Shoes Only a Spectator Would "Fall" For

It would be a lie if I told you I didn’t quite know where it comes from outside of watching my mother unpack her over-stuffed Lohmann’s and Bamburger’s shopping bags as a child.  I can remember sitting on her thickly piled French blue carpeted bedroom floor in the dressing room area right outside of her large walk-in closet. This was the very spot that within the first week of the rug being laid, my mother dropped the iron and left a deep permanent melted iron mark in rug.  Mom was on it though, another inherited trait, like me, she was a multi-tasker. I remember in the blink of an eye my mother sprinting to the garage for a rug remnant, a pair of scissors and a sharpee.  She had to hide that iron mark from my father as quickly as she had to hide her new bags of shoes.  With some quick and concise instructions from mom, I took the shag square and placed the cool iron on the back.  With the magic marker I traced the shape of the iron, cut it out and dropped it right into place as making it appear as if it never happened.  Mom continued to feverishly unpack, her always fabulous and always fashionable new shoes.  I can recall mom’s fascination with how elegant spectators were and she had at least a pair for each season.  I wonder if mom held onto any of her spectators after all these years?  I think a closet raid is in order.  I vividly recall the red leather pair she had with black patent leather trim.  In fact, I gave my mother a practically brand new pair that I wore once two years ago, they were ox blood with black hounds tooth wool and croc trim with black laces.  Well, my mother timed it perfectly when she handed them back to me two weeks ago and exclaimed, “These are like brand new!”

If you have opened a fashion magazine in the past few months, you would already have recognized the “well heeled” in their spectators.  As for me, I walked into a shoe store and did my seasonal clean sweep of five pairs of new shoes in five minutes.  The store clerks “looked on” in amazement as I made a spectacle of scooping up every hot shoe in the store.  Size 8 was cleanly pulled from each “help yourself shelf” and piled high one by one.  Like a circus clown juggling act, I made my way to the register.  When I finally arrived home, like my mother I quickly unpacked the evidence and crumpled up the shopping bag, as my children sat outside my closet door “spectating” just as I once did.