My dad's parents still live in the region where they grew up: "wild, wonderful" West Virginia. They've lived in several parts of the state, besides spending a good portion of their lives traveling elsewhere (mostly by American-made car throughout the U.S., visiting relatives and friends). For as long as I've known them, their home has been in Parkersburg, a small-to-medium-sized town near the Ohio border. They're big fans of the place, and my grandfather owns several WV-stamped hats and tie pins just in case you don't believe him.

Last Thanksgiving Todd and I drove down from New York in a borrowed car to spend the holiday with grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. I insisted on driving rather than going by air, as I missed the drive through the mountains that I used to take with my family every year as a kid, and I wanted to point out all the truck escapes to my captive in the car. Truck escapes have always fascinated me, because it feels sort of like a crime scene, like the eerie spot where something bad might've occurred. (I feel the same way about collapsed mountain tunnels and broken bridges, and, for some reason, long-ago closed subway stations.)

Todd had already met my grandparents, but my other relatives were new to him, as was West Virginia. He was kind of wide-eyed throughout the experience, not unlike the way a cat behaves when it's set in a new environment. (He did just fine, by the way.)

It was particularly nice sitting around my grandparents' wood-paneled living room with several of my relatives, exchanging old stories. It had been a while since I sat around with people doing nothing but talking, without the any distractions or social lubricants at all -- no music, TV, alcohol, or additional entertainment. It wasn't boring or exhausting, and I didn't even really notice that any of those things were absent.

In many ways I turned out pretty differently than my relatives (politics is just one way), but I love that it doesn't matter, really, and that we like each other anyway and get along easily. There naturally isn't any passive aggressiveness, competition, drama, or narcissism in the room, and my family is remarkably un-superficial. (Perhaps to a fault, as I grew up without a firm idea of certain social rules and traditions. I have naively worn my share of inappropriate things on formal occasions, and it's taken me a while to develop a keen sense of what "underdressed" means to other people. If I felt like it, I could totally sit down to Thanksgiving wearing sweatpants and no one would notice. Wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt might be another story, however.)

Since I'm rarely in West Virginia with a car, one of my goals that trip was to drive through some dilapidated mining towns, both to satisfy my nostalgia as well as my affection for show-and-tell. Before we left for New York, Todd and I asked my grandparents how to find these ghost-like towns, and they did their best to help. They gave us a West Virginia map, and pointed to some oddly named places, saying that many of the towns and roads we wanted weren't even marked. They said they could drive us to these places, but telling us was another matter, as the roads are often differentiated by landmarks rather than signs. So they provided us with West Virginia-style directions anyway, leading us to various crossroads in the vicinity of Clarksburg ("At the end of the dirt road, take the left fork up the mountain, and look for signs for Killarm...") and we set off.

We didn't really get to see what I recalled from childhood trips, but we did drive down some dead-end roads and saw lots of detritus-filled front yards and even a pile of (what looked like) coal on the side of the road. We came across some deer hunters, we had a puppy dance around our car, and we got lost more than once. When we stopped a man to ask him for directions, he asked, "Well, where exactly do you want to go in Killarm?" We didn't know how to answer him, as saying "we want to see a crumbling shell of a town" didn't seem appropriate. So we just shrugged and said, "I dunno, the main street?"

A couple weeks ago my mom and dad were back in West Virginia for another visit. (Visiting West Virginia is the extent of what they do; my dad used to playfully suggest that they move there, and my mom used to playfully respond, Hell no.) While there, they found some awesome antique cake plates Todd and I can use for the wedding (West Virginia has an abundance of that sort of thing), and my grandmother combed through her jewelry box for pieces I might be interested in wearing. (Some of them are really pretty. I'll be wearing some of it for sure.) They all also looked through old photo albums, as I wanted to somehow incorporate old wedding photos of my and Todd's relatives at our reception.

Not only did my dad send me the wedding photos I was hoping for, but he also found lots more, pictures of people I've known only as older adults, and people who died well before I was born. He scanned them all in, and since returning to North Carolina, he's been emailing me a "photo of the day" of people from the past, along with descriptive details of their personalities, locations, and relationships. I'm enjoying getting to know them via their frozen expressions and gestures, and seeing my grandparents' personalities still present in their younger faces.

I'm really glad my relatives took (and kept) so many pictures. I think my distant cousin Babe would've liked to been added to Flickr, so that's what I've done. (You can see all the photos my dad has sent so far here.)

My friend Stef grew up in a small North Carolina town thirty minutes away from me. (She lived in the superbly named town of "Advance," which is locally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, and with a slight drawl on the second syllable: AD-vayunce. I lived in Lexington, a town I would idolize until I saw it much later, with adult eyes.)

