Bridezilla’s Masquerade

On a Sunday night in August, I received the text from the Louisiana Governor’s office: “You have until nightfall to finish your preparations for Marco and Laura. Wherever you are when it gets dark, is where you should plan to be for seventy-two hours.”

“Well, crap,” I thought, already weighing the risks in my head. The next day I had an 11 am appointment to get my wedding dress altered in Prairieville, an hour-and-a-half drive from my house in Scott, Louisiana. This was the second seamstress I’d be visiting—the first having been utterly overwhelmed by the strange “shoulder thing” I needed fixed—and I’d waited almost a month on this second one’s list before she could see me. Bridal photos were scheduled in three weeks. Call me bridezilla, but I called her, begged her not to cancel despite the impending double hurricane, and raced my butt out across the Mississippi first thing that Monday morning.

As you now know, that Monday Marco started to fall to pieces and laugh at us a bit. It was a bright sunny day, cloudless and quiet. I was sweating and sleepless by 10 am as I made it into my Monday morning Zoom meeting, having just realized—upon removing the dress from the bag in the back of my closet it’s been living in—that the veil I’d very sentimentally borrowed from a cousin was not the right shade of white. Oh yeah, guys. White comes in infinite shades, in case you were unaware. Stark white, silk white, diamond white, ivory, champagne. Don’t forget: bridals are in three weeks.

Between more meetings and getting our September issue online, I called another cousin; secured another veil. Made a plan to drive the hour and a half to Vidrine that evening to get it. Having just dropped my dress off in Prairieville though, I would have no way of knowing for sure that it matched until I retrieved it two days before we were set to take photos. 

It’s no secret that wedding planning is a behemoth of epic proportions. There are books, there are blogs, there is a booming industry around the whole dang thing. There are movies and memes and listicles caricaturing the madness of the ordeal and all of the disastrous—often hilarious—ways it can go wrong. And those are in normal times.

We got engaged on February 28. Do the math and you’ll realize that we got almost a month of pre-COVID fiancé-land bliss, planning a season of trips and parties and celebrations all leading up to the grand finale on October 31. Oh yeah: we’re planning a Halloween wedding. You know why? Because fall is the least likely time for sudden thunderstorms poised to ruin an outdoor reception . . . much less a hurricane—right? Being extra slick, we picked the Saturday scheduled for LSU’s bye week. Bridezilla’s not trying to share her day with the Tigers.

Somehow, after the false alarm of Marco, the devastation of Laura, and the dread of Delta, we’ve now made it to wedding month with just enough time to pick up the branches in my mom’s (thankfully, otherwise unharmed) backyard where our reception will be held. Coming out of our engagement having survived one of the worst hurricane seasons on record, a move to a new city, some job insecurity, and a global pandemic that we are, of course, still battling—well a thunderstorm feels like child’s play. And, of course, LSU has revised their schedule. See you at the bouquet toss, Auburn.

Over the past several months, we’ve watched so many of our friends and family navigate the weirdest wedding season ever. Micro-weddings, un-invitations, drive-by showers, live-streamed sacraments. We joke about our upcoming Halloween masquerade. We, unlike the couples of Spring 2020 who had to change their plans on a dime, had the benefit of ‘getting used to the idea,’ and therefore the benefit of making jokes.

We’ve also had the benefit of preparing ourselves ahead of time for the worst, and re-evaluating the most important parts of all this. We could have never imagined this sort of wedding season, this sort of year. The cloud of stress and gloom and the unknown hanging over the past several months has—more than once—brought Julien and me to look at each other and wonder if the universe is against the prospect of our marriage.

And then we laugh. At the vanity of such a statement, and also because we are sure this is not true. Even if it is just the two of us and God, the world crumbling to pieces all around us, we’ll certainly be married on October 31. It’s only fitting that our wedding mass celebrates the solemnity of All Saints, with a first reading from the Book of Revelations, detailing the actual end of times. This particular account, though, at least is one of hope, ending with the verse: “These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress.” 

We’ve survived, and so many around us have survived much worse. 2020 will go down in history as a remarkably challenging year on so very many fronts, but there have been many good parts too—none the least of these the fact that, in a year devoid of so much, we’ve been given a bounty of quiet, distraction-less time together as a couple. 2020 will always be the year that we started our lives together. And if the world really is ending, well I want him at my side every step of the way.