YOU'RE (NOT QUITE) THE TOP - AND DON'T EVER FORGET IT!

 

A friend who knows our affinity for bric-a-brac and our willingness to clutter up the place with it sent us a box full of stuff. It was good stuff. Old holy water bottles, mermaids, do-dads, curios, whatnots, a roll of crafting foil, etc. One of the things in the box was a celluloid wedding cake topper from the 1950s.

I have real problems with frou-frou driven weddings and everything that adds to their frou-frou-ness. Fancy cakes and cake toppers usually fall into that category. Boring, redundant, unoriginal. But mostly boring, redundant and unoriginal. However, this topper is interesting. And honest in ways it probably never was meant to be.

The groom is generically stiff in his tuxedo with its creased trousers. His shirt is still white after all these years. His hair is slicked back. He's not wearing a ring, so whatever is going to happen hasn't happened yet. Or maybe it has and he is one of those guys. He stares straight ahead, as manly, upright and true as any other little plastic 1950s guy.

But the bride is a different story. It was the tilt of her head that caught my eye. She is looking down. Is she simply meeting expectations? A woman of her time? Is it a subservient he's-in-charge nod? Or maybe it's a look of resignation? Or sadness that it came down to this when she had other plans? Or that she is settling for her little plastic man when she could have done so much better? Or maybe she's pregnant and the girdle she is wearing to help hide it is uncomfortable (those were the days). Whatever it is, she looks completely miserable with what is happening to her and what will be happening to her from now on. Those thin little lips and downcast eyes. She has seen the future and it doesn't look good. 

But there is a hint that she just might have had a little fun before she headed down the aisle. It's the dress. Yellow? Off white? Ivory?  Either way, my wife has told me that in the secret code of wedding dresses (of which I knew absolutely nothing until she explained it to me) that not-white - even if it is not-quite-white - means the wasp-waisted bride with her small and simple bouquet of flowers is not a virgin.

In a time when virginity was considered a good thing if not everything why would anyone wear a dress that delivers such a message? Probably because her disappointed mom or pissed off dad insisted on it (because the wedding rulebook said that is the way it should be and people in the 1950s followed the rules. Or at least pretended to. No wonder the children of those people threw out as much of the rulebook as they could when the 1960s came around). The 1950s spawned nothing if not hypocrisy. I figure many a bride wore a white dress that really was a white lie and heard about one whose mother insisted she wear white because, "I want you to be a virgin when you walk down that aisle," even though she knew the bride was more than a little pregnant. But not this girl on the cake topper. Is she being honest or being demeaned, humiliated, punished in some way because she messed around with some guy in the back seat of his car at the drive-in movie? Maybe even this stiff little plastic guy (but I hope not). Either way she doesn't look like she wants to do it again. At least not this way.

We can only hope: 1) she enjoyed it and 2) she saw what she was getting into, left little plastic man standing there, and skedaddled before it was too late. But probably not. It was not a time of diddling and skedaddling. So who knows. Maybe she's your mother. Or grandmother. Or some other woman sitting over there with her eyes downcast and her legs crossed.

 

Cake topper confessions. Our wedding occurred during a potluck picnic at a friend's house by a lake in Minnesota, so this was the photo on our invitations, a cake topper atop an antique Dutch oven. A topper with its own kind of commentary, I suppose. We refuse to be those people, always have. Still have it.