A Wedding Dress Horror story- A Cautionary Tale

I have been exchanging emails with my friend Liz. Her daughter is getting married and wanted to repurpose both her mother's wedding dress and her future mother-in-law's wedding dress into something wonderful for her wedding.

Yesterday was one of those rainy gross days that makes you want to just say in bed. My mother used to say about days like that, while reverting to her deepest Brooklyn accent., "I shoulda stood in bed".

Liz showed up in the gross rain with two wedding dresses in tow. One was in a dry cleaner's bag (covered with a heavy black garbage bag against the rain).

Liz's dress was similarly sheathed in a black garbage bag but it had been preserved in a box.

Before she unveiled the box, I mentioned to Liz how the daughter of one of my mother's friends had paid to have a wedding dress preserved. They wanted to lend the dress to a friend, opened the box and saw that not only had it not been preserved, the dress hadn't even been cleaned and the giant wine spill that had taken place during the reception was still evident on the dress and to top it off the dress was kind of stinky after it's years sitting in a cellophane lined cardboard box.

Liz is a careful person and one who is prone to read directions. She read the note on top of the box that mentioned that the guarantee on the preservation would be void if the gold colored seal on the side of the box was broken. I noticed that for a box meant to preserve, the cardboard did not seem to be made out of the sort of museum quality cardboard that actually preserves textiles and looked like it had discolored and was beginning to disintegrate.

While Liz read the letter I looked through the green cellophane window in the lid. I noticed something rather disturbing.

The dress was covered with little dots of black, dead bugs and critter droppings.

We looked up the cleaner that had offered the preservation services. We saw that they had done business under a number of different names over the years, Prestige Wedding Gown Preservation, National Wedding Gown Preservation, Global Wedding Gown Preservation, to name just a few. We saw that they had asked wedding gown manufacturers to hand out flyers selling their services. We read that they had been sued by the State of New York for selling fraudulent services- the process they described for preservation was hokum. We also read many horror stories similar to Liz's.

The unpreserved dress needed a wash. The "preserved" dress was scary.

The $280 Liz spent to preserve her dress 1988 is now the equivalent of not quite $600. It's a case of the Emperor's New Cleaners. All of it quite distressing.

Liz though is a woman of action. She has plans about how to be made right. Once the dress is sorted out and decontaminated I will begin this project.

So after you wear your wedding dress, get it cleaned and shove it in a plastic bag in a bottom drawer or in the back of your closet and you will be better off than paying to get it "preserved".

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

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