Security

As my friends begin to have children, I figure their daydreams about future babies involve the part where their child will appears in their living room, at thirty, asking how to get a bridesmaid dress on a flight to Denver tomorrow. And crying that dresses are stupid and planes are stupid and why do people have to go and get married anyway?

Anyway, so I had the dress in a garment bag with some kind of anti-wrinkling contraption my mom made out of tissue paper and hangers.  And in my other hand, I have a work laptop, so that I can continue to meet rapid and changing deadlines for game content. This is not the ideal way to go through airport security.

We all know that airports are not places for socializing. Between the gate agents who hate their jobs, the cattlecall of boarding, delayed flights, and the blaring, repeated announcement that unattended packages are threats to national security, most travelers are not full  of friendly feeling towards one’s fellow passengers.

If you are carrying a bridesmaid dress, though, the normal rules do not apply. Strangers talked to me in the airports and both my flights, asking me where I was going, who was getting married, how I felt about seeing my ex-boyfriend, Stick, again after a year apart. (I might have brought that question on myself.) I told strangers that my college friends, Hugo and Diana, were getting married, in Denver. I told them, no, I’m going stag. I said that I’d been to Denver once, to visit them. That I was looking forward to catching up with Stick, but yeah, there’s some apprehension there too.

I finally got to my hotel that night, and opened my suitcase to get my oversize conference T-shirt, I mean, my pretty nightgown, and I found this:

Well played, TSA. You win this round.