My name is Anna and I am a shoe addict. (Applause and murmurs of support now please.) Though some may tut-tut and call me Imelda, I feel no shame. In fact I’m quite proud of my footwear collection. My shoes are neatly organized by heel height and style and I have them lined up on the ten shelves of my “shoe case”—an adjustable Ikea bookcase I bought a few years ago, and painted purple, to showcase my sandals, stilettos, and slides. I currently have fifty-six pairs.
Like many parents of a child with a substance-abuse problem, my folks want someone to blame. As a baby, my feet weren’t aligning themselves correctly, so I was fitted with plaster walking casts on both legs. My father blames the doctor who may have traumatized me by removing the casts with a deafening electric saw. My mother blames that last pair of corrective shoes I had to wear, even to sleep in, for weeks after getting the casts off.
As a teen, I probably had a healthy eight or ten pairs of shoes, but the summer after my first year in college, I got a mall job at a shoe store called Précis. It was owned by the same company as The Wild Pair and was sort of its Euro-wannabe older sister. I loved being surrounded by all of those shoes. I remember the pleasure I felt when I’d take a brand new pair out of its box for the first time, removing the tissue, examining the shoe, running my fingers over it, relishing the feel of an un-scuffed sole, the scent of brand new leather. I took full advantage of the employee discount that summer and left the job with five new pairs and a budding fetish.
Pandora’s shoebox had been opened.
Back in college, I was unable to shake that nagging attraction I had for every cute new pair I saw on display. I found arch-support in my roommate and good friend, Ali, a budding footwear junkie, and I have many happy memories of the two of us roaming Boston in search of a shoe-fix. Luckily, our tastes were on the lower end, cost (and maybe even style-) wise, and we usually stuck to such shops as Payless and Filene’s. I took another summer job, this time at The Wild Pair, and again, took full advantage of the discount. Actually I probably abused it by letting Ali share the joy too. By the time I graduated, I owned patent leather (or more likely, pleather) chunky sandal heels in red, peach, aqua, green, gold, silver, black, and white.
