Announcer

Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from howstuffworks.com.

Molly

Hey, this is Molly.

Cristen

I’m Cristen.

Molly

Cristen, today we’re going to talk about debutantes, an age-old female tradition, and believe it or not, I myself was a debutante.

Cristen

You know, and you told me that earlier this week, and I was so surprised.

Molly

I know. I was telling her earlier also that you know that game, Two Truths and a Lie?

Cristen

Mm-hm.

Molly

Where you’ve got to tell people like – they’ve got to find something that’s a lie about you and it’s really hard to figure out. I usually either throw in the sorority thing, which I talked about on our sorority’s podcast, or I throw in the debutante thing.

Cristen

Yeah, two pretty random facts about you Molly because, in my mind, not knowing much about debutantes, I imagine debutantes as – and apologies to all the other debs out there, but you know stereotypes too – of being very stuck up, rich and man-hunting.

Molly

Yeah.

Cristen

You know?

Molly

Well, let me tell you about my experience, just to broaden your horizons, Cristen.

Cristen

Yeah, please bust wide open my stereotypes.

Molly

So the reason I was invited to do it was because my mother did it when she was a girl herself. And let’s see, I remember it as being a really great time to bond with my mom because we got to go shopping for the big white dress that sets the debutante apart. And when we were researching this podcast, I was looking at these articles about how much girls spent on their dress, like thousands and thousands of dollars. I did not spend anywhere near that. Like that was sort of the fun of it, was like finding the $200 beautiful white dress. And recently I was talking to my mom about marriage, and I said something like, “Oh, I’ll just wear my debutante dress again.”

She was like, “No you won’t.” But it led to me trying the dress on, and it still fit.

Cristen

I saw the photo, guys. It does still fit like a glove.

Molly

Yeah, it’s a beautiful dress. So you wear your dress. You get to invite like ten of your friends to watch you do this. You have a nice dinner. You get all sorts of like parties thrown where you meet all the other girls, none of whom went to my high school, so it was a really great way to meet a bunch of other ladies in the town.