What would you do if your wedding dress arrived only 3 days before your wedding? Well, if you were Elisa, you’d leave it in the box and wear a spare dress you’d bought off the rack. Then you’d start a website and hold a contest to find someone worthy of your unopened, unaltered, unworn $3,000 wedding dress. From Elisa’s site:

I did get married in October, and I did wear a wedding dress. But it was not my wedding dress: the simple, strapless, A-line gown that made me feel teeny-tiny. (I’m not.) The dress I got married in was my Back-up, bought off the rack two weeks before the big day, in the kind of frenzy I’d sworn I’d never get sucked into.

Which is why, to this day, I haven’t even looked at my original wedding dress. I can’t. I’m still mad at it.

“Um, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’m closing my shop,” said Paula, the owner of the adorable bridal boutique where I’d found The Dress. My first thought was, Poor Paula. I was not yet jaded or wise enough to think, Poor Me.

This was mid-August. The wedding was still two months away. The last thing I wanted to become was the clich

d hysterical bride, so I chose to believe Paula’s weekly promises that the dress would “definitely be in by next Friday.”

And then one day, Paula stopped returning my calls. The gate to the shop came down. For good.

It was time to become hysterical.

Elisa’s solution? Give the dress away! She says she just wants “a happy ending” for the dress. So if you’ve got a tale of woe, and you’d like a size 10, Mariana Hardwick gown made of Thai silk, you’d better get over to Elisa’s website and pour your heart out.

In less than 500 words, of course. —MEGHANN MARCO

Take My Dress. [Via Brooklyn Record]

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