Pain of showy shoes prompts sole searching
By Beth Teitell
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
For years, I've thought - hoped? - there must be some trick to wearing ``Sex and the City'' shoes.
How else could half the female population of Boston stride around town in stilettos with knife-point toes and be no less ambulatory than if they were wearing Birkenstocks?
This endless cruel-shoe parade is enough to convince a person to try on a pair herself. Or try to try on a pair. I cut and run before my right foot got all the way to the very end. What if I get a blister?
And yet wearing sneakers (sweat pants for the feet) is not without its own (emotional) pain. So the other day, after noticing a great pair of heels in a window on the way to work, I looked around my office for mentors.
``Will you teach me the secret?'' I begged two women who own one pair of sneakers between them.
``Lower your comfort expectations,'' one said. ``Mind over matter,'' the other advised.
Maybe I wasn't putting my question properly. ``Don't they hurt?'' I asked.
``I'm in pain right now,'' one said brightly.
``You can't think like that,'' the other admonished, turning her foot to show off her towering podiatric profile. ``Pain isn't even part of the conversation.''
The first woman mentioned that most of her shoes are not compatible with walking. ``Which is why I'm 20 pounds overweight. If I had comfortable shoes I'd walk and be thinner and I wouldn't need the high heels.''
Her sole-sister imitated a weak woman in a shoe store: ``Oohh, those are going to hurt.'' Then she looked at me and my flats: ``You need to toughen up.''
When she's wearing heels higher than two inches, she added, picking up her toddler makes her go numb from the waist down. Finally, a glimmer of hope: Maybe I could get a pre-Manolo epidural.
Or . . . maybe there's a compromise: I could buy the sexy heels and simply carry them around to show off my good taste - all from the comfort of my kick-tush Pumas (lovely with a skirt).
Actually, I'm only one step from doing this already: Whenever I have a meeting, I wear comfortable shoes until I'm as close as possible to my target, and then (hiding in a doorway, or behind a chair in the reception area) I put on the show shoes (which would be dismissed by my mentors as ``flats'') and hobble ``onstage.''
As I said, I've been hoping there was something I was missing, but now I realize it's like what Watergate operative G. Gordon Liddy said when asked how he could stand to hold his hand over flame: ``The trick is not minding.''
