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Weddings have gotten a little ridiculous. Last year, the Knot reported that the average American wedding cost an astonishing $31,213 to throw. Being a bridesmaid will also cost you, as most women know, as much as $701 on average, and simply being a guest at a wedding in the United States now costs $673.

Whether you're an attendee or a member of the wedding party, you're doomed to drop some dough, especially given how involved weddings have gotten. Those chalkboard signs telling guests that they are present for a wedding? Those frames that guests hold up to create the illusion that they're in the picture? The individually printed cards informing you of the wedding hashtag? First of all: Why? Second of all: No.

Which leads us to a third question: Aren't there better things to spend money on other than gifts from your lovebird friends? Or a dumb bridesmaid dress you'll never wear again? Or even on your own wedding that — repeat after us — will only last one day? Can something good come from spending thousands of dollars on flowers or food?

That bridesmaid dress you don't want anymore could transform a teen's day.

So, you're a bridesmaid. Sucks a lot, doesn't it? Well, there is a light at the end of the money-sucking tunnel. After you've dropped upwards of $700 and your friend says her vows (and you vow to never speak to her again), turn your attention to that dress. Do you burn it? No, of course not, much as you want to. You take that purple halter top dress with the flower on the side and think, "Who wants this more than I do?" The answer: A fashionable teen.

A number of prom dress charities across the country take bridesmaid dresses, including the nationwide Operation Prom, which accepts any formal dresses that could work for a high school prom. Fairy Godmothers, Inc. also accepts gowns and bridal accessories fit for a cool teen, as does the Glass Slipper Project, which is based in Chicago. Becca's Closet, based in South Florida, has several chapters accepting dresses as well as accessory donations (meaning those matching, gently used dyed shoes can go too). Across the U.S., plenty of small, local charities will accept that lilac monstrosity that someone else will love for free.

That wedding dress everyone obsessed over for months can be passed on to another deserving woman.

A bride hunts for it for months. She drags her friends and family around town, from boutique to boutique, arguing over sweetheart necklines and dropped waists. But after one single wear, it will hang in the back of her closet in a plastic bag, slowly yellowing until she decides to pass it on or (sadly) throw it away.

Now, there are alternatives to the cycle of waste. Several organizations are offering to take it off their hands and donate it to a good cause. Brides Across America accepts dress donations that then go to military brides, donating more than 2,000 dresses a year. And in addition to dresses (which must be less than five years old), Brides Across America also accept veils, tiaras and accessories, and works with local bridal boutiques to organize collections.

St. Anthony's Bridal in Rockville, Maryland, also accepts donations, reselling dresses for around $100 each — a bargain compared to the average American wedding dress, which costs a whopping $1,357. There's also Brides for Haiti, which collects wedding dress donations for women in the island nation. There are plenty of other options for donating a wedding dress and making that thousand-dollar clothing purchase worth it — for a master list, head on over to DonateMyWeddingDress.org.

That ring that's lost meaning (for whatever reason) can make a big difference to someone else.

Let us present you with a vague situation: You (or someone you know) have a ring you don't want anymore. It could be from a man or woman who's no longer lovingly in the picture, or perhaps the ring style itself has fallen out of favor. What to do? There's the pawn shop option, but that can feel icky, so it may seem like a good time to donate the ring to something more meaningful.

Options include the global do-good organization the Rings of Hope Project, which, in partnership with Tough Angels, will take unwanted jewelry and make a donation of the jewelry's value toward helping end rape and violence against women and children in Africa. There's also the California nonprofit With This Ring, which sells rings and uses the profits to drill wells for clean water in developing nations across the world. (The organization is also pretty evangelical Christian, if that's your sort of thing — or not.)

Those flower centerpieces that caused a million arguments can bring joy to a whole new set of people.

It's around 10 or 11 p.m. and guests are starting to trickle out of the reception hall. (If a successful party was thrown, they're actually stumbling.) Your glazed-over eyes scan the room, and you notice something: Those flowers that you know cost thousands of dollars are just sitting there. Sitting there with nowhere to go. They're like Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles.

Sure, you can take them home and sprinkle them in your bathtub like you're Mariah Carey on Cribs. But you could also donate them. If you are located in Palm Beach County, Florida, the charitable org Petals With Purpose actually offers to pick up the flowers immediately after the nuptials and donate them to a local organization of your choice to benefit the elderly, children or those living with disabilities. There's also Random Acts of Flowers, which has location hubs across the U.S. and will pick up the arrangements, repurpose them into new bouquets and send them to healthcare facilities in the area. If you're in the Seattle area, Floranthropy offers a similar service.