Stef and I wouldn't meet each other for another 15 years, but back in 1984, we were already in the same headspace -- pining for the members of Duran Duran, just like a million other little girls at that time. I was too young to see them in concert, but once, when a live show was broadcast on the radio, and I recorded the whole event on cassette, thanks to my brother's assistance. As Simon's voice was being etched into the tape, I stood close to the boom box, singing along with all the songs, and keeping careful watch to make sure nothing went awry. I listened to that tape relentlessly, memorizing the banter to the point that I half-expected to hear the same deviations in the studio versions of the songs.

I never got to see the band during the '80s, back when I would've exchanged my Cabbage Patch Kid for tickets to their show, but I did see them perform in 1999, when they were made up of only two original band members. My interest had waned some, and I hadn't planned on going, but for some reason my office was given free tickets, and I took the opportunity. It was at an outdoor venue, and my friends and I got drenched with rain, but it was unbelievably fun, and I remembered why I liked the band so much as a kid.

A few weeks ago, I went to my second Duran Duran concert, this time at Summerstage in Central Park. Stef (who now lives near me in Brooklyn) joined me in the sea of ladies in their 30s and 40s, as Duran Duran (now nearing their well preserved 50s) mimicked earlier versions of themselves. (These days they have four original band members.) It was fascinating -- they still moved the way they used to, they still made the same guitar faces, and they still played their music as well as they had on my tape. I kept thinking that it'd be pretty cool if we could all instantly be 23 years younger, just for that hour -- Duran Duran would be in their prime, and we'd be a sea of girls with our heads exploding, passing out in disbelief and excitement. (I picture my 9-year-old self as being frozen solid with eyes wide like saucers, rather than being a screamer.)

In between the moments of singing, picture taking, and shrugging with Stef about what the lyrics mean (as if hearing them for the first time), I thought about aging, and how both far away and recent my childhood feels to me. It was strange to think of the men on stage as actual people, and the very same people who wore ruffled shirts and created that crazy Hungry Like the Wolf video.

Also, it's one thing to see a young picture of, say, Mick Jagger and realize that he was actually not always an old man, but it's another to actually being alive long enough to remember someone being young. It made me kind of sad -- not for Duran Duran, specifically, but for everyone. Not that getting older is so bad -- each year of my life seems to only improve -- I guess it's just sad to me that we can't preserve our adolescent impressions, or the zeitgeist, or whatever it was that had made that band, for me, seem almost supernatural.

Instead, as much as I enjoyed the Central Park show (I really did love it), I couldn't separate what I was seeing from the image of them at the beginning of their careers, when they were young and mysterious. It was now clear to me that not only are they human, they are entertainers, and that those guitar faces are probably not natural expressions, but faces deliberately created to make the women in the crowd swoon. While there's something sort of charming about that, it doesn't compare to being too young to analyze such things, and just letting it pull you in the way it's supposed to.

One of the first venues Todd and I looked at, back in March, was a building that housed antique firetrucks. It would've been completely sufficient for a wedding, and the firetrucks were kind of neat, but it only seemed appropriate for people who have a firefighter in their family, or if the couple getting married happened to be two 12-year-old boys. (Todd was more into the firetruck place than I was, needless to say.)

Another place we checked out had a ceiling as fancy as King Tut's tomb. Although the place was lovely, it seemed way too ornate for us, and I figured our less-traditional wedding might look kind of plain and drab underneath its golden beams. (It was also prohibitively expensive, if I'm totally honest. And it was around the corner from the Museum of Sex, whose window display I worried might cause a stir among my relatives.)

We ended up settling on the first place we looked at, a venue called The Montauk Club, which was built over a century ago, and has gargoyles! I was pretty much hooked the moment we stepped inside the lobby; the only reason we even looked at other places is because it seemed like a wise idea to shop around. I love that the building has charming imperfections (like we do!) and that it's located in Brooklyn, walking distance from home. It's a bit smaller than we hoped, so we're not able to invite everyone we've ever known (which is kind of our style), but that's probably for the best in the long run.

Other places one or both of us briefly considered for our wedding: one of New York City's fancy libraries, The Natural History Museum, the aquarium at Coney Island, the High Line, the tip of Roosevelt Island, Prospect Park, and a certain extravagent Brooklyn venue that amused Todd because it's so garish, like some sort of glass castle designed for Victoria Gotti. I'm not sure how serious he was, but Todd suggested that crazy place more than once; I maintained that while I appreciate Todd's affection for the absurd, I'm not sure our wedding should be ironic. It's one of those things that's funny to consider, but not actually go through with -- sort of like the idea Todd had about having a chimpanzee act as our ring bearer (which, I'll admit, sounds pretty good).

