CONVENTION CRASHING: THE MARKET BRIDAL EXPO

Friday, April 13, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.

So the important thing to remember when walking into a bridal convention is ...

Flee! Fly! Go somewhere far away, somewhere they can't get you, the Australian outback, the Mongolian Steppe, North Dakota - just run. Elope, you fools! You're going to say weddings are beautiful, special moments of love and celebration? Fool! Dunce! You probably tell pigs how tasty sausage is, huh? Huh! And, and ...

And the important thing to remember when walking into a bridal convention is that your own wedding was months ago and nobody can make you do it again. Nobody.

Anyhow, The Market (vaguely named, but dedicated to the "bridal and special occasion industry") was a pretty low-key affair.

This show, the spring show, is doing the fall fashions, an off-season for weddings. It was booked for 3,000 attendees, but at the Sands Expo on Wednesday, the first day of the show, there were more like 300 people, and none of them were planning their own weddings, which is to say none of them were plotting world domination and blood-drenched purges. No, they were quite calm.

For them, it was business. They were either wholesalers selling dresses, tiaras or tuxedos, or they were retailers examining and buying the same, retailers like Liz Mortensen, new owner of I Do I Do Bridal in Albuquerque.

Mortensen used to be a wedding planner, but seven months ago she bought an established bridal shop. At the show, she'll get a look at new wedding dress designs (white: still in) before the fall catalogs are out. Also, about 80 percent of her suppliers are here, and it's a chance to put faces to names and haggle with wholesalers, or as she'll call them in her store, "designers."

"I guess we call them designers because the girls in my store like to feel like they're getting a great deal from a designer," Mortensen said.

Great deals are a relative concept in the wedding industry. Brides pay at least twice as much for dresses as retailers do. That - ha ha ha - economy model $600 dress? It wholesales for about $300. And that decadent $7,000 Marie Antoinette on a binge dress? Don't ask. It's a low-volume business, and each dress has to pay for more floor space.

It all works because for many American women, there's a built-in idea of The Dress and The Day - hence the stress - and Mortensen enjoys helping them fulfill it.

"I guess every little girl's dream is to get married in the perfect dress," Mortensen said, "and to help them find that dress is pretty fun."

And besides dresses, Mortensen has another reason for taking a trip to Las Vegas. She's visiting home and family (if you're keeping score, the native Las Vegan graduated from Cheyenne High School). To really combine business and family, she brings her mom out to the bridal show.

Mom, at the moment, is indulging at one of the hanger-on show booths, getting a $100 teeth-whitening treatment ("Show special!" assures Clinically White's Nathan Hayden). Mom's lying back in the chair with a goop-filled mouth bathed in bright blue light.

"She's a Smurf!" Mortensen points and laughs. "It looks like they ate Smurfs!"

Be waaaary quite, I'm hunting bwides

For the discriminating gentleman who wants to stand out by blending in, Jim's Formal Wear offers vests and ties in a hunter's camouflage pattern. The vest and tie (tux and shoes not included) rent for $15 to $20 at finer establishments.

"Where there's a lot of hunting," salesman Tim Moran said, "it does surprisingly well."