Wouldn't it feel good knowing that those bouquets of hydrangeas and lilies, which were painstakingly chosen over a period of months, are being enjoyed by someone new?

That Hawaiian buffet you waited in line for (for what felt like 4 hours) for can do a lot of good for someone else.

In stark contrast to all the dieting and Spanx'ing that had led up to the wedding, the reception will inevitably include far too much food for anyone to physically fit into their bodies, especially if it's a buffet.

If at the end of the night there's still plenty of food in the kitchen, you can contact Feeding America, which can connect you to a local food bank thanks to an online network of more than 200 food banks and food-rescue programs. There are also caterers who offer to donate, like Ohio-based Two Caterers, which donates leftover food to local charities like the YWCA. There are also "food runners," extremely helpful people who pick up food after events and take them to local charities.

Instead of the mashed potato masher from your friend's Bed Bath & Beyond registry, ask your friend if giving to a charity in their name would be an acceptable gift. If your friend is not an asshole, they will say yes. Entire organizations like the I Do Foundation have been created to help couples directly incorporate charitable giving into their weddings, from donating to charity in lieu of favors to creating a charitable registry instead of a gift one.

Because hey, if weddings are going to suck you financially dry, might as well do it for a good cause.

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When Newsweek published a story about David Bowie in October 1972, our pages said that “whatever world of rock is ultimately to succeed the Beatles, the Stones and the Who, it’s having trouble being born. This is a time of confusion, a middle ages, an appropriate breeding ground for the dark, satanic majesty of England’s David Bowie.” At the time Bowie was still best known in the States through the persona Ziggy Stardust, as in his 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

“I prefer being Ziggy to David. Who’s David Bowie?” the star is quoted as saying in that article.

Just over a decade later, Newsweek ran a profile of Bowie, describing his “new look” and all those that had come in between. Writer Jim Miller called him “a star of many faces, an artist of many styles, the supreme pop chameleon” and “the single most influential rock artist of the last 10 years.” The author grappled—presumably as Newsweek’s readers did at the time—with the performer’s many incarnations and seeming contradictions. How could he, and audiences, reconcile the mascara-wearing Ziggy of the previous decade with the guy being interviewed for the pages of a mainstream newsweekly in 1983?

It’s now more than 30 years after that “new look” profile was published, and the world saw plenty more from Bowie in the ensuing decades.The star died Sunday, just two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his 28th album. As the world confronts the loss of Bowie, arguably one of the most prolific and influential musicians of the last half century, Newsweek looks back to its archives.

Read the full July 18, 1983 profile below.

He is a star of many faces, an artist of many styles, the supreme pop chameleon. For more than a decade, in a spectacular array of different guises, he has played the part of the outsider, becoming a rock legend in the process. Meet David Bowie; astronaut of alienation, underground avatar, apostle of irony and distance—and now, he says, a man intent on being himself.

Suddenly, rock's resident enigma is everywhere. Let's Dance, his first album in three years, is Bowie's first runaway international hit since the mid-1970s. He is a star in one new film, The Hunger. Another film, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, opens in the fall. Radio stations and rock videos feature a horde of Bowie imitators, confirming his impact as the single most influential rock artist of the last 10 years. Now Bowie is midway through this year's most glamorous rock happening, a world tour that lands this week in Quebec, where Bowie is kicking off two months of North American shows.

Rake: His current concerts make plain the reasons for his resurgence. More than any other performer, he has defined the mood of rock today: romantic, aloof, electronic. Recently Bowie capped his triumphant British homecoming with a benefit concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon theater. It was the hall where, 10 years earlier, he had laid to rest an alter ego named "Ziggy Stardust" and waved goodbye to his incarnation as a Day-Glo rock diva. At the benefit, though, he was just plain "David Bowie"—a genial rake crisply attired in a collarless blue shirt with red suspenders and baggy, bib-buttoned white trousers.

Never one to miss an opportunity for drama, Bowie changed his routine and opened the show with a churning, edgy song called "Look Back in Anger." The crowd responded by showering the stage with gifts—roses, a stuffed Pierrot, an inflated plastic leg. The high point came when a goose-stepping version of the song "Fashion"—sounding eerily like "fascism"—seamlessly turned into "Let's Dance," sung with magnificent grandiloquence.

