Easter Shoes and a Wayward Muse

 Its sort a twofer. BOGO. Write a piece for CCWC and publish it in my blog as well. Win win.

The assignment: to write about shoes. Usually I ignore assignments. but there was a sort of siren’s song about the topic. Granted, it is a little gender stereotypical, female-centric, but I could ignore that.  S-h-o-e-s, it whispered. A biological imperative? Maybe.

After all, did Plato see shadows of Manolos on the cave wall? Did Proust flash back to a lifetime of memories upon slipping his feet into a pair of strappy heels? Interesting to contemplate, but the answer is no.

But I digress.

Its 1959. My mother and I are in Block and Kuhl’s shoe department. I stare at the high heels. (That’s what we called them them, back then) I am fourteen and it’s almost Easter. I get to buy high heels to go with my very grown-up blue tweed suit, a narrow dark blue leather belt riding just above a snappy peplum flaring over my non-existent hips.

A pair of shoes catches my eye, standing out like neon against all the rounded toes and  low heels. The perfect shade of blue. Stilletto heels, maybe 3”. At least 3”. Pointed toes.  And the piece de resistance: a tiny, ornamental, brass trimmed blue leather change purse right at the toe cleavage. My heart races. The smell of new shoes. The smell of fresh leather.  I ask to try them on.

My mother laughs, Not in a mean way, but in surprise, or more likely shock. I am such a mousey little thing, and those are bad-girl shoes. The salesman detects my lust, and hopes for the power of a daughter who has fallen in love to loosen a mother’s purse. I slip them on. I turn my feet this way and that, gazing at them. Those shoes are so much better than I am. I want to know those feet. I want to do what those feet do.

Easter morning, I slip blue leather pumps on my slick, nylon-stockinged feet.  Modest two inch heels. Self effacing rounded toes. Mousey girl shoes, confirmation of who I am, and who I am not.

More than half a century later. The world in a pair of shoes.

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And now to current concerns.  A lady whom I greatly admire does not admire herself enough.  That, I think, is a common condition among seriously talented people. Much of what I will say is hypothetical, because she is also very private, and not given to confiding, which can be an admirable trait when the world is filled with those who overshare.

She is leaving our little writers cohort because she feels she has no more to offer. There are times when the gift, the muse if you will, leaves us all, or most of us, at least.  It is a scary moment.  The artist, and she is a real artist, fears the art will never return. It's like youth, gone forever.

I hope I can assure her, if by chance she reads this, and I am pretty sure she won't, that it doesn't work like that. A field cannot flourish if it doesn't lie fallow. True, there are some who create year after year, a prodigious outpouring without break, but who is to say they would not have profited from the nourishment a pause would give. For some, the pause is long, lasting months or years, and then one  day, the muse is back, ringing the door bell, barging in with cheese and crackers and a bottle of wine and demanding to be heard. She will then keep you up late, just as she once did, and  you will feel yourself racing to keep up with yourself. And, dear friend, it will happen to you.

"Noah," don't do it!

At about 8:45 this morning, I was in the produce department of the Fairway grocery, Broadway at 73rd, playing softball with Sarah Jessica Parker and talking shoes. I have very colorful dreams.  I can understand the Fairway Grocery part. Next month we are going to New York and staying at the Beacon Hotel.  That is right across the street from Fairway on the upper west side. And shoes make sense, too. I just wrote a little piece on shoes for an assignment for my writer's group. (It will appear here in the middle of the month.  Two birds, one stone) And softball makes a kind of sense because we are going to baseball games in Peoria and Chicago this summer.

My question is, what was Darren Aronofsky (he of "Black Swan") dreaming when he not only came up with "Noah"but managed to get actors, funding, and actually put it on the screen? How did presumably bright people (that may be overreaching) go along with this, nod, and say" Oh boy, that's a great idea. " I think it was the stone angels,  transformer-like quasi-Biblical digital creations, that pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks. (Not tracks, really. I was sprawled in a recliner in the den, stupified from Christmas dinner and just waiting to eat again.  But, same thing.) The angels plus Russell Crowe's magically changing haircut and his "What in the hell am I doing here?" expression made up  an accident I couldn't take my eyes off of, (except for a short nap,) an accident revealing careers sinking  faster then the Marie Celeste.

