I love Jen, and she loves me; I’m at least reasonably sure of this because she came home last night and didn’t immediately attempt to kill me. This weekend was pretty brutal for the two of us because of the stress involved in choosing bridesmaid’s dresses. I’m actually pretty good at helping Jen pick out clothes for events—once I learned how to shop with her (and the Oprah phrase you make that dress look great, babe), we’ve made a good team together, and I’ve helped her find more than one beautiful dress over the years. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been involved in this particular hunt, but with her sisters scattered to the four winds, she needed all the help she could get. And a spare pair of eyes to seek out the elusive color periwinkle, which seems to have been banned from current clothing altogether by an evil cabal of gay vampires who only favor black, white, and red.

Our first brief stop downtown to look at a formal dress store was not sucessful. The colors blue, green, and yellow have apparrently been banned from production, unless you’re looking at the J.Crew catalog, in which case you look like a Bennetton model from 1984. We also found out that when you’re a gymnast visiting from out of town, you have to wear a kerchief, or at least a little sock, on the required pile of cat sick which goes on the top of your skull. (There was some kind of gymnast/cat sick convention this weekend.)

We cruised through the exciting, squawking hell that is David’s Bridal, where hundreds of crazed women fought over dresses, changing rooms, and mirrors like sharks with blood in the water. I’ve never seen a spectacle quite like it. On the racks, the dresses hung limply after having been stretched, pulled, poked, and walked over; we found the three styles that matched up with Jen’s vision the closest and brought them to the front desk, where an angry-looking woman put them on a rack and had us wait for a changing room. Now, I like certain types of crowds, like New York City crowds, because they know what side of the subway platform to walk on, and how not to get in your way. Here, clucking Glen Burnie Hons ran willy-nilly through the store, tugging on dresses that crossed between styles like Spanish Harlot and Frosted Birthday Cake. Other women considered bridesmaid’s dresses that were less appealing than a hazmat suit, holding them up to their skin and yelling out to people across the store. “Oh, I like this color!” Well, it makes you look like you have jaundice, sweetie.

After waiting for about ten minutes and people watching, Angry Woman got us a room. Jen tried each of the dresses on, we took notes, snapped pictures, and consulted. There were two possibles, but no strong candidate. While she changed, I watched a group of women convince a tired-looking girl to buy a wedding dress stacked with more lace than a French whorehouse. (A woman who I took to be her mother was grabbing two handfuls of the back of the dress in an attempt to keep her boobs from falling out the front, while insisting, “They can take it in! They can take it in!”)

After a quick stop at the local formalwear store (where a bored 15-year-old barely resisted the urge to crack her gum while offering no help whatsoever), we retreated to the Towson Mall to look through a few other stores. I bought us some cafe mochas and we sat to regroup, which was good and bad—we got our gameplan together but wound up sugar crashing about a half-hour later. Here again, we found that black and red were the only colors offered by anybody on the three formal dresses in the whole mall. It was pretty depressing, really. The one dress we found in the right material and shape was an orphan in the Nordstrom Rack, missing its separate and worse for wear.

The upside to this story is that after returning home, Jen was able to get four or five dresses organized online, got her sisters to look at them, and spent about an hour in conference with Heather, the patron saint of dysfunctional weddings and cranky fianceés, who helped her narrow the field to a contender. Which was fantastic, because I had ceased to be effective or communicative sometime around 4:30. She was also able to resist the urge to kill me, for which I am thankful, because I know I was not helping her as much as I could have been. I think she may be on the downslope of this particular circle of hell, and I give her all the credit in the world, because I did not realize just how difficult this whole process has been until I experienced it first hand.

The Powerbook is much, much quicker now—erasing all that crap from the drive really helped a lot.