Tunesday : She Ain't Pretty

Deliberately unpretty picture from 1990. Isn't this how they did it in the old timey days?

She Ain't Pretty

(Potvin, B) Performed by The Northern Pikes

I had two jobs, I had dishwater hands
And on the weekend in a rock 'n' roll band
One Friday night in my hometown bar
In walked a girl who looked like a movie star
She stared at me and it was turning me on

She said she worked in a beauty salon
I heard a voice inside me say
She ain't pretty, she just looks that way
We made a date to go for a drink

I wore my jeans and she wore a mink
There was this misconception all over town
That she ate lonely guy heart by the pound
She said "Take me home, there won't be no fuss"

I said "Sure you got some change for the bus"
Watching her leave I heard the bartender say
"She ain't pretty, she just looks that way"
So, I called her up, her father was home

"Son, she's busy she can't come to the phone"
I held my breath then decided to wait
A guy like me doesn't get many dates
I fell in love with a model from hell

It took some time for my hormones to tell
That chasing her has been a grave mistake
She ain't pretty, she just looks that way
Her ego wrote checks incredibly fast

But her personality didn't have the cash
I laughed out loud to my total dismay
She ain't pretty, she just looks that way
She ain't pretty, she just looks that way
She ain't pretty

She ain't pretty
She ain't pretty
She ain't pretty, she just looks that way

It's been a month since the last installment of my life's story (I really am getting bored with it), so to recap and move it along: The last I wrote about was how Dave and I got engaged, so this week is going to be about our year-long wedding prep. And a note on this week's song choice: I was looking at the top songs for 1990, and this was my favourite on the list, so I'm adding it here to my discography; no deeper meaning. Interesting note: the model in the video is pretty much sporting the hairstyle I wore on my wedding day.

Dave is totally a sentimental traditionalist, so when we started sketching out what our wedding might look like, he pushed for a June wedding (because "the roses would be in bloom in Springbank Park" and that's where he had always imagined having his wedding pictures taken). As someone who didn't have a hometown or a mental image of any aspect of my dream wedding, I was an easy sell for it to take place in Dave's hometown, where the majority of our potential guests lived anyway. So by the time we called our parents, all we had planned was a June wedding in London. I don't remember calling Dave's parents to let them know that we had gotten engaged, but I do remember that Mum sounded excited when we told her (even though she had never met Dave to this point), and when she passed the phone to Dad so I could tell him, his only response was, "Why wait a year?" (And I appreciate that he wouldn't have known what to say, but this was the least personal option that might have occurred to a normal human being. I could only mumble something about needing to plan everything.) 

Mum asked if and when we were thinking about coming out to Ontario to start planning things, and as I figured we'd need to book things around a year in advance, we tentatively said probably in May or June. Mum asked if I would want to have her along for wedding dress shopping -- she offered to take me to the Bridal area of Toronto -- and that sounded good to me, so I said, "Sure!"

Now, Dave and I had plenty of money (a coffee can full of cash from my tips and a stack of uncashed paycheques), and as our parents hadn't contributed to either of our educations, we weren't expecting them to contribute to our wedding either; and that was fine and proper; I wasn't dependent on my parents for anything, so why would I depend on them for this? As it turned out, when we got to Burlington (where my parents were living at the time), one of the first things that Dad told us was that he had recently sold a truck for ten grand and he had earmarked it for us: we were free to spend any portion of that money on our wedding and he would cut us a cheque for whatever was left over. Sweet! We spent a few days in Burlington, Dave got to spend some time with my parents and Kyler, no one ever took me to the Bridal area of Toronto, and then we had to go to London to start booking things.

One of the biggest draws for having our wedding in London was that the priest who had married my inlaws however many years before in the big cathedral now had a small parish (which my father-in-law attended), and Father Jim was available and willing to marry us, too. We met with him, booked the church for the last weekend in June of the following year, he offered up the church organist to provide our music, said that the church ladies would make us some appropriate arrangements if we dropped off loose flowers for them, and everything seemed easy-peasey on that front (and especially since Dave wasn't baptised and Father Jim didn't blink beyond mentioning that we would need to take the wedding prep course run by the church, as would anyone else).