 I'm with you, Russell. This is  undoubtedly the worst movie of all time. You know it it and I know it; let's not pussyfoot around.  It ranks as most awful because of it's pretentiousness, its huge budget, its veering off into wildly insane territory unrelated to the story it purports to tell, and much more.

There other "worst," movies, of course, and they will pop up on any Google list.  Take "Plan 9 from Outer Space."  It almost always tops the list, and it is truly deserving. But it has charm. It's cheap, full of unintentional blunders and is reminiscent of kids making a movie in their back yard.  You can't hate that. You can really and in good conscience hate "Noah."

If you want a couple of great movies, find "Assassination Tango " or "Ghost Dog."  I'll say no more.  Not everyone's taste, but great just the same. Stay away from "Noah," a plague all by itself.

It's a Sprint with Mother Time

Today is New Years Day.  Fraught with so much meaning, so many implied demands.  Screw it. I am watching the Rose Bowl Parade on HGTV with the Property Brothers.  The have such soporific voices, which makes the Kitsch Parade almost bearable. Like George Clooney but more nasal.  The best sleep-to movie of all time is The Perfect Storm. Wind, rain, churning sea, and Clooney's unanimated voice - knocks me out cold every time.

So, as I was saying, too many roses, not enough thorns. Corporate America disguised as a chintz sofa. I bite every time.

Best winter sporting event takes place today: The Winter Classic. Hockey as it was intended to be played. Outdoors. Snow. Ice. Fans freezing in the stands. Except it's being played In Washington D.C. They should ditch the idea of playing on team turf, so to speak, although one team is Chicago and could  no doubt have offered up a suitable climate. Just say its going to be played in Detroit or Calgary every year and be done with it. We have two ice sport people in our family: one plays hockey and one curls. Before you laugh, curling is not for the faint of heart, although it is played predominantly by Canadians, and the opposing teams applaud one another. Curling just proves that Canadians have a sense of humor, previously unsuspected. For instance, they have a big curling get together where everyone plays in pajamas. I can relate to that.

So, how do I know that the holiday season is truly over? (Please God, let it be over.) Not because it the New Year, but because the peppermint bark is finally gone. I love that stuff. But I digress, as usual. I was going to talk about my nose. Do you ever look in your car's visor mirror and see things that completely shock you? There you are, sitting in the Kroger parking lot, and you pull the mirror down to make sure you don't have anything disgusting in your teeth before you go inside, and dear God, what is that ? The clear, unforgiving afternoon light illuminates every blemish and flaw. The driver's seat of your car is the best place to pluck your eyebrows, by the way, as long as the car is not moving. But this time it was not my Sean Connery-esqe eyebrows. It was the tip of my nose. A maze,  a florid street map of the greater Los Angeles area ! W.C. Fields, Rudolph. Call the Butcher of Church Street! Pronto!

The Butcher, as you may recall, is my dermatologist. I have him on speed dial. A chirpy female voice answers his office phone. He's not in, won't be for another month.  Business has apparently been good, and he is in the Caribbean tanning his bald pate. I have always wondered why the guy who preaches the "no suntan" mantra ways has that golden glow.

Anyway, I called my go-to font of information, Kay.
"Not to worry. It's broken blood vessels. You are just falling apart with age," Kay said reassuringly. "Slap some make-up on it."

Wait, this is a trend. A couple of weeks ago my trainer gazed into my eyes as I was sweating through a set of flies and said, "Your left eye is filling up with blood.

Bad news in anybody's book. By the time I got to my eye doctor a week later ( I was busy. It was the holidays) the flaming red of my eyeball was gone.

"Don't worry," he said.  "Broken blood vessels aren't uncommon at your age. Don't even have to exert yourself much. "

So there is a theme here. One day you are dandy and the next, ppffft! Body parts start falling off, you start leaking various things. This is not good. I hit the wall of 70 a couple of weeks ago, and let's just say, I suspect it's downhill from here. Of course I am still going to the gym several times a week, and I watch every morsel that passes my lips (watching is the operative word here. I watch it, but I still eat it) It's a sprint with Mother Time. I need new Adidas! Shoe shopping cures almost anything, even if its for gym shoes.