So, I was looking for shoeboxes last week.  The girls and I were going to this place to make a craft with some other Moms and kids and we needed shoeboxes (we were marble painting, if you must know).  I was digging through my closet when I came across a dusty old shoebox that, I can tell you, had not been opened since the summer of 1994. It made me laugh to see the contents, but I felt badly at the same time.  Here is what was inside the box:

The funny part?  Well, obviously that I actually wore these shoes, even if it was just for one afternoon and evening.  I wore them for my old roommate's wedding (With a matching shiny blue dress, that was purposely shorter in the front.  What a great style choice that was!  HA!).  Notice that I didn't say it was for my "old friend's wedding".  It was one of those odd things.  This girl, Vicki, was an acquaintance, really, of both myself and a good friend of mine, Laura.  We were all Elementary Education majors.  Somehow or other, we decided to share an apartment our senior year.  Laura and I hung out with the same group of people, while Vicki hung out with her boyfriend, mainly, and another friend.  Laura and I were shocked when Vicki asked us to be in the wedding.  Don't you ask your best friends to stand up in your wedding?  Anyway, we wore the disco blue dresses with the puffy sleeves on the hottest July day in a chapel with one measly ceiling fan.  We felt badly, not because we had to suffer in the ugly dresses and matching shoes, but because we felt that this wedding was a mistake.  It was the summer after graduation!  Too soon in our opinion.  They had no money, so I'm sure this couldn't have been Vicki's "dream wedding".  They were going to move to Tennessee after the wedding for a "job" for the groom, that turned out to be an unpaid internship.  Yes, they went anyway.  She got a teaching job at a Baptist school making little money.  The writing was on the wall.  There were too many bad decisions being made.  Sadly, we were right.  Laura ran into Vicki's husband a while back, only to find out he was now her ex-husband, he had a baby with a girlfriend, and from the age of the baby, it was apparent that the relationship started while he was still married to Vicki.

It's too bad we weren't Vicki's best friends.  Maybe we would have had the courage to tell her to slow down, not to be in such a hurry to get married, to wait until the time was right.  Or at least, maybe we could have explained in a delicate way just how God awful those shoes and dresses truly were.  That true friends never make their friends wear shiny blue dresses and shoes dyed to match.  Did I mention the handmade barrettes with ribbons hanging down, which by the way, I would have loved when I was eight?  Okay, now I'm just getting mean.

So, do you have any interesting bridesmaid stories to share?  If not, then answer this: what's in your closet?