Someone emailed me a series of shoes that are all the rage in Japan and I couldn't help but share them here. It seems that these shoes would be somewhat useful for short people, such as many Japanese are. However the women who wear these will tower over the men.
Do you suppose men would wear anything like this?
Uh...I don't think so. They are used to being visually seduced, but do not themselves often fall for the impracticality of such fashions. Women, whose value is too often judged by what they have on, the way they wear their hair, the cut of their blouse, their manicure--these are the ones who succumb to things like this that not only look ridiculous but also impair their health. Can you imagine the pulled hamstrings and toe injuries that result from wearing these? Not to mention the kind of sprained ankle that someone would get from falling sideways off their shoes.
These shoes would also promote a mincing kind of inefficient walking style. A person couldn't run a city block in these or grab for a recalcitrant child without fear of breaking a long bone. I think I'll stick with my middle-age, appropriately sensible shoes: Birkenstocks, Rockports, Easy Spirit, and Born. But awkward shoes that wreck your toes and arches have been around forever. Even back in the 60s and 70s when I was a kid.
I well remember one Easter when Mother and Daddy were invited to sing for Amateur Hour at the school where Daddy worked. They chose a Jeannette McDonald and Nelson Eddy number: Easter Parade. It was a cute song from a record they played on the stereo all the time. Nelson Eddy singing through his nose,
We thought that was pretty romantic. But then there was The Indian Love Song that started off with a prolonged "ooooooh" by Jeannette McDonald, answered by Nelson Eddy: "ooooooh." Sometimes at night, my sister or I would start out with the eerie "Oooooooh" in the dark of our bedroom and wait to see if one of my brothers would sing the other part back (they never would, which would make us even more obnoxious with other musical challenges.
But back to Mother and Daddy. Easter Parade itself isn't such a bad song. But what my parents wore was awful, we thought. Daddy combed his hair down over his forehead which made him look like Captain Kangaroo. Mother wore a pale pink taffeta suit with a straight skirt and three quarter sleeves. The crowning touches were a hat with pink netting that came down over her eyes, and pink high heels. Very high heels. They were almost four inches high. We'd never seen Mother wear anything like that before, and I have no idea where she got them because we certainly didn't have money for her to buy spikes.
The Amateur Hour evening came and they belted out Easter Parade, full tilt. We groaned in mortification as Daddy came out dramatically, leading Mother who was mincing along in her spikes. They always sang incredibly loud (we always knew they had beat us to church when we walked in and could hear their operatic voices above everyone else's). This evening, they did the whole song in front of a microphone, gesticulating and making over Mother's miserable netted hat. It was loud, operatic, and silly. You know how kids are: we could have died seeing our parents up there. But everyone else loved it and Mother gave us a knowing but superior glance as she came off the stage. How she got down in those heels was beyond me.
The evening had been a smash and Mother had even gotten a new outfit from it. She decided to wear it to church the following weekend. So Sabbath morning dawned and she was up and dressed, tripping around the kitchen making us breakfast in her stilty shoes. Mother visually dared us to say anything about her outfit, probably because we kids had given the lowdown about her ridiculous shoes once too often. We ate breakfast quietly and got ready to load into the car.
Bear in mind, we lived in the country, back East. We had a driveway, but no path to where the car had parked. We walked out to find a foggy morning. It had rained during the night and the ground was soaked and muddy. We kids climbed into the running car while Daddy held the front door open for Mother. Out she came in those pink heels. As she stepped off the last stair onto the lawn, her right heel sank into the ground to the hub. Surprised, Mother took a step and put her other foot forward, where the left heel sank four inches into the ground. Yanking out her right foot, she then took a large step forward where her heel disappeared into the muddy lawn. Hurrying while trying not to ruin her shoes, Mother had a most arresting gait as she yanked her feet up and sank in with each step. She seemed to be focusing on keeping her pink hat with the netting atop her head, for she walked very erectly to the car. I wish you could have seen it--we were in hysterics by the time she climbed into the front seat, moaning that her shoes were muddy. Daddy ran into the house to get a rag for her to wipe off her shoes while we teased Mother about her "cornplanters."
Since moving into our farm house, we had discovered an antique corn planting device that made narrow indentations in the soil and deposited one kernal of corn in each hole. We complimented her on the utilitarian nature of her shoes as she glanced balefully at us. (We were awful!)
So when I see these shoes, I think of Mother's cornplanters and wonder if little Japanese children are having a heyday with their mother's ridiculous fashion statements, too.
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