Little Britain USA: Class, Culture and Dignity?

The premier of Little Britain USA Sunday night marks the inevitable transition of Britain’s leading comedy sketch show onto American televisions. In Britain, the show has been running for five years and is a cultural phenomenon. Books, coffee mugs, t-shirts, you name it. Everyone in the show’s homeland has received a Little Britain Christmas gift since the first season’s debut in September 2003. Catch-phrases are plastered on everything, and the streets sing with imitation.

What made the show such a success was its unbridled parodying of people-types in the U.K. The show spoke aloud what everyone else was witnessing in day-to-day life, from the “Chav” persona of Vicky Pollard—a teenage girl with a fondness for sports brand clothing, shop-lifting, smoking, binge-drinking and pregnancy—to the ancient socialites in charge of judging village events like jam-making or cake-baking—one of whom is plagued by bigotry and vomits on anyone who isn’t white or heterosexual. These were caricatures, with a high level of disgustingness thrown in, but they evoked the real-life counterparts in a way that allowed Britain to acknowledge them together.

The show’s tag line, “Class, Culture and Dignity” is, of course, a little British sarcasm. Little Britain USA lives up to the British show’s reputation for being crude, lewd and rude. But the show’s fondness for coarse, unrestrained sketches may be its downfall in the U.S. While the British public watched LB move from parody to perversity over five years, Americans are getting the rawest deal. This season’s Little Britain USA is the result of five years of broaching and breaking boundaries. The sketches are shocking, even for someone who owns the first few seasons on DVD and would consider herself an addict gone cold turkey since moving to the U.S.

Vicky Pollard: Proud mother of six, photo courtesy of the BBC

Many of the characters have been invented to parody American stereotypes—the gun-clinging cop, the brownie-guide going to camp, the muscle-bound gym-goer—but each with a hard-to-swallow outrageousness factor that makes it difficult to appreciate what the characters represent. The cop has more than an obsession with guns; it’s an erotic fascination that comes to a climax right before our eyes. The young brownie guide can’t help but spurt out references to Internet pornography as she waves goodbye to her mother and leaves for camp. The “gym buddies” sketch involves a couple of grotesque body suits, heaped with muscle and overshadowing the miniature body part beneath it all, bikini-line shaving, and sex simulation in a very precarious position for a public gym locker.

The sketches that remain funny without the involvement of bodily fluids include the Weight Watchers equivalent “Fat Fighters” and its team leader Marjorie Dawes. Her unabashed anti-“fatty” mentality is not only hypocritical, but hilarious. This week, Rosie O’Donnell had to defend her sexuality and size as two independent facets, after Dawes asked: “Are you a lesbian because you’re fat, or are you fat because you’re a lesbian?”

And then there is Carol Beer, the most unhelpful receptionist of all time, who instead of answering questions will cough in your face and tell you, “Computer says no.” Vicky Pollard, the classic Little Britain character, also returns this season to go to boot camp, and Lou and his wheel-chair bound friend Andy go to a preacher for healing.

But many of my favorite sketches seem to have disappeared, perhaps because the producers deemed them un-translatable to an American audience: The strange Scottish hotel owner who speaks only in riddles and plays the pipe-whistle; Mr Mann, the annoying customer who is always looking for something unattainably specific (like a picture of a disappointed horse) or unhelpfully broad (like a book); or Mr Cleaves, a teacher at Kelsey Grammar School who sets ridiculously unachievable goals for his students (e.g.: “find the square root of Popeye” or “divide Henry VIII by Edward II”).

These were the more Monty Python-esque pieces in terms of outright silliness, and it’s a shame to see them exchanged for the cruder sketches. Still, I’ll be watching avidly to see how many different ways Matt Lucas and David Walliams can both annoy and charm America with their candid displays of “Class, Culture and Dignity” as they take Little Britain to big U.S.A.

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Welfare Policy, Leg-up Versus Hand-Out

At some point soon after the very beginning of man, a Neanderthal tripped and fell over a misplaced mammoth bone onto the cave floor. Some of his buddies laughed. Some ignored him. But one of them grunted over and put out his hand. This was the moment we started talking about welfare policy. When the fallen Neanderthal refused to get up, that was the moment we started complaining about it.

