Murderous Medea: A Recipe for Wedding Disaster?

Who on earth would name a wedding dress after Medea?!



Elizabeth Fillmore, apparently. The above dress is cccccrrrraaaaazy in an eccentrically beautiful kind of way, but even if I had the necessary funds ($19,580, apparently - which is, what, the best part of £12,000?) I don't think I could bring myself to wear a dress worn by such an ill-starred mythological figure.

Let's remind ourselves of her story, shall we? (I'm sticking mostly with Euripides here, I think) Medea is minding her own business on Colchis when along comes the handsome Jason - who doesn't so much sweep her off her feet, as convince her to help him nick the rather valuable and certainly unique golden fleece by murdering and dismembering her own brother. Nice. Then, they get back home to Corinth, and after knocking her up a couple of times Jason announces he's leaving her for a princess (the daughter of the king, not just a spoilt blonde); as if that weren't bad enough, he pretty much tells her it's all her own fault for being different and that, not to worry, she can be an ex-wife with 'benefits', if she wants. In retaliation, Medea is emotionally torn, but decides to punish him by killing the two children she has borne him in cold blood (but off-stage). She doesn't even leave their little lifeless bodies behind for the now-bereft Jason to bury with the proper rites.

Even the myth seems to blame Jason, because Medea doesn't get her comeupance but is carried off on the sun-god's chariot. Ovid has a rather nice line in Medea's point of view, too, in his Heroides (note too that Jason has not one but two letters from scorned special lady friends in the Heroides, the cad!).

So all in all, not the best name for a wedding dress.

On Wedding Discos; their effect on concentration

We've all been there: a slightly darkened (although not dark enough) village hall/hotel function room, glitterball throwing sparkly lights over the slightly uncomfortable crowd, the rather well-oiled father of the bride throwing shapes on the dance floor, all to the righteous sounds of the Jackson 5, ABBA and other, inoffensive, inter-generational grooves.

In fact, I'm there right now. Rather, I'm outside said wedding disco, trying to write my Phd in my institution's library in a race against time to meet the supervisor's impossible deadline ("of course I can turn it around in three days; in fact, make it two!"). Yet I'm losing that race, due to my institution's lucrative sideline in corporate hospitality/events. Every 20 seconds or so, I get a good blast of Take That delivered to my desk through the open doors of my institution's function room, peppered with whoops and shrieks from rather over-excited children and rather over-indulged bridesmaids.

Not that I'm against weddings or discos. Far from it. I'm just the kind of person who, unfortunately, requires total and extreme silence when they're working. I have been known, in the past, to throw 'looks' at my colleagues who do not adhere to similar policies on noise - I have no control over it, it's just something I have learned to live with. I actually require this level of pure peace and quiet else, for some reason, I end up writing what I hear. And right now I'm hearing Dolly Parton's '9-5'...which is ironic, as I'm going to admit defeat and quit work for the evening.

* p.s I should have mentioned that the Phd is in classics, and that the bride was wearing a truly awful green number, just to fulfil the classics/fashion requirement of this blog.