Onstage he is a blond Don Juan, artifice in motion. But face to face, the most disarming thing about Bowie is his easy, outgoing manner. Curled in a chair in his London hotel, chain-smoking, wearing a dusky turquoise shirt, cuffed brown tweed pants and mauve loafers, he held court with warmth and quirky charm, ranging volubly over a host of topics:

On being a rock and roll star: "Everything begins to revolve around the cut of your trousers. It becomes vegetative; it's like cutting off all your limbs. It's not an important existence."

On his psyche: "I've been abjectly confused most of the time—as confused as the environment I was writing about."

On the origins of his outrageous early costumes: "I was looking for a way of presenting myself without having to do it as me; I was always very intimidated by bands that seemed to be so happy up there."

On his current album: "Yeah, it might seem a kind of whimsy. I don't care."

Despite his flair for japery, Bowie leaves an overriding impression of self-appraisal. He somberly remembers John Lennon. "He had an awful lot of influence on me," he says. "He's the only rock star I know who was always interested in me as a person. He always used to straighten me up; he was a very reassuring man—an older mirror. This sounds corny to say, but however cynical on top, he was an extraordinary humanist." Since the breakup of his marriage, Bowie has been responsible for raising his son, Joey (formerly Zowie), now 12. "I've found," he says of the experience, "that it has produced the most seemingly simplistic and naive answers to my problems as an artist—that I should try to write in a positive fashion."

It's hard to reconcile the man speaking with the character who first became a star 11 years ago. Like Pulcinella, the legendary hook-nosed rogue of a marionette, Bowie in the past has often acted the sage fool, a puppet of his shifting impulses. This, after all, is the man who crashed into public view by wearing dresses and mascara; who declared Adolf Hitler "one of the first rock stars"; who officially "retired" after his farewell-to-Ziggy concert in 1973, only to turn around and create a ferociously bleak new kind of avant-garde rock. Yet now this man appears—altogether convincingly—as a normal kind of guy, intent on making an uplifting, "positive" kind of pop music.

Is this simply David Bowie's greatest performance yet?

He began life in the hard-nosed London neighborhood of Brixton, where he was born David Jones in 1947. At 16, David dropped out of school and began to work professionally as a musician, recording a string of ill-fated rock singles. To avoid confusion with the Davy Jones who was a member of the Monkees, he changed his last name in 1966 to Bowie, after the knife. In the first of his many startling turnabouts, he began to emulate singer Anthony Newley, the co-author of the musical Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. Bowie absorbed Newley's broad Cockney accent and his knack for writing satiric theatrical vignettes. Drifting through London's bohemian underground, he danced in an ice-cream commercial, studied Buddhism with a lama, learned mime and makeup in an avant-garde theater troupe.

Inspiration: His belated breakthrough came in 1969, with "Space Oddity," a song inspired by Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A vaulting melody evokes the grandeur of the void and the lonely heroism of the song's protagonist, an astronaut named Major Tom who decides to float off into space rather than return home. The song became Bowie's anthem—but the album flopped, and the singer seemed to vanish from sight.

He became determined to do something different. He was inspired, he recalls, by "a burgeoning juvenile interest in Nietzsche…I hated the whole togetherness, peace and love thing—not because I was against peace and love, but because it was conceited, flabby, suffocating. My reaction was to put a man into an area of isolation and to talk about him there and try to experience that kind of dissociation."

The first glimpses of Bowie's new persona appeared on "The Man Who Sold the World" (1970) and the bravura tapestry of songs that comprise Hunky Dory (1971). These albums offered a dark, Gothic hybrid of half-baked existentialism and sci-fi sideshow, expressed in gnomic lyrics modeled on Bob Dylan's and dressed up in the garish pop decadence made fashionable by Andy Warhol. With the help of a new impresario, Bowie boiled down this witch's brew and set out to become a star, through a production called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972).

Sex: Ziggy was Bowie's quintessential creation: a "leper messiah" and pop Zarathustra who offers to lead libertine youth, revolted by the prospect of a global apocalypse, into a glorious new era of instinct and mastery. Onstage, Bowie appeared in a glittery cat suit and laced boots with stacked heels, his face painted with makeup, his hair teased and dyed carrot orange.

