The Wedding Dress — Nicole Conn

This is the story of a single wedding dress and its remarkable journey throughout the ages. It is the story of the women with whom the wedding dress comes into contact as it is handed down from generation to generation, as it weaves a history, not only of their lives, but of the countries in which they live. We follow the sometimes sweet, sometimes tragic, always fascinating stories of women and men who fall in love--and we learn that marriage is only the first step in a partnership. It is also Madeline's story, a thirty-seven-year-old documentarian researching a project on divorce in 1997. The assignment initially reflects her own feelings about the tradition of marriage; that women young and old identify with pinning dreams and futures upon a tradition pervaded by romantic ideals--but that every year in the United States, fifty percent of those dreams are destroyed by divorce. In the midst of her project, Madeline is left an inheritance of a magnificent wedding dress and a hope chest filled with family heirloom memorabilia; diaries, journals, and letters. What she unearths is a migration to the past that soon becomes an obsession. T