Since then, governments around the world have tried, reformed, and tried again with various welfare philosophies. Some prefer the "leg up" method, where aid is a stepping stone to self-sufficiency (the Neanderthal learns how to get up from the cave floor himself, after a little instruction), and others employ the "hand out" method, where welfare is a wall of dependency to lean on in hard times (the Neanderthal has a fake arm installed in his cave to use in case of slippages).

In Germany, the method is one of social karma. If you've put a lot into the system, through work or education, then you can get a lot out of it. France prefers the concept of "mutual responsibility". Sweden puts its money where its mouth is, paying 50 percent of its wages to advocate "social equality". Britain has a bad reputation for giving away too much too easily, and America for giving too little too late.

According to the Budget for Fiscal Year 2008, Historical Tables, the U.S. Spent $354.3 billion on means-tested entitlements in 2006. That figure includes a long list of different types of aid:

"Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance (AFDC), supplemental security income (SSI), child nutrition programs, refundable portions of earned income tax credits (EITC and HITC) and child tax credit, welfare contingency fund, child care entitlement to States, temporary assistance to needy families, foster care and adoption assistance, State children's health insurance and veterans pensions".

It sounds like a lot of money, services, and philosophies, but how does welfare policy really apply to those in need of help? What does it mean to be living in a "hand-out" versus a "leg-up" system?

Thanks to a helpful calculator on the U.K. Government's welfare website, I can figure out exactly what I would receive if I was unemployed and living in the United Kingdom. Every two weeks, I would pick up a government check for £47.95 (approximately $84) in Jobseekers Allowance. As long as I remained unemployed, I would get a 100 percent reduction on the property fees owed to the government, known as Council Tax, and live rent free in government property. Even if I wanted to work, as long as I pitched in less than 16 hours a week, I would still receive my unemployment benefits.

If I were to add an infant to the mix, not only would I be moved to bigger accommodation (a 2-3 bedroom house), but I would receive £18.80 (approximately $33) a week in Child Benefits and £1393.46 (approximately $2438) a year in Child Tax Credit - more if I had a husband, civil partner or if the child's father was also living in the house, unemployed.

So, I would make a total of £93.54, or $170 a week without working. Or I could supplement that with 16 hours of work and double my income. To top it all off, health care is completely free, including dental care until the age of 19, and then unemployed or low-income families have their bills subsidized by the government.

In the U.K., you don't have to go it alone if you find yourself in financial trouble: The government will act as a safety net. But the biggest downside is that it pays to do nothing. In fact, the way the system works, most single parents wouldn't be able to match their government income if they worked full-time. Not only would they lose time with their children and have to spend their wages on child care, but they wouldn't be able to pay the bills. Working at minimum wage 40 hours a week would provide £30 more income than government welfare benefits. That "extra" income equivalates to one day of child care. The result of this dramatic system flaw is that most mothers, especially single mothers, have to wait until their children are old enough to go to school before they can go back to work.

It's not as easy to find out what benefits you are eligible for in the United States. The questionnaire is more probing for a start; it requires ethnicity, professional experience and marriage history. I also have to tell them whether or not I have ever worked for the government or have end-stage renal disease. And then the pages take ten minutes to load.

Have you run away from home or are thinking about running away from home? Do you need disaster relief funds? Are you a victim of domestic violence, torture or trafficking? It gets harder. One minute you're trying to find out what money the government can give you, and the next you're taking an exam about yourself. I choose "general declining economic conditions" as the reason for not having a job: No, it's nothing to do with September 11th or having my parents killed by a "President declared disaster" (as opposed to a "declared President disaster?"). No, I don't live on a farm, have any family in the military or come from Native American heritage.

Finally, with question 72 complete, I discover that I am eligible for 29 separate sources of welfare. After reviewing the choices, it becomes clear that some of them are not going to work. A competitive grant for research "that joins biology with computer science" for example, is not something I would consider myself "eligible" for. I can get Food Stamps. If I had children, they could get milk on school days and food in the summer. I can line up at certain health centers and try to get medical aid. I can get help with my electricity bill and I might even be able to get a loan. Nowhere in any of this is the government giving me a check. Nowhere are they handing me an income and saying "this one is on us". Nowhere can I depend upon a solid government cash flow while I'm down and out.

