By
Mary
Flood
Shoes
have always been a problem for me. I
have big feet. They are not freakishly
big given the fact that I am six feet tall, but just big enough to make buying
shoes a challenge.
When
I was a kid and my feet were growing, I remember my mother’s exasperation when
she would take me to buy shoes and the only things in my size had high
heels. My mother would say to the
salesman, “But she’s just a little girl.” He would shrug his shoulders as if to
say, “It’s not my fault your seven year old has clown feet.”
The one pair of shoes I always
looked forward to buying was my tap shoes.
No matter what size foot you had, everyone in
tap class had the same shoes: black patent leather with grosgrain ribbon. They were shiny and made you dance like
Ginger Rogers or Eleanor Powell. It got better come
recital time when you took gold or silver paint to them so they would match your
costume. Whoever came up with the idea
to add glitter to the paint was a genius.
Alas,
even my tap shoes ended up being a problem.
As I reached adolescence, my classmates started showing up in
high heeled tap shoes. Perfect,
right? Well, no, because by then my feet had grown so much
they didn’t make the high heeled tap shoes big enough. Back to square one.
I
have made peace with the fact that I will never wear Manolo Blahniks or snap up
shoe bargains or develop a shoe
fetish. That sometimes makes me feel out
of step with the sisterhood. As for tap shoes, the last pair I bought when
I returned to tap dancing a few years ago were black leather, not
patent leather or high heeled. They were
men’s black leather tap shoes and it’s hard to
feel like Ginger Rogers when you’re wearing Fred Astaire’s shoes.
Copyright 2012© Mary Flood
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