Sensible Shoes

Poompy has a real thing about sensible shoes. He says this himself.

We're doing this thing now where we spend six hours a week together, writing. He's working on his novels and I'm.... blogging. We're 29 minutes into our first two-hour writing session of the week. I spent the first 26 minutes coming up with a bio for a theatre company I'm a part of in Los Angeles. (I'll write about what that did to my self-confidence in another blog.) In minute 27 I cried aloud, "Damn! My fingernails are making it really hard to type! I feel like I'm crippled!"

For those of you who don't know, I have been biting my fingernails since birth. Literally. I've always been the girl with short, ragged, chewed up fingernails. I always hated that habit and longed to be the girl with long beautiful fingernails. I've tried acrylics and press-on nails and all that, but they're so damaging. About two months ago, I tried to stop biting my nails for about the 8,000th time in my life and actually succeeded succeeded. I managed to grow out these gorgeous, healthy, long, beautiful nails. My hands are so pretty all of a sudden that I can't stop staring at them. On the subway. At work. Walking down the street. I've always got one hand extended so I can casually admire my gorgeous fingernails. But goodness, long nails do get in the way. For example: I will now type tis whole sentence without delting the typo's that er created simply because my fingernails, my beautiful fingernails keep getting caught in the keyboard and preventing me from being able to tyep like a normal person. SEE WHAT I MEAN?

So, in minute 27 I complain to Poompy that I feel crippled by my lovely fingernails. And he looks at me and says, "I've been thinking a lot about how society cripples our women by its demands of beauty."

I'm sorry?

Papa came to Manhattan this weekend to visit. He was in Boston on business and hopped a bus Friday night to come say hi to his baby girl and her hubby. I had rehearsal all day on Saturday, so Poompy took Papa around town. The one thing Papa wanted to do, other than catch his little girl's performance Saturday night, was to pay his respects to Ground Zero. And so that's what they did. And it was powerful and moving and heart breaking. The photographs, the stories, the remnants - it's not something you can put out of your mind once you've put it in. Of course, anyone who lives in Manhattan or has visited since 9/11 and seen Ground Zero understands that. Papa was very moved and bought himself a book to memorialize the experience. On Sunday night, while Poompy was waiting for my performance to begin, he was browsing through Barnes and Noble when he saw a book about 9/11 that he thought Papa might be interested in. He began reading it and came to a section of photographs of the lobby of WTC 1, photographs of all these women floundering in the water that was filling the lobby. Someone had had a camera with him as he made his escape from the building and he took pictures in the stairwell and the lobby as he was leaving. Poompy describes the photographs to me and the circumstances in which they were taken. The women had taken off their high-heeled shoes in the stairwells so they could run down the stairs to escape. Water from the sprinkler systems and the fire departments hoses was streaming down the stairs, adding to the confusion and the already dangerous situation. When the women reached the lobby below, the floor was flooded with dark, dirty water and shattered glass. Debris from the tops of the buildings was hurtling out of the skies, hitting the windows of the buildings, shattering the glass, and the glass was pouring into the lobby and the streets outside. The men, in their sensible flat shoes, were able to run through the lobby and outside. The women, in their bare feet, could not.

Poompy was struck by the photographs. The men pushing through the crowd of frightened women to get to safety. The women, bloody bare feet, floundering to make it through the lobby. And then, once outside, forced to flee on sidewalks strewn with burning debris and broken glass and shards of metal. Bare-footed. As he describes this scene to me, my stomach is turning. My hand covers my mouth. My eyes fill with hot tears. I cannot believe it. I cannot help but imagine myself in that situation. I arrive for work in the morning in my little suit - I want to be professional, I want to be taken seriously, yet I want to feel feminine and sexy. That's not uncommon. Every magazine I read, every movie or television show I watch helps to teach me that as a woman I must be feminine and sexy, even if I am smart and strong. And part of what makes me feminine and sexy is attractive foot-wear. Spike heels.

I don't believe that I am any more easily swayed by advertising than the next person. I pride myself on being a down-to-earth, low-maintenance, guy's girl. But when I was running around the city for job interviews two months ago, I made sure to wear my professional-yet-slinky pin-stripe slacks (they make my ass look terrific) and stiletto heels. Because I know that I will make a better impression if I am smart and hot. Then, in the blink of an eye, unbelievable disaster, horror, nightmare. You think it'll never happen to you. And then it does. And I am running for my life. And I can't run in these fucking heels! I slip them off and with relief I tear down the stairwell, slipping on the wet cement stairs in my stocking feet, but better off than if I'd kept my heels on. I reach the lobby and I think I have a chance at safety. Until I step into the murky water and am blinded by the pain of a thousand shards of glass ripping through my flesh.

I'm sorry. I have a vivid imagination. I am horror-stricken. I know that people actually experienced this. I realize that they were the lucky ones. They were the ones that made it. I know. But I wonder how many women were so badly detained because of their fashionable foot-wear that they didn't make it out. Or suffered injuries far worse than they would have if they had been wearing sensible shoes.

Poompy has a point to make when he is telling me this horrible story. He looks at me, his face earnest, his beautiful green eyes watery, "I couldn't stop thinking about how we've crippled our women by our standards of beauty. Please, please wear sensible shoes. I couldn't help thinking about you and the ridiculous things you wear on your feet that you call shoes. I know they're fashionable or whatever, but I'd rather you be able to run if you need to, then be trapped in some horrible situation because you were wearing flip-flops or some other crap. And cut your nails. You are more beautiful when you aren't crippling yourself."

Truth be told, this is actually something that's been on my mind a lot lately. How women abuse themselves to meet the demands of beauty. The many, many “beauty treatments” that feel more like self-flagellation than self-indulgence. The way women seem to punish themselves for getting older. The way they seem to degrade their worth if they gain a little weight while pregnant or taking care of their family or working long hours to further their career. I think that women, and I include myself in this, put too much pressure on themselves to be able to do everything. This is something worth investigating. But not today. I only have 16 minutes left of my two hours of writing and this exploration into women’s sense of self deserves more than 16 minutes. Besides. I need to go cut off my fingernails.