Finding a Dress, Part II

I wasn’t in panic mode yet, but I knew that since I hadn’t found “the” dress the first time I went looking that it may take me several trips to find it. In typical business school fashion, I sent out an Outlook appointment request to my girlfriends in school to see if they wanted to come, and a couple had prior commitments, but a few could make it. I had looked online at Watters to find a bridal shop in Austin, and it worked out that The Bridesmaids Store looked like a good choice (especially since I also had to order a bridesmaid’s dress for a friend’s wedding). Having learnt my lesson from the last time, I called ahead to see if they had the styles I was interested in trying on, and they had several of them, so I thought I would give it a shot.
The setup was very nice, the store had hundreds (thousands?) of bridesmaids dresses in the front, and to see the bridal gowns you went to the back of the store, where they had a salon-style dressing room, with a living room outside of it for guests to wait while you were trying on. Another plus is that we were allowed to look through the dresses (even though there weren’t nearly as many bridal gowns as bridesmaid dresses). I gave my friends a general idea of what I was looking for, but I also told them I’d try on dresses “outside the box.”
My experience was much the same as the last shop, the store associates drifted in and out of the bridal section, asking if we needed anything, which is good, because I don’t think I could stand someone dressing me. Like the last time, I found several dresses that I liked, and my friends found their favorite one, but I didn’t find “the one.” I did try to “create” “the one,” I pulled a sash off of one dress and wrapped it around another, at which point my friends intervened, because I had crossed the line into desperation. Another day with no dress in sight: time to schedule another dress excursion.