Wedding Lockdown

Ryan and I are getting married in November, which is just a few short months away!

With the reality of the wedding beginning to set in, I am busy DIY-ing my heart out in preparation. The wedding will take place in New Orleans, so the invitations need to go out earlier than for a hometown wedding.

I am hand-making all of my invitations and favors, which with the budget we enforced early on, is a must. Invitations are ridiculously expensive, in my opinion. Sure, some people keep them as remembrances, but most end up in the trash. I can't imagine throwing a ten-dollar invitation away, now that I know!

I would highly recommend that thrifty brides design their own stationary. It's fun, usually much cheaper, and it gives you a chance to really express your personality as a couple.

I designed my wedding aesthetic around New Orleans in the 19th and early 20th century, while my dress takes much inspiration from the 1940s. I just couldn't pick one era, I love so many. The wedding venue is beautiful, and I can't wait to deck it out in preparation! I am so lucky to be surrounded by so many talented people that love me. My sister is doing all of my flowers, and one of my best friends is a phenomenal photographer and is giving me my wedding shoot as a gift! Lucky!

Great weddings can be done on the cheap - destination weddings give you opportunity to be a little more casual and not quite as concerned about the finer points of etiquette you must observe for more formal, larger weddings. Our recessional is funny and irreverent, for example. I like to break with tradition just enough so that everyone is in on the joke, but not offended either.

We have lots of creative ideas for the elements of our wedding, some traditional and some not. The overall look and feel is going to be very retro and fun. I am looking forward to sharing our special day with everyone involved!

Bettie Page and all things Pin-Up

"I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn't trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn't think of myself as liberated, and I don't believe that I did anything important. I was just myself, I didn't know any other way to be, or any other way to live."

-Bettie Page

I'm a little obsessed.

I first saw Bettie Page about ten years ago. I was looking at a website about Marilyn Monroe, another favorite, and saw this gorgeous brunette with the most intriguing look I had ever seen. She had a see-through negligee on, and a come-hither glance that spoke innocence and naughtiness at the same time. Her photos seemed to leave much more to the imagination than many of her contemporaries. She was the classic girl-next-door, with a bite.

It may come as a surprise to you, but I really like vintage Playboy magazines. The articles are good, and reveal a lot more about the time than the candy-coated women's magazines. They are excellent social commentary. Plus, the nudes are tasteful, not raunchy. And they are full of kitsch and charm. I guess that's why I like Bettie. Some of her pictures are goofy, some are sultry. She wasn't ashamed of her body. I like that, and you got the sense that she was really enjoying what she was doing, not being exploited. Also, Bunny Yeager, the photographer that took the iconic "Christmas Ornament" photo for Playboy in 1955 had great sensitivity as a female photographer. I can imagine them having lots of fun at those shoots. She was the second centerfold for Playboy. Marilyn Monroe, with her strawberry-blonde curls, was the first.

Her beauty was accessible. In a time when plastic surgery and PhotoShop reign supreme, the image of a little tummy and boobs that have a "just-so" droop are wonderful to see. This is how women are supposed to look. Obviously men still like women to look this way - otherwise she wouldn't still be so popular, and neither would Marilyn.

She really was such an innocent Southern girl. In interviews I have heard, she recounts how puzzled she was by people viewing her as a sex object. And she also was confused why people had such a problem with her nudity. The way she saw it, God created us nude, we came into this world nude. To her, it wasn't a sexualized thing, but a natural thing. Naive, maybe. But I've never felt "dirty" looking at her pictures.

I love all the pin-up girls, they all have their appeal. Betty Grable was always my dad's favorite, and she really was a true blonde bombshell. Burlesque and pin-up are seeing a resurgence and I love it! It validates things for me - I always wanted to look that way, ever since I was a young girl. I cut the Bettie bangs for the first time 5 years ago, because I have a humongo forehead and I thought - "Eh, what the heck, hair grows." It has since become my go-to look. My fiance thinks I look like Bettie Page as a redhead, but he's biased.