Bowie's protean sexual persona remains a distinctive—and puzzling—ingredient in his celebrity. In 1972 he had grabbed headlines by announcing he was bisexual. Yet his flaunting of polymorphous pleasures in his Ziggy revue seemed curiously antiseptic: sex was a weapon of the new teen-age superman—a proof of power, not love. Even after Bowie dropped Ziggy's screwball look and took up the pose of the handsome Hollywood man, he remained a distinctly icy icon. In the rock video for "Boys Keep Swinging" (1979), he staged a savage, grotesque satire on just such gender stereotypes. Yet on his current tour, Bowie has cultivated, with considerably more warmth and less irony, the same reassuring comportment of a dashing matinee idol—our culture's masculine ideal, writ large.

Still, the freak was father to the man. Ziggy Stardust made David Bowie into a superstar—particularly in England, where he remains the most pivotal and popular rock act since the Beatles. His life became a fast-lane blur. He poured out wham-bam punk throwaways like "The Jean Genie" (1972), slash-and-burn anthems like "Rebel Rebel" (1974). He planned a musical of George Orwell's 1984. He journeyed to Philadelphia, then the mecca of disco, to record Young Americans (1975), an album that included his first No. 1 single, "Fame," an acrid duet with John Lennon. Bowie contemptuously called his own new style "plastic soul." More popular than ever, he wasted no time in devising yet another persona: "The Thin White Duke," and yet another musical style—the tough, sinewy electric funk of Station to Station (1976). Said Bowie at the time: "I've got so many shells I've forgotten what the pea looks like." "My early albums," he recalls today, "came out of a stance, helped by drugs, to put myself in strange situations. By the end of '75, I was a complete emotional and psychological wreck."

The stark sound of Station to Station brought to the forefront what has always been Bowie's most unusual asset—his voice. It is a strange amalgam, fusing the affectless monotone of Lou Reed, the "sand and glue" whine of Bob Dylan and the almost histrionic manner of Anthony Newley. Playing with the tension created by these contradictory styles and producing ambiguity by shifting unpredictably from a passionless drone to a florid vibrato, Bowie has managed the odd feat of creating a unique, impersonal vocal style.

Focus: Take a performance like "Wild Is the Wind," a song first sung by Johnny Mathis. Mathis obeys the conventions of a normal pop performance: he invites a listener to identify with the sentiments expressed in the lyrics. Bowie, by contrast, interprets the song in the most extravagantly affected manner possible, with a rigidly straight face. The result is weird: captivated by the detached gesture of the singing, a listener becomes uncomfortably aware of the bathetic lyrics. Mathis offers a fantasy of romance, Bowie a study in blankness.

While his art was coming into fresh focus, Bowie's personal life was unraveling. In an effort to pull himself back together, he departed in 1976 for Berlin. Living in an apartment on top of an auto shop and working with Brian Eno, the wizard of "ambient" electronics, he set out, he says, to exorcize his demons through his art. Bowie's first two Berlin albums—Low (1977) and Heroes (1977)—are masterpieces of atmosphere and texture. Using techniques of "cut up" composition borrowed from William Burroughs, he at last was making a music that truly captured the angst and ennui and the sense of claustrophobia that had always run through his lyrics.

In the years since, Bowie has made a concerted effort to escape from what he calls the "blinkered" life-style of most rock stars. He lives off the beaten path in Switzerland and paints for his own pleasure. His film career began in earnest with The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), Nicolas Roeg's ambitious pageant of extraterrestrial alienation. Since then, with varying success but an instinct for taking risks, he has played a Prussian stuffed tuxedo in Just a Gigolo (1978), a rapidly aging vampire in The Hunger (1983) and a tough-willed POW imprisoned by the Japanese on Java in the upcoming Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. On Broadway, he won praise for his performance as John Merrick in The Elephant Man (1980).

But Bowie's bread and butter remains rock and roll. Three years ago, in "Ashes to Ashes," Bowie exhumed the character of Major Tom in a song that implied that "Space Oddity" was really a metaphor for psychotic withdrawal. The record neatly tied up Bowie's career and left him free to pick and choose from 14 years of different musical styles. On Let's Dance, his current album, he's opted for "plastic soul," take two. With its upbeat lyrics, riffing saxophones and piquant reminders of darkness and dissonance, it is a shrewd retreat from the brave new music Bowie forged in Berlin.