That's the very real difference between the U.S. and the U.K. in terms of welfare policy. Britain, which has come to be known as "The Welfare State", is criticized as being too lenient, too ready to hand out money first and ask questions later. The government is the sole welfare provider and charities throw a few pennies into the bucket now and then.

America, on the other hand, forces people to jump through loops even to find out what help is available. There is little unity in the welfare system, which isn't really a system at all but more of a fragmented selection of charities who might receive government grants and incentives to keep them going. The only "umbrella" government welfare system in the U.S. is reserved for people old enough to access social security. Everyone else is encouraged not to rely on their government but rather find their own way.

Both systems have their evils. Ideally, government dependence means national solidarity, just as independence means self-sufficiency. But "dependence" can also mean inescapable reliance, and "independence" can render many people lost and alone.

(The Huffington Post, Sep 26,08)

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David Foster Wallace, A Literary Genius who Changed Fiction Forever

Perhaps it was inevitable that the strange curse suffered by so many great writers should strike so close to home— at least, as close as my coffee table, where Infinite Jest resides, or my desk, stacked with books of David Foster Wallace’s short stories. Even my memo board is filled with words given to me by D.F.W, scribbled on post-it notes: “You‘ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you‘re working on. Maybe that just plain loves.”

News of his suicide came as a shock. He hanged himself on Friday, Sep 12, 2008 at his home in Claremont, California. He was 46, a professor of creative writing at Pomona College, and a literary revolutionist.

I had hoped one day to meet this man and glean some of his genius through even the briefest of conversations. I watched in awe of as even Charlie Rose couldn’t keep up. Now he is to become what all my other mentors are: words on pages, tinted by the knowledge of a tragic end. Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath… David Foster Wallace, or “D.F.W.” as he is affectionately referred to by his cult following. Lives weighed down by words in an endless struggle to articulate meaning and find release.

My fascination with David Foster Wallace began in 2006 when I bought his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on a literary whim. I opened the book at random in Borders and began reading a story written in second person about a boy assessing the progression of puberty on his thirteenth birthday (”You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair.”) I was confused by the content and astonished by the writing. It made no sense. It was offensive. It was perfect. Foster Wallace could mesh Hemingway-esque terseness with aggressive, arrogant verbosity like no other.

“Death is Not the End,” another story in the collection, is a three-page sentence. Many of the other stories are structured as Q&As, the questions not really questions at all, but independent statements that are as equally confusing as the “answers” accompanying them. “A Radically condensed History of Post-Industrial Life” is just a short paragraph and yet an entire story, heavy with silent sadness and irony.

Foster Wallace was as obsessively unconventional in all his writing as James Joyce was with “Ulysses,” but what Joyce spent years trying to achieve through thorough planning and execution, Foster-Wallace did with an ease that only those with a supernatural level of intelligence can access. The only author able to surpass David Foster Wallace was David Foster Wallace.

To everyone else in the literary world, this was very annoying. Zadie Smith captured a universal sentiment after reading Foster-Wallace’s 1989 collection Girl with Curious Hair, saying: “He’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us… Goddamn him.”

He didn’t write the kind of books that people take on vacation, read by the fire on a cold winter’s night or discuss in book groups. His fiction was purposefully difficult. He wanted to make people squirm. He wanted to make his readers work really, really hard for it. But if they did, it would all be worthwhile. If they made the effort to engage, analyze and sweat their way through the pages, they would level-up onto a new plane and be somewhere nearer (although, still very far away from) where Foster-Wallace himself was standing and peering down at the world with a calculator in hand. He was passionate about mathematics, and complicated numeric digressions often pervade his writing. Sometimes it progresses into incomprehensible equations that look more like algebra than narrative. His writing is, above all, an open-ended calculation.

Or else, it is one never-ending footnote that spirals into a story different from the one it squeezes off the page. Or a collection of dictionary definitions, backward chronology, free-association, fragmentation; everything that makes meaning difficult to grasp. Any object he can find to throw in the reader’s way, he does, turning each event into an obstacle course.

This is “serious art”, and as D.F.W. once said: “Serious art is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.”

