style show, they had to find a tiny high school student to model it. At some point after that Joni had the dress cleaned and the crystalline went to pieces. The veil also went to shreds. As beautiful as it was, it was not a dress for the ages.

Congratulations to Joni and Pat – June 11, 1956 -- 53 years.

[The photo is of my mother, Dorothy Dobson, carrying the bride's clothes to the car. Someone called out, "Here comes the bride!" Rice was thrown. To my six-year-old mind, it was funny that someone thought she was the bride. "It was a joke," Mother explained to me later. "No one thought I was the bride." That's me standing at the lower right-hand corner of the photo.

Oh -- and Mother's dress: She bought that dress -- a lovely off-white linen with a shawl collar embellished with pink beading. It was really a beautiful dress. We let it go when we cleaned out her house in 1991. What were we thinking!] KW