Cracks in the Mask: The "real" David Bowie meanwhile remains as elusive as ever—particularly for a critic trying to appraise a career filled with such abrupt twists and turns. At the end of "Young Americans," Bowie sings, in a memorably plangent tone, "Ain't there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?" The question seems pertinent after listening to all of Bowie's work. He has crafted a dizzying array of personas; he has pioneered an effectively harsh style of hammering, metallic new music, and he has taken the theatrical mechanics of rock and roll and exposed their inner workings to anyone who cares to look. A cynic might note the glibness of Bowie's style, the recurrence of commercial ploys, the unattractive coldness of much of his music. A sociologist might explore the mirror Bowie holds up to our culture and echo critic Tom Carson's remark: "In an age of artifice, he was the master artificer."

But after hours of listening to Bowie, what sticks are the many odd little cracks in his masks, where the pang in his voice makes isolated phrases bob to the surface like flotsam from a shipwreck: "Can you hear me, Major Tom?" "We can be heroes, just for one day." "I've never done anything out of the blue." He may not make you cry. But with the formal restraint, restlessness and self-consciousness of a true modernist, Bowie at these moments has reinvented rock and roll as an expressive medium. He is our Pulcinella of the id.

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Mount Carmel’s basketball players had to scurry from the Alario Center on Saturday night and change from uniforms to dresses and heels for the school’s winter formal.

Not even two games Saturday was going to stop this party.

In fact, the Cubs gave themselves another reason to celebrate: the championship in the Allstate Sugar Bowl National Prep Classic.

Mount Carmel shut down Warren Easton in the second half to claim a 46-37 victory in the title game of the tournament’s platinum bracket.

“Yes, this really gives us something to celebrate,” senior guard Kristen Nuss said.

Mount Carmel trailed 30-20 at halftime but outscored Easton 26-7 in the second half.

“The first half we were really sluggish and all playing like we were tired,” Nuss said. “Our coaches got onto us at halftime. They knew we had to step it up, and we knew we had to step it up.”

They did just that, starting the third quarter on a 9-0 run to get back in it. Ellie Holzman and Megan Donaldson scored all nine points in the run until Easton’s Keira Williams ended the run with a shot in the lane. Mount Carmel took its first lead since the first quarter when Paige Frankiewicz banked in a 3-pointer with two minutes left in the third to put the Cubs ahead 34-32. The Cubs (16-5) never trailed again.

They outscored Karr 18-2 in the third quarter.

Jamie Thomatis, in her first season as Mount Carmel’s coach, wouldn’t take all the credit for the halftime speech that apparently lit a fire into her team.

“It wasn’t just me,” Thomatis said. “Having (assistant) Stacy Berry on the bench helps. She lit into them. We were just so flat. Our energy was so poor. We challenged them. The girls had a gut check moment at halftime, and they responded well to the challenge.”

Nuss was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. She was joined on the all-tournament team by teammates Donaldson, who scored a team-high 13 points, and Frankiewicz (five points). Freshman Holzman had 11 points to help the Cubs avenge a 59-53 loss earlier this season to the Eagles.

“I knew Mount Carmel would have some intensity because we beat them earlier,” Easton coach Darius Mimms said. “We came out and laid an egg in the second half.”

It was the second straight season Easton, the reigning Class 4A state champions, lost in the title game of the Sugar Bowl tournament. They fell to Salmen last season in the tournament’s championship.

In the first half, Easton looked well on its way to removing the taste of last year’s loss. Kechelle Figueroa started on fire, nailing four 3-pointers on her way to a 16-point first half.

“We talked about controlling the tempo,” Mimms said. “We were in full control in the first half. The first three minutes of the second half and it was the other way around. We just had no energy. We went to a trapping defense but a trapping defense just doesn’t work if you have no energy.”

Figueroa scored just two points in the second half and finished with a game-high 18. Kalyn Green and Keira Williams scored six points each. Figueroa and Williams also were named to the all-tournament team.

Mount Carmel held all four of its tournament opponents (Ouachita, Madison Prep, Cabrini and Easton) opponents to less than 40 points.

“We do a pretty good bob of guarding the other team’s personnel,” Thomatis said. “… Our girls are tough. Kristen is tough, and our guards feed into that. And whenever you can make big shots, that momentum can switch.”

The other players named to the all-tournament team were: Cara Ursin (Destrehan), Kelsey Pinera (Cabrini), Rakell Spencer (Cabrini), Kierra Brimzy (Natchitoches Central) and Eladriana Payton (Natchitiches Central).

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