How I found my wedding dress: Breaking the rules!

Previously:
Part I: Having my doubts

When we left off, my mom and I had just arrived at the little bridal shop in my neighborhood, only to find one woman, clearly not an employee (and also, it turns out, not an English speaker), knitting in the corner... and no one else. Anywhere. In the whole store. For at least five minutes. My fears! Confirmed!

But my mom and I took advantage of the opportunity to pointedly ignore the signs, posted all over the samples, that read "PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH DRESSES. ASK FOR ASSISTANCE"—after all, there was no one to assist us, five minutes after our appointment was scheduled. The selection was small, but it was good, and my first choice dress at the time was one of three in the window, which I took to be a serendipitous sign.

Eventually, the manager came out and, to her credit, didn't yell at us for getting our grubby hands all over the sample dresses. :) She directed me to a seat, pulled out a binder full of pictures, and told me to mark the ones I liked, because they were all of the dresses that she had in the store.

I must have marked at least ten dresses: one I'd tried before, the remainder were a mix of my choices and my mom's choices.

First up was a La Sposa satin gown, Fana.

(source)

I still don't know why I marked this dress. Was it everything I ever hoped and dreamed? Hell no. It was practically nothing that I wanted in a dress: it was shiny, it was drape-y, it was kind of boring. But when I tried it on, it looked fabulous in oyster, a sort of dark champagne color. The draping made me look like a six foot-tall supermodel. I don't think I'd ever seen myself in anything so slimming and flattering before.

I came out of the dressing room feeling like a million bucks, while my mom sat in a big cushy chair on the complete other side of the shop. "What do you think?" I asked, all smiles and enthusiasm. "I don't know," she said as she fidgeted with her cell phone and calendar. "Come closer; let me look at it."

Hm. This wasn't the response I expected, or the scene as I'd envisioned it.

"Um, it's pretty long and kind of hard to walk; why don't you get up and come here?"

After some huffing and puffing, my mom put her stuff back in her purse and walked over, putting on her glasses to give me her most critical eye. In a little notebook, she wrote down the name of the dress ("La Sposa, not Lasso," "O-Y-S-T-E-R, not ouster"), and her response ("Maybe"). She criticized the fit ("Mom, it's a size 10; it's not supposed to fit"). She sat back down.

Unnerved and in a nervous sweat (sorry, whoever tries that dress on next!), I went back for the second dress...