Here Comes the Bride

My 2012 collage

As you know if you've ever been a regular reader of this blog, I choose a color and a word for each year.  This year my color is purple and my word is juice.  Last year, I also started the year by making a collage that represented my color and word, which turned out to be a wonderful thing, so I did it again this year.  I have a ton of stuff I want to share about how this year and its themes have unfolded so far, but I'm going to have to break it into several posts, so I hope you'll bear with me and come along for the ride.

In choosing the images for a collage, I keep my theme(s) in mind, but sometimes I will find myself drawn to an image that doesn't completely fit.  In the 2012 collage, that image was the face in the top right corner.

She is a bride from a small village in Kosovo where they paint women's faces for their weddings.  The colors used on her face, other than the obvious white, are blue, red, silver, and gold - not purple.  But I felt the need to include her with no idea why.  A bride?  What did that have to do with anything?

Lo and behold, a couple of days after I finished the collage I got an email from one of my editors at the Taos News, asking me to write an article for the Taos Wedding Guide supplement that comes out every spring.  I would be interviewing three women in Taos who are all ordained interfaith ministers and wedding officiants.

After interviewing these amazing women and then transcribing the interviews, I had no idea how to jump into writing the article.  Weddings are not something I've experienced much in life.  I did marry the same man twice, but the first time was on Halloween in a cemetery, and the second time was on a Wednesday night (in a church this time at least, but it was extremely casual).  I was a flower girl in my uncle and aunt's wedding as a child, and a bridesmaid for a friend from high school, but that's about the extent of it.

I always like to say there's a fine line between "the pre-writing process" and procrastination.  In this case, I felt I needed some inspiration to get started on the article, so I went onto Netflix to try to find some kind of wedding show to stream.  After comparing the few that came up, I chose a reality show called My Fair Wedding because it was higher rated than the others, and I proceeded to watch two episodes in a row, which did in fact inspire me to write the article.

However, this show had a far more profound impact on me than just helping me write.  I ended up watching all 24 episodes available on Netflix over the period of a few weeks.  Once again, something fluffy has changed my life, and in my next post, I'll tell you how.