chapter 23

Getting engaged is the easy part. Things really start to get complicated when you talk wedding. Amanda and Mike were a couple with simple tastes. They didn't want anything too elaborate, nothing fancy and way over the top. But the Frazeks DID want Amanda to have a church wedding and if you had a church wedding you had to have a wedding dress and the wedding dress was the MAJOR complication.

Amanda wasn't a deliberate gainer. She had never set out to become what can only be called immensely fat. She just fell in love with food. Truth be told, she fell in LUST with food, and she pretty much ate all the time. Well, you can't be stuffing your face with big meals and small snacks all day without consequences. At the time of her engagement to Mike, the consequence of her eating was that she weighed something over four hundred pounds. Now this didn't bother Mike at all, in fact he was enormously turned on by Amanda's transformation. And frankly, Amanda handled her gain pretty well too. Thing is, the gain didn't stop when she and Mike got engaged.

For the most part this was no big deal. except for one teeny thing. The wedding dress. The fact is, Amanda had gotten SO big that her wedding dress had to be custom made, which was fine. She was making nice money at the hospital and Mike was bringing in enough to make them VERY comfortable financially. So buying a custom made wedding dress was no big deal, and wouldn't have been except for one simple fact. Amanda kept getting fatter.

The dress designer would take her measurements and start in on fashioning something and two months later Amanda would come in ten to fifteen pounds heavier. And so the designer would have to start all over again. Well, after six months of this, Amanda had put on another fifty pounds or so and her designer simply threw up his hands and quit.

So, what to do. They had booked the church. They had set up the reception. But Amanda had nothing to wear. Now Amanda had a cousin, Charlotte Pagliarulo. Charlotte was a writer, specializing in romance novels. One night at a Friday night family dinner, Charlotte suggested a "theme wedding". "Why not do a South Seas wedding. That way Amanda could wear a muu-muu or a sarong and it wouldn't make any difference HOW much she weighed as long as she didn't outgrow the material.

And so it was that Amanda Frazek and Mike Dombrowski got married at Saint Michael the Archangel Church on the Southwest side of Chicago. Amanda was stunning in a flower print sarong that showed off her curves spectacularly. It was a beautiful ceremony and an even better reception, with lots of good food, lively music, lots of dancing and drinking and LOVE was certainly in the air.

Not surprisingly Max Braverman didn't attend. Oh he had been invited, but he couldn't bring himself to watch the one-time Golden Girl of his dreams waddling down the aisle of the church on her father's arm, with barely enough room for the both of them. But amazingly, Amanda invited Hilly Przbylski and she came. Mike asked Amanda about that. They had talked about how Hilda had tried her best to fatten her up, trying to sabotage her career. All Amanda could say was that "Without Hilda Prsbylski, I wouldn't be HALF the woman I am today", after which she could only smile brightly and laugh raucously!!

Hilly came with Brad Brauner and they made a stunning couple. They congratulated the newlyweds after the ceremony and the even attended the reception. It was buffet style and Brad offered to fix up a plate for Hilly. When he came back, Hilly's jaw dropped. He had filled up her plate to the brim with all of the most fattening things on the menu and at a Polish wedding, EVERYTHING was fattening. Hilly smiled and dug in, eating the kind of food she had been religiously avoiding for over a year. And she LOVED it, which was rather too bad because if she had been paying more attention to Brad than to her food, she would have seen just how MUCH he was enjoying her make a pig of herself. She didn't know it yet, but Brad had some plans for her and it didn't have anything to do with diet OR exercise!!