The Wedding Disaster Story
(doesn't everybody have one?)

Melissa Garrison Elliott
 






© Copyright 2025 by Melissa Garrison Elliott
Photo courtesy of the author.
Photo courtesy of the author.

A few weeks ago I was scrolling Facebook and came upon a page that featured “wedding disasters.” There was every kind of story, from the maid of honor with her dress tucked up into her underwear to the bride whose groom surprised her at the reception by picking her up and dumping her into the pool. But many of them featured one key part of the wedding that just didn’t go as planned, and it made me think back to the “disaster” that almost derailed mine....

In December of 1976, at the tender age of 21, I was planning my wedding. It would take place in mid-May of 1977, so there was no time to waste; most wedding planners will tell you that six months is the minimum to get it all done. My bridesmaids, at least, were already chosen: Janet, my best friend from college; my 16-year-old soon-to-be sister-in-law, Susan; and my cousin Karen, just turned 14.

I was lucky to find my own gown right away. The bakery and flower shop in the town where my parents lived and where the wedding would take place were likewise a quick selection, known to my mother from countless occasions when they had catered at her church, the chosen venue. I wanted a quintessentially spring wedding, so in addition to planning the flowers as beautiful multi-colored spring bouquets, I decided to carry out the theme with the bridesmaid dresses. I found one at a local dress shop that I thought would suit all three attendants—always something of a feat, given different heights and body types—and we placed an order, in three different pale shades suitable to their various coloring: a fresh spring green for the maid of honor, Janet; blush peach for Susan; and a creamy yellow for Karen. The dresses were upscale for our community, coming as they were from a New York City manufacturer. We picked out delicate satin sandals and had them pre-dyed in the three colors to match fabric swatches from the dresses.

I was on top of all details for the wedding, which was taking place on a Saturday at 1:00. I had a schedule planned to perfection for Friday, the day before the wedding. Bracketed by an early morning flower delivery to the church and a lovely rehearsal dinner, its highlight would be a relaxing afternoon of manicures and pedicures for myself and the three bridesmaids, all of whom were arriving on Thursday night. But on Thursday, that schedule was abandoned.

For the two weeks before the wedding, either I or my mother called the local dress shop daily, inquiring whether the bridesmaids' dresses had arrived. Each time we were told no, not yet, but the shop personnel reassured us that the manufacturer said they had been completed, they had been shipped, and would arrive any moment now. Finally, on Thursday afternoon, an hour after all the bridesmaids arrived at my house to stay over, the owner of the dress shop called to confess that she had not, in fact, had any contact with the New York manufacturer for more than a week, that there were rumors of bankruptcy and closure, and that we should assume the dresses were not coming.

She quickly added that she and the other clerks at the shop had gone through their entire inventory and put together an array of dresses in the proper three colors for each of my bridesmaids, and that if we would come down to the shop that night so the girls could try them on, the seamstress would work throughout Friday to make sure that each of them was fitted properly, ready for my Saturday wedding.

The fitting was a disaster. While it was true that dresses had been found in the three requisite colors, they looked nothing like one another and were completely unsuited to their subjects. We winnowed them down to the three closest; but Janet, who was short and had unusually wide shoulders, was paired with a particularly unflattering style. Susan's peach-colored number featured an inset belt studded with ugly orange and white beads in a flower design. And my cousin Karen, who was barely 14 but had come into her rather luscious figure early, was given a yellow halter dress with spaghetti straps and a plunging neckline guaranteed to give her Catholic father a heart attack on the spot. We all looked at each other in despair, and then I turned to the seamstress and asked, How long would it take to get these dresses fitted properly? What if we didn't decide we wanted them until, say, late tomorrow afternoon? The seamstress promised she would stay up all night if that's what it took. So I turned to my bridesmaids and said, “Tomorrow, we shop.”

My parents’ home town isn't exactly a cosmopolitan center, but it does have its share of both stand-alone dress shops and shopping malls and, starting at 9 a.m. the following morning ,we hit each and every one of them. We went together to the smaller shops, then split up into pairs in the malls, combing the racks for suitable dresses and meeting up periodically at the food court for coffee and commiseration. Finally, at 4:30 p.m., in the last dress shop in the last mall in a 50-mile radius, Janet wandered to the back of the store to the sale racks and excitedly shouted "Hey! Hey, come back here!" There on the rack were three dresses in the pale spring green that had been planned for Janet. They were the right sizes for each of the girls, they were attractive and flattering, and they were on sale for $18 each. (The original dresses had been $59, an extravagant price in 1977.)

The rehearsal dinner was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. at a local Italian restaurant. My fiancé and I were late to our own dinner because we were busy driving out to the mall on the opposite side of town to buy two more pairs of satin shoes to be dyed green (since the other two girls couldn't wear peach or yellow shoes with their green dresses). When the dinner was over, we dashed back to the mall, arriving at 8:55 p.m. just before closing to pick up the still-damp but now pale green sandals, and Chuck drove while I held up the four shoes by their straps on my fingertips to keep them from being scuffed or staining anything else.

Due to this last-minute snafu, we had foregone our leisurely spa day. So while my mother hemmed my cousin Karen's dress to the proper length, I laboriously filed and painted my own finger- and toenails, experimented with a few hairstyles, and collapsed into bed about 1:00 a.m., only to be awakened at 6:00 by a call from the bakery. They had had a scheduling conflict and could only bring my cake by the church before 7:00 a.m.—could someone be there to receive it and let them in? I dragged myself out of bed and into jeans and a t-shirt, drove to the church, got the cake settled in place, and dashed home to eat a quick breakfast and start getting ready.

They tell me the wedding came off without a hitch. To me it was a series of brief flashes of sound and color, and I couldn't tell you whether I remembered my vows correctly, or what I said to people in the reception line. But in the photos it appeared to be the perfect occasion, and you would never have known that those were not the dresses originally destined to clothe my three smiling bridesmaids.

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