This is not just a wedding picture (taken days earlier in a studio – I looked a lot happier at the wedding) but an etiquette crisis. My grandmother had firmly implanted in me the rule that a lady wears only odd numbers of strands of pearls: one, three, five on up, if she is lucky, to a choker of 11, 15 – whatever she can fit on her neck and still be able to swallow her dinner. I must have been just as firm in passing this on to my daughter, because once, in a sentimental mood, I asked what she had learned from me all her life. "Only wear odd numbers of strands of pearls."

"Well, yes," I said. "But – what else?"

"That’s pretty much it," she replied.

Click here to read more on the weddings of the wOw women.

Nevertheless, there I am in two strands. This is because, just before my wedding, my future parents-in-law had given me some lovely pearls — but in a double-strand necklace. Being forced to weigh doing the right thing against doing the kind thing is a full-blown etiquette crisis. I realized I had to do the wrong thing in order to do the right thing. My grandmother was dead by then, and no one at the wedding would know, probably, except my mother who, of course, had been brought up by my grandmother, and my grandmother’s sister, my Great-Aunt Minna. But both the gentlemen with whom Great-Aunt Minna had lived in a ménage à trois were also dead, so she was too busy flirting with the elderly gentlemen at the wedding to notice my pearls.

The story has a happy ending: Immediately upon returning from the wedding trip, I had the pearls restrung, and in the 48 years since, the marriage has produced no other etiquette crises.

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