Dave's parents surprised us by saying that they had two grand set aside for us, and as they were on the spot in London, we chose a few things for them to specifically pay for: the photographer, the DJ, the flowers, and the cake (sounds like a lot, but we booked all of this well within their budget). I was so not picky about any of the details: Dave's sister, Rudy, and I went bridesmaid dress shopping, and although I had something kind of specific in my mind -- we had ordered blue invitations back in Edmonton because I thought I wanted these blue ballerina-type dresses I had seen in a magazine -- but when Rudy tried on this fuchsia dress, she looked so lovely in it that I said, "That's it"; Rudy then told me that she heard the nearby grocery store did beautiful flowers, and when we went there and looked through their catalogue, I found something I liked (mostly daisies with fuchsia carnations) and booked right away; we chose a DJ based on someone's recommendation (I don't know if we ever even met with him, but music is music); Dave's Dad had a friend who did wedding photos, but they looked really amateur so we went with another recommendation (no hard feelings, we were assured); and I had no mental picture of the cake at all, so I left it up to Dave's Mum to choose (I just asked that it not be fruitcake).  We called around a bit for a venue, and even though we had a good sized budget from my parents and plenty of cash ourselves, we just couldn't see ourselves in some big fancy place (even though the inlaws would have been impressed if we had chosen The Armoury, which we immediately dismissed on price). In the end, we went to see one place that sounded good over the phone -- The Ramada Hotel -- and the reception room was beautiful, the menu had delicious options, and best of all, $35/person included an open bar all evening and the Honeymoon Suite for us. Once that was inked in, that was all we felt we could do. We went back to Burlington, again no one mentioned dress shopping so I didn't mention it either, and we flew home again to Edmonton.

The only thing Dave needed to choose was what he wanted to wear, and he eventually went to a tux store; I had suggested it would be fun if his guys wore bolo ties (we were coming from Alberta after all), and as I offered to pick them up, Dave didn't even need to select a tie/cummerbund combo (I'm not sure now he even wore a cummerbund). In the end, he said he wanted to choose our wedding song, and I was so happy that he was willing to make a contribution to the planning that I left that in his hands (how could I know that his idea of a wedding song would be a sentimental ballad that had zero personal connection to us?)

Eventually, I needed to get a wedding dress, and after buying and reading a stack of bridal magazines, there was only one picture of one dress I found appealing: most of the dresses that were in style in 1990/91 were overly fussy to me, with big poofy sleeves, or lace appliques, or hoop skirts, and I saw a picture of a white satin dress with only rosette details at the neckline, and that one picture gave me hope. I waited until January of 1991 (thinking that maybe my mother would offer, once again, to take me dress shopping somehow), and although I thought I still had plenty of time, I guess I didn't. With a thousand dollars in cash from the coffee can in my purse, and my friend Curtis along for support, we went first to West Edmonton Mall, where there are a ton of bridal shops. I was able to get the bolo ties and a pair of shoes, a guest book with a pink feather pen, but store after store was filled with unappealing dresses and snooty saleswomen who told me that I had left it too late to order in the dress I wanted; I was going to have to settle for something off the rack.

We eventually went to a bridal store in a different part of the city, and it had a dress in stock that was a 95% match for the picture in my hand and in my mind. Curtis agreed that this was the only possible dress for me but the only problem was that, yes, it was too late to order one in, and while yes, the sample was for sale, it had a few drops of blood on the train from where someone was probably stuck with a pin while trying it on (I went with that explanation). This is how unfussy I was: I bought the imperfect sample for $200 and was beyond happy to have done so.

Meanwhile, back in Ontario, my mother was feeling left out of the planning, and she called me one day to ask if she could buy the topper for my cake. Of course she could -- I wanted her to be involved. The next call I got from her was an excited description of the Royal Doulton sculpture she had bought for my cake, and since it was too big to put on top of a cake, she had mentally designed and bought all of the accessories for a never-before-seen cake-as-gazebo-over-the-sculpture wedding cake, and although my future mother-in-law had ordered and paid for a cake already, Mum breathlessly explained that she had spoken to Bev -- who was totally okay with my mother making changes -- and then Mum had spoken to the cake baker, and everything was settled and everything was wonderful and I was going to be so happy. I was so unfussy that, other than worrying that my future mother-in-law might have been offended, I was happy to let Mum do whatever might make her happy.

When Mum asked if there was anything else she could arrange for me, I said that she could book a couple of rental cars for the bridal party to use between the church, the photos, and the reception -- I didn't want a limo, just a couple of black sedans, and as they would be having family staying with them in Waterloo (where they would move to before my wedding), Mum liked the idea of renting cars there to bring everyone back and forth to London in. (In the end, she got two blue cars, "That's all they had".) Dad and my brothers rented tuxes for the day (and Mum kept saying that they charged Dad for Dave's and his groomsmen's tuxes, too, but Dave paid for those himself; Dad was either mistaken or ripped off, but Dave ordered his tuxes in Edmonton and picked them up in London, nowhere near wherever Dad went). Mum also called my florist because, although I had ordered her an orchid corsage that matched Dave's Mum's and coordinated with my colours, she wanted to choose her own.

All good; I refused to worry about details that I had no control over. When we went to Ontario the week before our wedding, we realised that maybe we should have been worrying just a little bit more.