It has been the experience of a lifetime to work with Catherine Middleton to create her wedding dress, and I have enjoyed every moment of it. It was such an incredible honor to be asked, and I am so proud of what we and the Alexander McQueen team have created.
I’d been a wedding singer through college, but after a few years of doing my best renditions of jazz standards to clinking glasses and the sound of forks on salad, I thought, ‘Oh God, if this is all I do, I’ll never be able to live with myself.’
I met Prince William at a musical festival and he let me know he was a fan of my music. But the invitation to sing at his wedding reception came completely out of the blue. The fact that Kate and William knew the words to my songs was very touching.
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer’s office above the coffee shop where we’d been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, ‘By the time you get this, Daddy, I’ll already be Mrs. Blaise!’
My mom used to make my costumes when I was little; she sews a lot. One year, I was a bride and I had a big wedding dress and a bouquet. Another year I was a medieval princess with a long teal dress and a veil. It was a little extravagant, but it was cute!
A wedding, people decide to get married, it comes out of such love for one another and then women can turn into these other people. They’re planning something that’s the biggest event they’ll ever plan in their lives and it turns them into this other person, so it’s not totally the guy’s fault that he’s feeling disconnected from this person.
I haven’t made many wedding dresses. It’s a dress very, very important for the girl; it’s important to know the person, I believe, but at the same time it should be a shock to the person – the person should be shocked to be suddenly revealed. That’s the work of a designer sometimes, to propose an ID of look.
When I got married in 1991, I had never been to a wedding, so I didn’t know that my wedding was tacky. I didn’t know that I was getting married in a quinceanera dress, because there was nobody there to cry over me and tell me I look like a fool.
As a child, as a cinemagoer, I think there is nothing better than being in a cinema or watching a film. I think it’s just a while magical… it almost feels like you’re at a big party in India, where you’re singing, you’re dancing, you’re laughing, you’re crying, you feel like you’re at a wedding because our films invariably cover all emotions.
My problem with the wedding industry started when I studied in college and liked to have the television on in the background, and ‘A Wedding Story’ on TLC always came on, and I’d get irritated that the story of two people making a lifelong commitment to each other could be encapsulated in a half-hour show about the party they throw.
One of the great things about being a writer/journalist is that my boss loves me to go out and do features on being someone else. I did a feature on Kate Middleton, where I went to an incredible fancy state home in the countryside, put on a wedding dress and posed for engagement pictures with a fake Prince William.
I think the biggest thing that I have to do is to remind people that poetry is there for us to turn to not only to remind us that we’re not alone – for example, if we are grieving the loss of someone – but also to help us celebrate our joys. That’s why so many people I know who’ve gotten married will have a poem read at the wedding.
It’s not that I think weddings – or marriages – are letdowns. It’s just that I want to see my wedding as one awesome achievement on a continuum of achievements, all of which were, in their way, just as beautiful and profound for having led me to the current one.
Do I believe in coupling? Do I believe in commitment? Do I believe in co-parenting, raising children together, having a family, and growing old with someone? I absolutely believe in all of those things. I just don’t believe that you need to be married to do that. I love going to weddings, though. I do love a good wedding.
Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?
Recently, I was preparing to sing Springsteen’s ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ for a wedding and was unable to get through it without tears. My wife handed me ‘Love You Forever.’ I read it. I cried. But that cry somehow cured me of crying while singing the song. Go figure.
I’m used to being in front of camera and knowing what to think. But if you’re asking me to be me, I get very self-conscious. My job isn’t to be me. Being an actor, people think you can do a eulogy at a funeral, a speech at a wedding. I find all that very nerve-racking.
I am happy. I have a wonderful marriage. I was in a not-great second marriage for 20 years, then I fell in love with Steve, my first husband, again, and we remarried. I wore the dress from our first wedding in 1982 – it was tight, but I could get into it.
I have a memory of my mother kneeling in front of a cabinet in our home, tenderly cradling her wedding china. We never used the plates; she died in her 40s without ever letting herself enjoy these gorgeous pieces. I told myself that I would use my precious items.
I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.
I try to study the background of the country I am in and what were my hits there, so I can at least give them some of what they want. It’s like a wedding – give them something old, something new, something borrowed and definitely something blue!
Hierarchical formulations died because their wedding cake levels posited a multiply fractured cosmos that does not match the Space Age revelation of a unified universe in which the earth is clearly in, rather than separated from, the heavens. Hierarchical representations do not reflect what either the world or we are like.
People didn’t just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn’t hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit’s incomplete.
I had all kinds of fantasies, like a lot of girls, but did I actually go through the motions of planning a wedding and buying bridal magazines and imagining things and setting up who would play what role? No. Because as I grew up, I started to believe that I would be one of those gals that never got married.
It took two months from the day my fiance proposed to my first Google search for ‘wedding planning: how?’ Now, let me interrupt myself here and share how much I hate using the word ‘fiance.’ It’s so fancy, and it’s hard not to sound like a jerk saying it. Which is why I will be using my own word for fiance: gloob.
