This is an occassion for genuinely tiny knickers....

So I am a bridesmaid in a wedding for a very good friend from high school. So far, the process has been relatively painless: I have the dress, I have the shoes, I have a hair appointment, no need for a date: all the other bridesmaids have wisely chosen not to perform an act of desperation and are going stag (doe?). The only thing left was to purchase of the scary undergarments to go with the dress.

I went to one of the old lady department stores to find some old-lady corset-type underthings. I found a pair that loudly proclaimed "Look 10 pounds lighter in 10 minutes!". Ten pounds in 10 minutes, I thought as I picked out my size, I wonder why it takes 10 minutes?

After 10 minutes of heaving and hemming and hawing in the dressing room, with the scary undergarment only half-way up my body, I realized that the tag really should read: "Look 10 pounds lighter in about half an hour or so with the help of a friend or a small crane." When I finally got the scary undergarment in to place, it did in fact do the trick. I couldn't breathe, but who needs to breathe at a wedding?

Having decided to purchase the scary undergarments, I needed to get them off and allow my lungs to start receiving oxygen again. Well, as you may imagine, the scary undergarments are just as difficult to remove as they are to put on. For this reason, they come with little hooks at the bottom that hook the front to the back so that you do not have to remove the whole thing to use the bathroom. I decided to test the hooks to see how easy/difficult it was to unhook them. After all, at the crucial moment, I will not standing there in a large dressing room with just the scary undergarment on and no reason to be hasty in my movements--oh no, I will be standing in a tiny bathroom stall trying to hold on to six yards of crinoline and trying to unhook them while getting ready to break the seal on the obligatory amount of alcohol that a bridesmaid has to drink in order to feel better about herself. So I'm leaning over with my head trying to see the hook that I am trying to pry apart when I hear this resounding FWWAPP and instantly feel pain and see stars in front of my eyes. I had succeeded in my attempt to unhook the scary undergarment, but had also unleashed an enormous amount of potential energy that had been building in the half an hour or so that I was wearing it. I looked in the trio of mirrors and in the hundreds of reflections I saw a tiny little red welt on my forehead where my scary undergarments had exacted their revenge.

I bought them for the wedding. I'll just have to begin the dressing process the day before and hope to God and all heaven that I don't have to pee.