The bride was Beth's older sister, Karen, twelve months later. She along with a fellow Middlebury graduate, David Littlefield, was living together in New Haven, CT, but Karen told a buddy she needed "some type of push" to maneuver onto matrimony.

"I could imagine being married to David but couldn't see myself marriage," Karen remembers. The friend was built with a pragmatic suggestion: she and her husband and Karen and David would flip coins. "Heads you receive married, tails you do not." Karen agreed. But, she says, "As the coins flew into the air, I had a type of epiphany. All of a sudden I could see myself married. I knew it had been the right thing to complete." (Three from the coins agreed.)Go

When Karen tried around the mermaid wedding dress, it needed "a little bit of elastic stitching to create the neckline smaller. I also wore a hoop petticoat since I would be a bit shorter than Beth. And of course, the corset. That was the special moment piece that made all of us fit the gown perfectly."

She wore the initial lace cap, as did Beth, but both added new netting. Karen, a professor of Latin American Literature at Emory University, and David, a completely independent financial advisor, have two daughters and reside in Atlanta, GA.