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Kevin Cotter never imagined the day would arrive when he’d be flossing his teeth with wedding-dress fabric. Or using a wedding dress as a yoga mat. Or straining pasta with wedding-dress mesh.
But, of course, life takes wildly unexpected turns sometimes. And when your high school sweetheart and wife of 12 years abruptly walks out the door, leaving you stunned and single in your mid-30s, it can send you reeling.
That’s what happened to Cotter last July. He turned to close family members to help him get through the earliest — and most difficult — phases of adjusting to singlehood for the first time in his adult life.
In that cocoon of support, an idea was hatched. A truly hilarious idea. An idea so mischievously zany that, once unveiled, it sparked interest and support from hundreds of thousands of people across the globe in fewer than three weeks — demonstrating the awesome power, and potential perils, of letting the world in on your personal life via the Internet.
‘What should I do with it?’
It all began with his wife’s departure after they’d been together 17 years, ever since their senior year in high school. She took all of her belongings when she moved out of their Tucson, Ariz., home, with one exception. In her former section of their walk-in closet, she left her wedding keepsake box.
“You forgot something,” Cotter recalls telling her.
“And what’s that?” she replied.
“Your wedding dress.”
“Yeah, I’m not taking that.”
Cotter was dumbfounded.
“What do you expect me to do with it?”
“Do whatever you want with it,” she said before she drove away.
The dress sat there on a shelf, safe and secure in its box, for some time. Cotter didn’t touch it. Then, one night while eating dinner with his parents, his brother and his sister-in-law, he told them about the eerie presence of the dress in the closet.
A loyal bunch, they threw out some crassly comedic suggestions. Then Cotter’s sister-in-law observed that there could be 101 uses for the dress.
“As soon as she said that, the wheels started turning,” Cotter said. “I thought to myself, ‘That would be a fricking funny book.’”
Brainstorming ‘whole-dress uses’
With the help of his younger brother, Colin, Cotter immediately started brainstorming potential no-nonsense applications for a massive, used wedding gown.
“I whittled it down to this: What would a guy — a guy who’s been in a relationship for 17 years and is now going it alone — what real-life uses could a wedding dress have for him?” said Cotter, 36, a box and packaging-material salesman. “What could you really use it for, practically?”
Ideas began emerging about possible uses for individual pieces of the dress. But Cotter quickly recognized that as folly.
“I thought whole-dress uses would be funnier,” he said. “I mean, if you’re using it as a coffee filter, you’ve got this monster of a dress coming down the counter onto the floor. That’s funny.”
Cotter figured that if he could come up with enough humorous photos along with some engaging accompanying text, blammo: It would only be a matter of time before he scored a deal for a coffee-table book that could become a smash hit, considering the number of divorces in the English-speaking world.
The vibe of the project began to change when the Cotter brothers let the gown unfurl in all its white, fluffy glory. They initially — and almost timidly, in hindsight — used it as an outdoor tablecloth. Then they saw that it functioned as an excellent grill cover. And then came their coup de grace: They photographed the dress on a makeshift scarecrow adorned with a Darth Vader mask.
They knew they were onto something.
A blog is born
Somewhere along the line, Cotter decided that it might be fun to turn this project into a blog and solicit dress-use ideas from the general public. He wasn’t abandoning his book dream; he was just eager for some feedback and a bit of a therapeutic lift.
Once he and his brother were confident they had prepared enough content to make a real go of this, Cotter pushed his domain name — MyExWifesWeddingDress.com — live on May 6.
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“This project is a therapy of sorts for me,” he wrote in one of his first blog posts. “Nothing about divorce is pleasant or easy. ... I figure that sharing my experiences and photos might be helpful to others going through a similar situation.”
Cotter had no idea what he was about to unleash. By May 25, his site had been visited by nearly 400,000 unique users. He and his blog were featured on the television program “Inside Edition” and in multiple articles and radio shows all over the planet.
Dress-use ideas and messages of support, praise and general amusement poured in from across the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and France. A group of Aussies offered to sponsor a trip to Australia for Cotter and the wedding dress. Literary agents began calling Cotter to discuss book possibilities.
But how has Cotter’s ex-wife been feeling about all this attention? None too pleased.
Outlet for resentment or humor?
Ever since the start of this whole dress adventure, Cotter has been careful to conceal his former wife’s identity and to shield her — and their two children, ages 7 and 9 — from any media coverage.
She released another statement picked up by various media outlets that said: “His determination, along with his family’s support, to continue with this endeavor after his children and I have asked him to stop is incomprehensible.”
Needless to say, as Cotter prepared to post his wedding-dress jump-rope photos and his wedding-dress paint-drop-cloth photos, his ex-wife’s deep irritation over the dress project became a bit of a buzzkill. He began to feel gun-shy about the entire effort.
“I don’t know,” he said this week. “Maybe I should have sat on this for a couple more years — you know, so it wasn’t so fresh? ... Or maybe I should just put the domain name on eBay now and ask someone to carry the torch who doesn’t have kids.”
Oh no! 13 real-life wedding disasters
And yet — the potential of an actual book deal continues to captivate him. After all, his dress project clearly resonates with people. He senses that it might be good for him to stick with this until he’s posted 101 separate uses for the dress. (So far he’s shared about two dozen.)
“It’s really funny because I’m not an angry person,” Cotter said. “I’m not bitter. I’m not even angry at her at all. That’s the irony of the whole situation.
“I’m pretty much a guy chasing a dream right now. And one of the bonuses of the blog is that I’ve gotten letters from all sorts of people thanking me for how much I’m helping them, and thanking me for making them laugh, and telling me all sorts of information about their situations. It’s providing a certain amount of therapy for a bunch of people out there. And it did help me heal.”
© 2012 MSNBC Interactive. Reprints
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