Watch this woman celebrate her divorce by blowing up her wedding dress
She literally went out with a bang
She literally went out with a bang
She literally went out with a bang
Many people choose to mourn the end of a marriage, but not Texas woman Kimberly Stantleben-Stiteler. She opted to celebrate the end of her 14-year-long matrimony by going out with a bang — literally. The day after her divorce was finalized, she threw a party with her closest friend and family where she blew up her wedding dress with hundreds of dollars worth of explosives.
According to , the divorcee filled her dress with 20 pounds of the explosive target material Tannerite and then shot the dress. It erupted in flames and the explosion could be seen and heard for miles.
Shortly after text messages and Facebook messages started streaming in. “We were all getting messages asking if that was our explosion people were feeling and hearing around the county, up to at least 15 miles away,” her sister, Carla Santleben-Newport, told . “It was like, ‘Uh, is everything OK over there’?”
“I wanted to remove all things from our marriage from our house. Photos in the attic, ring in the safe (but probably going to sell it) and the dress I wanted to burn,” Stantleben-Stiteler, 43, said about what spawned her desire to blow up the gown.
“I had a lot of advice and suggestions from friends and family, like donating it for premature babies and baptism gowns. However, to me, the dress represented a lie. I wanted to have a divorce party to burn the dress.”
But just burning it in a campfire wouldn’t be enough, so she splurged on $200 worth of explosives and engaged in target practice to refine her shooting skills. Stantleben-Stiteler hit the bullseye on her first attempt.
“On the one hand, it was like being on set of some action movie. The explosion was huge,” Kimberly said. “It was liberating pulling that trigger. It was closure for all of us.”