But even with all the tributes and look-alikes, there was only one Bettie. In the end, she was a minister of the Gospel, working for Billy Graham. She never recanted her photos, never was ashamed of what she did. The sweet girl from Tennessee became immortal, but she never really cared about that. She just wanted to smile.

I Loved a Physics Geek

So picture me, 1987. I'm sitting in my 7th grade science class. I am chubby, bespectacled and AWKWARD. My earth science teacher has this ancient reel-to-reel projector that he is setting up to show us a film on nuclear fission and fusion (Reagan-era kids. Let's give them nightmares!)

Mr. Yonke does not realize that he is determining my future.

The film starts to play, with it's crackles and off-key music and strange strands of fuzz that have gotten onto the film-tape.

And then the scientists show up, mixing strange chemicals and talking about reactors and plutonium and all kinds of crazy shiznat that will melt your skin off. And they are hot - the scientists! They are smart and they know math equations and they can tell you how the earth was formed. And that's where it started in my adolescent crazy hormonal mind. And the computers they were using were as big as my house. I have one of those now! The scientist, not the house-sized computer. But he COULD run it with all of it's inefficient retro algorithms. And he wants to teach physics someday, and reads Stephen Hawking before bed with his crazy, thick glasses.

And I think I'll keep him, because he's smart in a different way than me, and that is perfect. :)

Why am I named this??

My blog just asked me that. Crazy blog can talk...

Rorschach: Because I have done a couple IQ/psych tests in my day, the ink blot test always kind of freaked me out and inspired me at the same time. I was always looking for the glint of judgment in the test facilitator's eyes when I saw frolicking satyrs or jelly doughnuts. "Does she have an eating disorder, or some strange addiction? Is she really that blind?"

But Rorschach tests are really cool, because every person that looks at them sees something different, and that's probably why they appeal to me. I have spilled my coffee at times and it's fun to Rorschach the -

Coffee: Caffeine probably accounts for at least 75% of my bodily chemistry. Plus, I like the whole aesthetic and feel surrounding coffee-drinking. It makes your hands warm in the winter and there is a whole culture built around the enjoyment of coffee. I think today's coffee shops are the equivalent of the bistros and absinthe dens of yesteryear. Creative types tend to like them. I tend to like creative types. We like caffeine.

1963:

I love anything pre-1980. I loved the eighties, don't get me wrong, lots of great memories of that time in my life. But I never felt like I fit into the modern world. Yeah, I have lots of modern sensibilities and I probably would have not done well in the more chauvinistic eras. But the music, clothing, cars and just the STYLE of the past spins me. Particularly the Victorian era, the Roaring Twenties and World War II eras have always fascinated me. Things were made better, even plastic was awesome, and there is nothing like an Eames chair, people. Rita Hayworth in Gilda changed my life as an impressionable teenager sitting in the library one summer afternoon. I was really homely. She wasn't.

But why 1963?

Kennedy, of course. It changed our world when one of our last great presidents died in Dallas. Seeing the footage of beautiful Jackie trying to frantically reassamble her dying husband's skull in her flawless Chanel suit was gut-wrenching. And I wasn't even alive yet when it happened. My mom was, and it really was the day the music died, for everyone. But 1963 does it for me for other reasons. Probably my single favorite year for fashion, for automobiles (I had a '63 Dart), and just the general feel of the time. Women still had womanly figures, and girdles weren't a dirty word. You had to have a girdle to look good in a pencil skirt. Now we have Spanx. Thank God!

America was starting to wake up to women's rights and equality in the workplace. Women were going on birth-control, and the seeds of the sexual revolution were being sown. But there was still that tinge of innocence...at least until November.

I guess that's why I love the show Mad Men so much. It shows that transition, in a truly fine way. The characters change with each year that goes by, and are a microcosm of society for the decade. You love and hate Don Draper with equal fervor. I want to steal Christina Hendrick's wardrobe and I wonder if the perpetual scotch is REALLY scotch or iced tea. Otherwise the actors are gonna need rehab after the series ends...which it will have to. Eventually.

So that's blog post number 1!! I think that one will be the hardest.