Elsa Connally, of Cohutta, Ga., didn't hesitate to say yes to the dress.
Even though her grandmother's wedding dress had been an actor in a bittersweet wedding 61 years ago, Elsa freed it from its plastic wrapping and gave it a second chance.
The vintage dress -- last worn in 1953 -- has a ballerina neckline, a lovely lace overlay, a fitted waistline and a chapel train.
From the time she was a young girl, Elsa, now a 28-year-old social worker, had admired her grandmother's wedding photos. Young Patricia Noles looked classy and beautiful in the photographs, Elsa thought, although the granddaughter knew that Grandma Patti's wedding day had been far from carefree.
It was planted in Elsa's mind from an early age that the dress -- yellowed and smelling of mothballs -- was available for her to wear if she ever got married.
"You're my favorite grandchild for your size and age," Grandma Patti would tell little Elsa, playfully.
Grandma Patti, now 82, loves to tell stories about her wedding day in New Jersey back in 1953, about how it was a day filled with anxiety but leavened with comic relief.
Patricia and her husband-to-be, Richard, met as students at the University of Florida in the early 1950s. She was a junior at the university and he was a dashing graduate student at UF when they decided to tie the knot.
Their wedding was set for the day after Christmas in 1953. It was supposed to be a happy time, two families coming together in New Jersey -- near Patricia's home -- during the holidays to celebrate a joyful event. But two life-or-death episodes cast an ominous shadow over the proceedings.
A few days before the wedding, the photographer hired to document the event died suddenly.
Then, disturbingly, Patricia's then-19-year-old brother, who was to have been Richard's best man, fell gravely ill and had surgery for a possible brain tumor in a Boston hospital a few days before the wedding. (He eventually recovered, but the illness turned out to be early-onset multiple sclerosis.) There was talk of postponing the wedding, but the families were already gathered.
The ceremony itself had a couple of memorable glitches. The flower girl got the mumps and couldn't attend. Patricia tripped on her dress coming down the aisle and literally fell into Richard's arms. Later, during the reception, the new bride got too close to a candle and her veil caught fire. Alarmed, her new mother-in-law reached up and snatched it off her head.
Crazy stuff.
All this has been told and retold over the years, like a fairytale with a few scary parts but a happy ending.
Now, fast-forward about six decades. Somehow -- fate, maybe? -- Elsa became infatuated with a handsome guy who worked at an Ace Hardware store near her home in Georgia. The attraction was so strong that she invented reasons to visit Ace.
"I was interested from afar for a long time," she says. "I bought mainly horse feed [at Ace], but also an ax, loppers, pruners. I would find a reason to go."
It took a while for the flirting to turn to friendship and then romance, but Elsa and her new beau were eventually engaged and planned their October 2014 wedding for the The Barn at Ross Farm in Cohutta.
Elsa immediately shared with her fiance, Brandon, that she wanted to wear her grandmother's wedding dress, and a week after they were engaged she decided to try it on for the first time.
"Brandon was there, and he was absolutely thrilled with it," Elsa said. "I've always fantasized about what it would have been like being my grandmother in that dress. She looked like a princess, so beautiful."
Still, the dress would have to be painstakingly cleaned and altered to fit Elsa, who is several inches taller than her grandmother. They took the dress to David Galusha, in Sandy Springs, Ga., an expert in reconditioning heirloom garments.
On her wedding day, Elsa was beaming when her grandmother came to visit in the bride's dressing room before the ceremony.
"There were tears in her eyes," Elsa remembers. "She was overcome with emotion. She was so happy."
The dress that had launched a successful, 61-year marriage was suddenly back in the game.
Elsa plans to preserve the garment -- better this time -- so that some day a great-granddaughter or two might don Grandma Patti's dress. Far from being cursed, the dress has become a symbol of a family's multigenerational happiness, a vessel of beauty and hope.
Meanwhile, it waits for its next princess, while forever infused with the magic of a cold New Jersey Christmas in 1953 and a chance romance celebrated in the majestic North Georgia autumn of 2014.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.