Paratalk or Torque is where I take a paragraph, mostly at random, and talk about it however I wish. It’s an old column I’ve revived. It has fairly broad scope and could go on for ages. Let me know if you get bored, I may not listen though.
Today’s paragraph is from The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbooks: Weddings by Joshua Piven, David Borgenicht, and Sarah Jordan. This book was donated to an organisation making up hampers for people fleeing domestic violence. Everyone looked at these books in shock, totally unsuitable reading for people in this situation. I made these books disappear from the hall, the organisers were very grateful.
Today’s paragraph comes from the chapter How to Survive if the Bride’s Gown is Lost. And it reads:
Take a bridesmaid’s dress.
Select the bridesmaid who is closest to you in size. Take her dress and soak it in bleach to make it white. Inform her gently that she is out of the wedding.
Such a small paragraph, let’s see what I can say about this.
First thing, the writing. It’s not bad, there are no obvious grammar or spelling errors for me to pick on. It’s brief and to the point, which it probably wouldn’t be if I’d written the sentence.
I suspect this tip might be tongue-in-cheek, but I also suspect some people would take it seriously. There are bridezillas who would stop at nothing to ensure they look good and don’t care about a bridesmaid’s feelings at being dropped at such short notice.
If it were me I’d find myself the nearest op (thrift) shop and start looking for a new dress. It’d probably take just as log as bleaching a dress to make it white and then washing and drying it. If your wedding were that day I’d be doing something entirely different such as looking in your wardrobe for anything that fits and looks good.
But this copy of this book has been annotated by hand. Someone took umbridge with my story of it being donated to the wrong organisation and started annotating it. Whether this was a good move or a bad move I’ll leave you to think about. The annotation under this paragraph reads:
Anounce that the bride (possibly groom as well) will be clothing optional.
And as for some of the other annotations? On the next page there is a note about how to remove a red wine stain from a wedding dress. I’ve no idea if putting white wine on a cloth and blotting from the other side would work. If someone happens to have tried this please let me know in the comments how it went. The hand written annotation suggests to cover the dress with more red wine. You never know you could start a whole new trend of white wedding dresses with red wine stains. It could be very artistic. Please credit me if you do this, it could be fun.