Red Shoes

            I guess that my first red shoes were my tap shoes. My sister and I got forced into tap-dancing. Shuffle hop tap. Shuffle hop tap .We didn’t exactly like it but Mummy was giving us “opportunities”.

            She always said and she was right: open doors for your children, think of them as being flowers to be cultivated in healthy soil, feed them, expose them, water them, let them feel the sunshine but she didn’t mention manure. And that was part of it. For me, tap dancing was manure. I thought that it was the shits, especially doing it with my dumb sister. She couldn’t keep up and then she would give me baleful looks and suggest that I couldn’t keep up.

            Mummy meant well and she exuded joy watching our tap dance. I mean she was practically teary-eyed. Can you imagine? How weird can one mother get? We wore matching outfits and tapped in unison but not really because it stunk! Then I saw that movie with Moira Shearer, a great ballerina of her time, although maybe not so famous because I never heard of her again after she danced herself out doing the red shoe-shuffle-sorry, I mean classical ballet. The Red Shoe Ballet, no less. Like to die for?

            But somehow, I got stuck on red shoes so like thanks, Mummy. Pop culture always supported my desire to own red shoes. Judy Garland and the Ruby Slippers in a bodice so tight. She was already seventeen and had to look like maybe she was eleven because, if she had been thirteen, she wouldn’t have believed in fairy tale stuff like witches and how they were out to get you especially if you were like Cinderella or Snow White.

            The Ruby Slippers are in the American Museum of History in Washington, DC. The Hope Diamond is there too. YESSIR, seen them both. But the thrill of the Ruby Slippers-- you click your heels just three times. It is a wonderment, it is a wonderment, it is a wonderment.

            Last pair of red shoes that I own, I bought in Florence, Italy. Just last year.  I was looking for something tasteful that means “old-lady and conservative” but then I saw red suede shoes with glittering buckles. I bought those ruby slippers and my daughters said to me, “Good choice, Mom. They sure look like fun shoes.”