Tuesday, June 26, 2007

For the Love of Shoes

Some women like shoes. Some women love shoes. Some women are addicted to shoes.

I never really understood the female fascination with shoes, and although I could appreciate a pretty shoe, it made no more impression on me than a pretty sweater or nice pair of jeans.

I hated heels with a passion. I am bow-legged and at the same time knock-knee so I walk like a cross-dresser when I wear heels. A 1 1/2 inch heel gathered dust in my closet, reserved for those times when I wore a *gasp* dress. Clogs were my heels.

Then...in the autumn of 2006...at the age of 44...my first pair of heels (or as a friend refers to them, 'crack') called out to me.

They did not say "I am comfortable." They did not say "You can wear me to _______ event." They did not say "I am inexpensive therefore worthy of being whimsical." They were three inches of toe-squishing, bunion growing crack.

"If leather is elegant, I am sex!" they said. I tried them on and surprisingly was able to walk in them. Unlike other heels, no pain shot up through my metatarsals.

So I bought them.

Then, one day, when I was trying on a *gasp* dress, the store clerk gave me some shoes to put on so I could see the dress how it 'should' look. ('Should' means 'without running shoes.')
They were silver and sparkly and four inches worth of metallic sex.


I bought the dress...and of course the shoes because the dress was NOTHING without those shoes!

I have since bought a classic-but-sexy-in-a-stealth-kind-of-way pair of 4" black leather pumps and a lovely toe-peeky-ankle-strappy pair of 4" black cherry patent leather platforms that would make a drag queen swoon.

I am typing this wearing the most un-sexy pair of Birkenstocks, and I still love my clogs and running shoes, but now I have at last triggered that gene that exists, even if dormant, in all females.

I am a late bloomer, but yes, I am, in my friend's words, addicted to crack.

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