2001-05-19~~11:43 p.m.
Oh no... I'm old.

I’m getting old. No, I didn’t just have a birthday. That isn’t what is making me aware of the terrible aging process. It’s just that, well, my wedding pictures are starting to look dorky.

I got married in 1990, but everything was planned during the last year of the 80’s. You remember the 80’s right? Do you remember what formalwear looked like in the 80’s? The pictures of my entire wedding party together look like some nightmarish prom. It’s really quite embarrassing.

There was taffeta. A whole lot of taffeta. And it was pink. Not just ordinary pink. It was BRIGHT pink. And the men wore cummerbunds and bowties. At least the tuxes themselves were generic black. Except for the groom. He wore all white and tails. Boy, I really wish I could blame someone else for having picked that stuff out. But I can’t.

It could be worse though. My mom and step dad got married in 1976. I’m pretty sure mom’s dress was polyester. The men wore big, brown, velvet bowties and there was a matching velvet stripe down the side of the tux pants and along the edge of the lapel. In retrospect, it is absolutely horrid.

I knew that the pictures were starting to look funny even before we went to the tux rental place to pick up my husband’s tux for his best friend’s wedding. But I had no idea the dorkiness factor was so high already. There wasn’t a suit in the place that looked anything like the garments from our wedding. Everything was all stylish and puttin’-on-the-ritz-y.

Oh. And another thing we saw there. Little boys. They were coming in to pick up tuxes for their proms. They were YOUNG. Babies, really. They made me feel all... momish. I wondered how many of them were planning to *score* with their dates. It made me want to call those girls’ mothers and let them know what these young Rico Suavés were up to.

The other thing I was wondering as we waited for the groom’s tux to be adjusted [side note: even grooms in Rico-Suavé-tuxes do not look cool when the pants are three inches too short] was where do the old, out-of-style suits go when they die?

Do they just toss them in the dumpster behind Selix? I’m thinking probably not, because if they did then I probably would have seen a homeless person in a tux by now and I haven’t. Do they recycle them somehow? What ELSE could you use a cummerbund for? Emergency fan belt? Or you could hook a whole bunch of them together and wrap them around the earth to mark where the equator is. That way tourists could see it and say, “No wonder it’s so darn hot. We’re right on the equator. See the line? Just like on the globe.”

My husband loves the tux pants. They are adjustable. He thinks it would be great if all his pants had adjustable waistbands. He’d never have to worry about outgrowing them on a pizza binge or shrinking out of them during a “gotta do something about this gut” phase. I think the adjustable pants would go over well with his kind, in general. Then men could keep their pants around as long as they keep their underwear. [Which any woman knows is until the very last pair of underwear atoms can no longer maintain their bond and the underwear just disappears into thin air.]

Y’know.. I bet there is some fancy photo-editing software that would enable me fix those wedding pictures. I could even update them every few years so we’d always be in style. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to deprive my kids of the pleasure of growing up secure in the knowledge that their parents, like all parents, are dorks. And that they, of course, will not only grow up to be cooler, richer, and smarter, but will also have much better taste in formalwear.... at least until they have kids of their own.

-Alice