Caroline in Paris

Right, well, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but I’ll be in a wedding in a few weeks. A Manhattan Wedding, in fact–and actually, the type of Manhattan Wedding that I pretty quickly ruled out being nearly cool and modern enough to plan for myself. So now I get to go to one anyway; it’s the best of both worlds.

And complicated, of course.

Oh, we’d worked out most of the details ages ago: we have flights booked and a place to stay, we’ve got the kennel coming for the dogs, we’ve mastered international mail.

Pretty much the only thing I hadn’t sorted out yet was the dress.

It’s beautiful. It’s this long, black, silk beautiful thing that just so happens to fit almost perfectly (I will run four times a week between now and the wedding. I will. Just not today, because eww, rain). It just needed to be hemmed and have the straps taken in, which is no big deal, so when I realized that everyone in the world would leave our neighborhood in August, I made the logical choice: I would wait. After all, if I ran enough, I might need more taken in, right? And it would buy me time to find just the right shoes. And my tailor’s turnaround time is just a few days (”A hem in two weeks?  Uhh…yes, ma’am“), so why alter in July when I could wait until September ?

Because, as a very tactful note from a fellow bridesmaid informed me, The Dress Is Complicated. Even basic alterations could take an unexpected amount of time, so we’d all better make sure to get them done now, okay?

Hm.

I came thisclose to lugging it across town to the woman who altered my wedding dress and begging for help. Printemps doesn’t close in the summer, and she took the skirt in in about thirty seconds while I was standing in the next room; good stuff. But then I recalled that my wonderful dry cleaners across the street were coming back more than a week before everyone else (including my tailor), and thought that they might have a slightly more practical suggestion.

As it turns out, they have a “couturière” on staff.

“That’s so French,” Andrea said.

Of course, my dry cleaners pretty much only ever see me frumpy. They see the clothes I drop off, of course, which hint at a life outside of worn-out flats and cozy sweaters, but I don’t think that they really believe it. Because when I stepped out of their back room in a ballgown and stilettos, they looked like I had just pulled a Cinderella. Naturally, it fell apart when I started walking–I hadn’t taken the time to lace the shoes securely, and the hem of the dress was just at tripping length.

“Oh, dear, she’ll have to practice walking in heels,” one of them murmured, genuinely concerned.

I know how to walk in heels; can we just get that straight? Before I moved here there were long stretches of time during which the only shoes I had with less than three-inch heels were sneakers. Like…a pair of sneakers. Now I have hunting dogs, and that just doesn’t work, okay? Damnit.

Anyway. Aside from having to remind the couturière once or thrice that I would not be the only person wearing this dress, so as to discourage her from re-ordering its folds to more perfectly mold the thing to my skin, the whole thing went swimmingly. In fact, I’ll have time for a second fitting. And the “village” comes to the rescue….