But why put his reader through all this effort, when the author could so easily hand them the plot and meaning in a neatly wrapped bundle? One possible clue is revealed in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993), in which Foster-Wallace explains that television has replaced fiction as the medium for access to an unknown world. “Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding,” wrote Foster-Wallace. In a land of television-watchers, art becomes passive and the world over-familiarized. So D.F.W took it upon himself to switch the balance, re-claim “uncomfortable” art and de-familiarize the world.

He was hated. He made people furious. He ignited a hardcore set of “anti-fans” who accused him of pointlessness, impenetrable arrogance and wasting paper. Nowhere in my long chain of literature-lovers is there someone who has completed the one thousand-plus pages of Infinite Jest, nor have I met anyone who knows of anyone who has. There is, however, someone who was so offended by its presence that they used it as toilet paper (and it lasted six months).

To the critics: say what you will about David Foster Wallace, but the man dedicated his life to the “high art” of fiction. He poured his genius into words, sculpted meaning into a form of literary electricity, and wrote long and hard without intellectual restraint. For a short life, his works span infinity. All we can do is try to catch up.

In his own words—a sampling of D.F.W.:

“People read fiction the way relatives of the kidnapped listen to the captive’s voice on the captor-held phone: paying attention, natch, to what the victim says, but absolutely hanging on the pitch, quaver, and hue of what’s said, reading a code born of intimacy for interlinear clues about condition, location, and the likelihood of safe return…”—“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (“Girl with Curious Hair”, 1989)

“Fiction-writing is lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It’s yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.”

“Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.”

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering… We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.”—(An Interview with David Foster Wallace, Larry McCaffery, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

“Serious art… is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.”

“You‘ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you‘re working on. Maybe that just plain loves.”

“Sometimes things do happen. Even in reality. In real realism. It’s a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they’re about equally strange.” —(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“The preceding generation of cripplingly self-conscious writers, obsessed with their own interpretation, would mention at this point, just as we’re possibly getting somewhere, that the story is getting anywhere.”—(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”—(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“I became in myself axiom, language, and formation rule, and seemed to glow filament-white with a righteous fire.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Things become bad. I now have a haircut the shadow of which scares me.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“I’m afraid of absolutely everything there is.”

“Then welcome.”—(The end of “Here and There”.)

“And here’s what I did.”—(The last sentence of “Girl with Curious Hair”.)

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Brits Back Obama, Remain Skeptical of U.S. Politics

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown backs Obama. Russell Brand (we think, but he didn't make himself too clear on this one at the VMAs...) is also in the Obama Camp. Now a BBC poll shows that the majority of the world, given the chance, would stamp their hopes next to Obama's name on the ballot. But do Brits back Obama wholeheartedly, or because there seems no better option?

Judging by the furious debate being held on the Facebook group I created called "What the Rest of the World thinks of America," Obama and McCain are no more than a hair's width apart.

"This election is more symbolic than anything else," said Dave Roe, a graduate from my alma mater (The University of Kent) with a degree in politics. "The election of the first black president would be nothing short of radical, and if you are reading the British media it seems as if he is going to walk it. Read between the lines, however, and this is going to be close; Obama is seen as too intellectual and McCain knows how to play the Washington game."

The results of a BBC survey released last week suggest that presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is the preferred candidate internationally. The poll spanned 22 countries and surveyed 22,500 people to discover that global sentiment leans in Obama's favor by a four-to-one margin, with 46 percent of participants saying that Obama would improve America's relationship with the rest of the world if he took office, compared to 20 percent who believed the same of Republican Sen. John McCain. All 22 countries were dominated by a pro-Obama sentiment, but four out of ten survey participants remained undecided.

That's 40 percent of the world not being able to choose between two of the most politically opposed candidates America has ever seen. These guys are the definition of polar opposites: young versus old, liberal versus conservative, rookie versus veteran... Or so it seems.

The presidential decision, as one of my friends described it, is akin to choosing between Coke and Diet Coke at McDonalds. It really doesn't make a difference either way, because neither candidate will be able to make any dramatic changes in America. Many Brits believe that there is one thing and one thing only that controls ebb and flow in the White House, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office: it's that dirty word again...OIL.

