When I was a sophomore in college, I went to Paris with five of my friends for spring break. Like most girls born in the mid-to-late eighties (and even some in the early nineties), I romanticized this trip via my packing, not in the Carrie Bradshaw: the series finale way, but in the Mary-Kate and Ashley, straight-to-video travel the world series. The two went to London, Paris, Rome, the Bahamas, Australia … Utah … tell me if I missed one.
In each video, the plot was tertiary to the wardrobe, and the boys, and correct me if I’m wrong, girls, but in our preteen worlds, we were totally cool with that.
And so I traipsed through Paris in my finest Free People sweaters and J. Crew peacoat and black skinny jeans and ornate ballet flats with a zebra print umbrella when the weather called for it. Until my 20th birthday, which was our final night in Paris. The hardcore MK+A came out because it was like their final night too: I wore leopard print, off the shoulder Nanette Lepore tunic with a wide black belt, leggings, and to every shoe fettishist’s pleasure, four inch, patent leather, bright red, pointy Stuart Weitzman heels.
The only way I could have looked more Parisian was if I was chain smoking and not semitic.
It really was an amazing adventure, with the exception of the fact that no one had a crush on the right person on the trip, so there weren’t any magical pair-offs during a slow dance after a baguette sword fight under the Eiffel Tower.
So imagine the alarming wake up call I had when I was back at school and I kept feeling excruciating pain. My right foot had swelled up to three times the size of the left. Icing didn’t help. Neither did running. Neither did wrapping it.
Finally, I caved and went to a podiatrist (it was times like these that I was eternally grateful I went to college in my home town and could ignore Student Health and go straight to my hospital). After good times in the MRI machine and the running joke that this doctor had just seen my brother only months before with similar symptoms, he looked at my X-Ray.
“Carlin, are you a dancer?”
“I like dancing.”
“You’ve never been a ballerina?”
(Note: this was amusing. I took ballet for a week when I was five but I couldn’t plie so I quit.)
“I’ve done bad choreography in musicals…it was a disservice to everyone watching.”
I was a medical mystery! According to my doctor, I had ballerina feet! Not in the gnawed up blistery way, in the bone structure, muscle-y way.
So he gave me the boot. Literally. I was to check back in a week. No cardio. No weight on it. Put a trash bag over it if it rains. And…I could only wear my old, disgusting Saucony sneaker on my left foot from like sophomore year of high school because then my feet were level when I walked.
Wasn’t it just days before I was frolicking around Paris in stilettos? I had formals to go to. And my own sister’s bat mitzvah. I was known after my one semester in my sorority for my shoes. I had worked hard for this reputation.
A week goes by. The doctor has a medical epiphany: I don’t have ballerina feet. I have Sarah Jessica Parker feet: I had such bad heel abuse, I’d walked myself into a stress fracture. Ballerinas have similar injuries because of point-shoes..which are, he pointed out, UNNATURAL. And so, I wore this effing boot for six weeks.
This is me at formal that year:
Will broke his foot too.
The boot finally came off a day before my sister’s bat mitzvah, so the beauty of my family album is completely in tact. In fact, as a couple of my friends can verify, the photographer awkwardly put a photograph of my family in a window display on Walnut, about half a mile from Penn’s campus. This came in handy when we were drunk.
This is Greg, after a date party. We all had meningitis pills after.
But nowadays, the trepidation I feel when it comes to heels is KILLING ME. I’ve discovered something pathetic: in the time since graduating college, I’ve lost my ability to walk in heels. It’s embarrassing, like everything I once stood for was flushed out by a stupid MRI. And every freaking catalogue and website shows these fabulous sky-high heels and wedges. The good news is that shortly after my stress fracture, platformed heels came into style, making it slightly easier to walk, and stress fractures far more difficult to come by. The problem: I look like a transvestite when I wear them. A transvestite who is just learning how to walk. I put on my finest Khloe Kardashians, guys under 5’10 are midgets. And worse still, I’m a head taller than about half my girl friends when barefoot.
And so I’ve begun a quest: the chupacabra* of heels: platformed but not stripper, gorgeous enough to be Manolo but NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES Jessica Simpson, comfortable before I’m drunk. I find those, I baguette sword-fight under the Eiffel Tower. Hear me, Olsens?
*Google image Chupacabra: they are fucking UGLY AND TERRIFYING. Why would I want my shoes to look like that? Patti Stanger, stop using that term, no one wants to date a Chupacabra, they want to bury it in someone’s yard who they hate.
