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Years ago a friend wrote a flash fiction story about a bride who looked in the mirror and discovered she had no head. She screamed. End of story.

Exactly, I thought when I read the piece. A bride is at once the most decorated item at a wedding and the least important. On one level, weddings are about property and prestige; they are commercial ventures. On another, they're about the gears of one family meshing, or not meshing, with the teeth of another.

There's not a lot that's strictly personal about a wedding. Visiting the Gunn Historical Museum last week to see antique wedding dresses worn in the rural town of Washington, Connecticut, over the past few centuries drove that point home to me. In "The Fabric of Marriage: Wedding Dresses," the dresses on display--everything from heavy beaded satins to gauzy homemade muslins--obviously outlived the women who wore them and survived to tell the history of the town.

More to my point, though, they were draped on headless mannequins that made the women themselves anonymous. Though the accompanying captions told the story of the town and the families who have populated it, they really said very little about the women themselves. Where vintage photos of the bride were placed near the dresses, the women seemed bemused by their own invisibility as they studied their gowns from a slight and airy distance. They seemed to know these fragile bits of fabric were doing the talking for them--or for the place in society they once occupied.

I left the exhibit wondering why mannequins don't have heads. Perhaps to make it easier for each of us to imagine ourselves in the costumes they wear? Perhaps their story is in some way ours? Must these stories always end in personal oblivion?



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