"Resources are scarce, and it's not irresponsible of Bush or McCain to secure them for their own citizens," said John Bakie, a Kent graduate in history and politics. "Oil has peaked, and it is only going to become more expensive and more difficult to obtain in the future. You may think [Washington's] attempts to secure oil in the Middle East are a waste of cash, but really they need to secure [oil] because if they don't then Russia or China will eventually."

Faced with the pressure of two competing super-powers, no president can resist the battle for oil, regardless of experience, race or views on the Iraq war.

"[Obama and McCain] are both guilty of taking part in the back-scratching culture of U.S. politics," said Roe. "It's just that Obama has been doing it for fewer years so it's easy to paint him as this kind of idealist."

And now is no time for ideals.

"Long-term of course the U.S. needs to reduce its dependency on oil," said Bakie. "But it takes time and money to develop these technologies, and given a recession is upon the western world, both time and money are also scarce. We are moving towards a trilateral age, and the three powers of the world (the U.S., Russia and China) will all be aiming to secure the world's remaining resources for themselves, and it's quite reasonable to see why they would."

So, what happens when the oil runs out? According to these Englishmen, governments don't peer far enough into the future to care.

"None of this is sustainable in the long-term," said Bakie about the oil rush. "But governments aren't long-term, and the people who run them now will be dead in 30 years. But that's another problem altogether..."

Despite growing apathy in for either candidate, Brits are leaning toward Obama. Prime Minister Gordon Brown praised Obama's political mentality in a piece he wrote for Parliamentary Monitor magazine, stating that the Democrats were "generating the ideas to help people through more difficult times." It was an unusual move for a British government head. Prime Ministers in the past have favored a more neutral approach to presidential politics by declining to state a preference and staying safely behind party lines.

Unlike Russell Brand, who declared his Obama-love in a manner much less tactful than the British P.M. While hosting the MTV Video Music awards, the British comedian ignited a frenzy of complaints by pleading for America to elect Obama "on behalf of the world," calling President Bush a "retarded cowboy" and no doubt successfully managing to embarrass both the British public and Democrats everywhere.

But despite Brown's backing, a nine percent lead in a BBC world service poll, and Russell Brand's ruined career, the Obama campaign has suffered some setbacks recently. A number of polls indicated a lead for McCain after the Republican convention, and critics attributed a renewed urgency in Obama's recent public appearances to the explosion of support for vice-presidential candidate, Gov. Sarah Palin. The Democrats will be pleased to know that Palin isn't going over so well in the U.K.

"I think McCain's election would be a bad time for America," said Daniel Clarke, who graduated from the University of Kent with a degree in Biomedical Science. "Put aside any problems you have with him, and think [about the] very real chance that [Gov. Sarah] Palin could become president. Now there's a headache for the world: an evangelical, pro-life, pro-guns "hockey mum" commander-in-chief who wants creationism taught in schools and Alaska to be independent."

It's refreshing to virtually hop across the Atlantic and get a bird's eye view of what my generation is thinking about the presidential campaign. Many thanks to the twenty-something British intelligentsia and their unbridled pessimism.

N.B: The conversation has since spiraled out of control into discussions of "dying superpowers" and the end of world (2012 apparently).

(the Huffington Post, Sep 15, 2008)

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Holy Matrimony! From Gotham City to Goths, Weddings with a Twist

At "Wayne Manor" in Monrovia, the bride and groom posed for pictures before being driven away in a Batmobile.

For another couple, Castle Green in Pasadena became a haunted mansion, decorated with black manzanita trees, black roses in Gothic urns and glowing white pumpkins for a "Nightmare Before Christmas" wedding.

In Orange, Alice found Wonderland at the French Estate Inn and spent her wedding reception playing croquet with the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter.

Every couple wants to create something unique with their wedding plans. They all want a perfect fusion of elegance and romance, as well as an event that will be memorable for everyone.

But it's hard to take something old and make it new.

Given that society has been staging the same show for hundreds of years, isn't it time to shake it up a little?

Tiffani Sullivan of Untamed Bride encourages couples to let loose their imaginations and plan from the heart.

