I had to give lessons in grace, elegance, and deportment last night. That’s right, me.
I have a friend who is getting married this weekend and is borrowing my sidesaddle so she can ride her horse to the aisle. This is a much better plan than the previous one involving borrowing my carriage because the horse doesn’t know how to pull a carriage but I seemed to be the only one concerned about that. So I went over to fit the saddle on the horse and give a crash course on sidesaddle riding.
The saddle totally doesn’t fit the horse. The horse is obese and the saddle wants to spin. Luckily the ride isn’t far.
The main problem is the wedding dress. Nowadays we wear an apron that you can toss over your arm to keep it out of the way when you mount and get yourself situated on the saddle. Then you arrange the apron around you to give the appearance of a dress. Obviously this is not an option with a full wedding dress.
Mounting doesn’t really matter. We can get her on with a crane and scaffolding if we had to because it is done in private. But she is dismounting in public so it must be graceful. I proposed a mantra of, “I will not fall off. I will not tear the dress. I will not moon the audience.”
I looked up how women mounted and dismounted back when they had multiple grooms and they had to mount with dresses on. We practiced a few times without the dress and it went ok. The real test will be Saturday when she has to slip off the horse into her father’s arms hopefully without the sound of tearing fabric and without the dress flipping up over her head.
I have some friends getting married this weekend, too. 🙂 But to my knowledge they won’t be riding horses.
Hope all goes well for your friend!
She’s an incredibly good rider and the horse is well behaved or I wouldn’t even try it.
I really hate to be a killjoy but, sometimes, the fairy-tale aspect that some people try to insert into their weddings gets really out of hand.
I’m sure this woman is a lovely person but did it not occur to her that she probably shouldn’t be trying a new equestrian discipline in public and on the biggest day of her life? How good a rider is she in the first place or is this one of those things that’s just going to end in tears?
Granted, I’ve been tapped to be a groomsman in an upcoming skydiving wedding and I’d not stepped out of a plane once at the time I agreed. However, the law requires that I be AFF certified in order to jump without another person physically holding on to me so I kind of had to learn.
I hope it goes beautifully but it really does sound like a gamble that could ruin the ceremony.
*giggles* I hope all goes ok, but you certainly planted a funny mental image in my mind! Here’s hoping this bride isn’t a bride-zilla and can laugh if things don’t all go completely as planned.