Indiana State Fair Re-cap -- In Which I am Totally Offended as a Church Lady by the Prize Winning Photograph

As I stood in front of the prize winning wedding photo in the Home and Family Arts Building, I could practically feel Dana Carvey's Church Lady invading my head and saying, "Well! Isn't this wedding photograph just very speshhhhhhhhal? I wonder who could have been the inspiration for this picture, hmmm? Could it have been....Satan??!!"

(Seriously. I am wound so tight, I am just like her in many ways. I know that is very disturbing, but all I can say is that if the inside of my head scares you, you should see the inside of my purse.)

The photograph was huge, of a bride and groom sitting on the steps of the church where they were presumably just wed. The photographer managed to capture the moment just as her long tulle veil was caught by a playful breeze, lifting it up in the air in a graceful series of swoops that was just magical.

And then my attention was caught by the fact that the bride was sitting between the groom's legs with her back resting against his chest, but her legs were flung as wide as the branches of that chestnut tree in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's ode to the village blacksmith. And not only that, but the skirt of her gown was hiked up around her knees, with the groom's hands tangled in the folds. Near her left leg was a small view that went straight up her inner thigh. You couldn't quite see "all the way to China," as my mother used to delicately put it, but the whole effect was of two people who could hardly wait for the photographer to be finished with his dumb pictures so that they could get down to the business of being married, if you know what I mean. Way down.

It was a graceless and unattractive pose, and unless the photographer was going for the contrast of the faerie-like beauty of that wind-caught veil and the shlumpy, legs akimbo posture of the bride, I just couldn't see the purpose of it.

I sniffed dismissively to Aisling, Kieren and Meelyn that that certainly wasn't a very ladylike pose and her mother was likely not going to want to display it on the piano. (I remarked aside to Meelyn and Aisling that those had better not be the steps of a Catholic church that hussy was sitting on.) I later said to my mother that the photograph could have been such a beautiful study on the joy and innocence AND SANCTITY of matrimony, and instead, it looked like really well-dressed soft porn.

Yes, I said that. Soft porn. And you know what? I'M NOT SORRY.