I Said Yes To The Dress

        My daughter Claire's wedding is now la week and two days away and I guess things are as together as they can be two weeks before a wedding, which gave me time to return to the question of what am I actually going to wear to the wedding?
        I hadn't given the question too much thought since I tongue-in-cheekily came up with this combo (which my daughter Theresa loved) a couple of months ago:

        Since then the notion had been hanging around in some back closet of my mind that I would wear some variation on the above theme, like maybe the top with some black fancy pants instead of the gray jeans, and, well, maybe I would just go ahead and  glue some sparkles onto a pair of black sneakers.
        All the better to dance in, right?
        Claire had actually given me the okay.  "Wear whatever you want,"  she breezily assured me, "even sneakers and jeans."   Claire's kind of like me.  For us the purpose of putting on clothes every day is usually just to avoid going around naked.
    So I guess technically the above would have fit the bill.  Except that there are exceptions. Like a wedding.
    Now, it's not that I wasn't fully aware when I bought the above blouse-jacket set that Claire and Miguel's wedding was going to take place in Wickenburg, Arizona, a  desert town where the temperature soars to the mid-90's by the beginning of May;  but  it was February and freezing in Columbus when I bought the set and, I don't know, it looked like a wedding outfit.  Or part of a wedding outfit.  I guess I figured the blouse and jacket  were at least a start.
    However, as the wedding date has been approaching one of those helpful but annoying little voices in my ear has been reminding me that I really ought to figure out what I'm ultimately going to wear.
    "Wear what you want,"  Claire reiterated when I broached the subject again last week,  "but if you wear that black jacket and fancy-pants outfit, just remember it's going to be really  hot."
        Right.  I knew then what I'd known all along, that the black jacket and fancy-pants outfit wasn't going to cut it for this desert wedding.
        So, what to wear, what to wear?  Or, more practically, what to buy?  And where to buy it?
        But then Tom and I went to see this movie called "The Lunchbox,"  an Indian comedy set in Mumbai about, well, a lunchbox.  (It was really good flick, by the way, a good-hearted little comedy that fortunately didn't break out big, at least hadn't yet at the time we saw it, so I didn't have to endure the too-loud-forced laughers.  If you don't know what I'm talking about see the day-before-yesterday's blog).
    In the movie the main character, a woman, wears these beautiful, light, gauzy Indian dresses over loose, flowy pants:

        I loved the dresses she wore. 
        Then the wheels started turning....I loved those dresses....The weather is Mumbai is hot like Arizona, so the dresses must be suitable for hot weather....Bing!
        Now all I had to do was find a place in Columbus that sold Indian dresses.
        So I Yahooed the subject and found the name of a store at Eastland Mall called Deb Shops.
        I went to Eastland Mall and found the store but I'm sorry to say that Yahoo was lying through its teeth when it told me that I could find Indian dresses at Deb Shops.  I scoured that shop and there wasn't one item in the whole place that I'm not  45 years too old to wear.  None of it was Indian, either.
        But as long as I was at the Mall I figured I might as well make the rounds.
        And there it was, on a mannequin at JC Penney's! Then a few minutes later it was on me:     

        A nice fellow shopper took the photo in the JC Penney's dressing room.
        Anyway, while it's not the Indian dress of my dreams, it's aqua, spaghetti-strapped and flowy, and I found the sheer white shrug to go over it. Claire assures me that if I get too hot while cutting a rug on the dance floor I may throw off the shrug and go ahead and rock the spaghetti straps.
        But now what about the sparkly sneakers?