"You don't have to plan your wedding the way every single person does," said Sullivan. "It's not necessary anymore. You have to go with your heart and do what's true to you."

Wedding-planning season kicks off each fall with a host of bridal shows. On Thursday, the Hollywood Underground Bridal Show will offer an "alternative" twist - custom-made dresses catwalked by ghostly models with white hair, all staged in a graffiti-covered underground parking lot at the heart of the Hollywood Strip.

For couples looking for something a little different from the norm, edgy bridal shows are a good place to start. It also helps to live in a city renowned for quirkiness and perversity, where the bride can carry a light-sabre and the groom can don a Darth Vader costume.

Sullivan's alternative wedding company organizes themed weddings for atypical brides and grooms. Her clientele includes sci-fi buffs, comic-book nerds, Goths, rockabillies, dog lovers and horror movie fanatics, all looking for a way to fuse romantic passion with a passion for the strange.

It's not always an easy task.

"The Batman wedding was a little bit difficult because the bride didn't want costumes, and the groom wanted a Batman-themed wedding," said Sullivan, who coordinated the wedding for KROQ (106.7 FM) DJ Ralph Garman. "What we ended up doing was compromising with a Bruce Wayne theme, which was very elegant."

Instead of costumes, the wedding party went for classic chic, with the groomsmen in black tuxedos and the bridesmaids wearing white gloves. A Batman symbol was projected on the wall, and a '60s-style Batmobile - with an Adam West look-alike in the driver's seat - was the wedding car.

It sounds like a lot of work, but Sullivan says themed weddings take the same amount of time to plan as traditional ones and can cost much less.

"It turns out that you can actually find more budget-friendly vendors and facilities if you look to the more unique properties," said Sullivan, who has organized weddings in Hollywood-style movie studios, historical mansions and private estates across Los Angeles. "It's a way to save money as well as get a totally unique experience."

Not that brides are necessarily looking to save money. Despite the lagging economy, local wedding planners say brides aren't budging when it comes to their big day.

"Families have been saving for this their whole lives," said Kathy Recchia, a Manhattan Beach wedding planner.

Recchia said the average wedding she plans costs $40,000 to $60,000. If her clients cut back at all, she said, it's on smaller items. They might go with a DJ instead of a band, or chicken instead of steak.

"They figure out what's important to them, what's a deal breaker to them," she says. "No matter what the economy, people are finding ways to pay for it."

Of course, for the bride, the primary focus often is the wedding dress - and a unique one at that.

Vintage is an upcoming trend in bridal wear, and custom-made gowns are the surest way to walk down the aisle in style without looking like a "cookie-cutter" bride.

Designer Deborah La Franchi takes her clients to the Los Angeles fashion district to help them decide on fabrics and styles before she creates their custom bridal gown. The dresses range from $3,000 to $5,000 but come with the guarantee that no other bride will ever step into it.

"That's really what they're paying for when they hire me to design a dress," said La Franchi. "It's that one-on-one service from a designer who is creating a gown just for them."

After establishing herself as a costume designer, La Franchi decided to partner her theatrical expertise with the bridal fashion industry.

"Designing a bridal gown isn't that much different from designing for a theatrical production," said La Franchi. "You're still designing for a setting, whether it's a beach or a cathedral."

Among La Franchi's dramatic bridal designs are Elizabethan and medieval dresses, as well as colored gowns.

"Color is becoming a very popular thing for wedding gowns," said La Franchi. "The traditional white gown was started by Queen Victoria, but before that, gowns were actually colored. Light blue was the most popular gown because that was the color of purity."

La Franchi's most recent designs include a light pink wedding dress and an ivory gown made from Italian silk, patterned with vegetable dye.

"Every bride wants something different," said La Franchi, who is featuring her 2009 designs at the bridal runway show on Thursday. In true alternative style, the show will fuse edgy with artistic by incorporating an art gallery and casino gaming area into the fashion event.

Meanwhile, Sullivan is busy planning for a Tim Burton-themed wedding, transforming a Catholic mission in Riverside into a Gothic utopia.

"If you really want it to stand out, maybe with a diverse hobby that you want to represent, you don't have to be afraid," said Sullivan. "It will still be very elegant - and you can use tradition as a guideline - but let's have some fun."

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