Here are some pictures of the winning venue. (The photos below aren't mine; each photo is linked to its source. Thanks, Flickr!)

The woman who's making my wedding dress is the least self-conscious person I've ever met. She's an older Mediterranean lady who runs a small shop filled with lovely dresses that are in various stages of development. She's friendly and assertive and funny (although I'm not entirely sure if it's intentional or if she inherently says cute things because she's a foreigner with a thick accent). She decorates her small frame with clothing that's stylish in an absent-minded way, as if she picked out her outfit while concentrating on some unrelated task (which doesn't seem unlikely, actually), and she's in pretty bad need of a shave.

I liked her immediately, and knew right away that I wanted this lady to design my wedding dress, in part, because she's so self-assured and so no-nonsense that I felt safe in her hands, which seemed to nicely complement my total confusion with the whole ordeal of finding such a dress.

She's the sort of person who can say, "This waistline looks bad on you," and you don't feel the least bit offended -- in fact, you listen harder, in case she follows it up with another piece of frank wisdom. Within a few minutes of walking in the store, she threw several half-made dresses on me in various colors (none of them white, which felt refreshing), and for the first time during the dress search, I didn't feel like I was emulating Barbie.

Her shop is chaotic, a chaos that seems to hint at what it's like to be inside her head. She flits around the store, answering questions of everyone around her, while asking a few of her own -- questions she would already know the answers to if she ever wrote anything down. Questions like, "Who are you?" and "How much did I tell you I'd charge you?" She blanks on elements of the dress she said she'd make, wedding dates, and, really, all prior discussions, but she always seems to come through in the end. (Two friends of mine are also employing her, so I know it's not just me.)

Perhaps her lack of concentration has the benefit of lowering expectations, because when she actually makes what she said she'd make, it comes as a pleasant surprise. That isn't to say she doesn't do a good job -- she does a terrific job, in fact. She just very badly needs an assistant who takes notes.

My only problem so far was not realizing sooner that she is more of a dress maker than a designer, and it was up to me to direct her, rather than let her drive. Once I discovered this important distinction, I realized that I had to get to work on figuring out specifically what I wanted, without having the luxury of being able to try on the dress I half-envisioned.

(From the few times I've tried on dresses I admired online, I knew that there's no way of knowing if something will look good on you until you try it on. It's not at all like shopping for a simple summer dress in size M -- it's a lot more like trying on a bathing suit, and all the humbling moments that come with that process. There seems to be no shortcut for simply trying on a variety of them and seeing what works and what doesn't.)

Here's what I do know -- I know the fabric and color I like, as well as how the bottom of the dress should look, and I have pictures of the dress that inspired it. The top of the dress has been much more elusive, however, largely because I'm trying to diminish my top half without hiding it away. I also don't want my dress to be non-bridal to the point that I totally blend in with the guests.

My friend Stef (whose day job is costume design) has been helping me tremendously, and has even made straps of ribbon and safety pins to help edge me closer to a form. On Friday she joined me as I tried on wedding dresses at other stores, sneaking pictures of me in the mirror with her iPhone, covering the camera noise with a hefty cough. I think (think) we found a bodice that will work out nicely. (By the way, I'm learning how to use terms like "bodice" correctly, now that I am helping build a dress. Prior to this experience, my clothing vocabulary stopped at "button.")

Today I visited my dress maker with a printout of the photos we took, just to let her know what direction I was aiming for, and so she wouldn't go down the wrong path before our next fitting. She seemed to be okay with the new idea, but before giving her blessing, she pointed at a picture of me wearing a dress that's too small for my chest and said, "Your cleavage is big here."

And then, with a completely blasé sense of entitlement, she pinched the front of the blouse I was wearing and peaked down my shirt at my boobs. I mean, I guess it's okay -- she's pretty much seen me naked anyway -- but who does that? And why did I have to walk two avenues before it occurred to me that she'd broken a pretty big social rule? I'm not even sure what she could've determined by checking me out, but I guess as long as it results in an awesome dress, I won't question her methods.

I'm hoarse right now! I've been sick. I wish there were some way for me to write using my current voice, because I think it might remind you of a pleasant campfire.

Just wanted to mention that I have a new photo in The Morning News, of Miss Kristen Schaal. Kristen is a comedian, writer, and an actress (probably most known as the obsessed fan on Flight of the Conchords). She's also very funny in person, and friendly, and patient with photographers.

Very tiny interview here.