Someone sent me an E-Mail the other day with some of the most ridiculous shoes on it that I have ever seen and the article said that these were really shoes and women were buying and wearing them!!!! Ouch!!!!! They were the most outlandish "heels"! I was one that even as a child I liked to go barefoot, mainly in the summer because where I lived up in the states of Washington and Idaho, it was too cold to go without shoes in the winter!!! I had as a child, "Mary Janes" which were patent leather shoes that really had a good shine on them! In later years, some folks were saying that you could see the girls panties in them. Well let me tell you, in my day they wouldn't have been able to see much!!!! We wore bloomers and sometimes they were black. BUT... they covered your whole behind and then some they had elastic around the waist and also around the legs which hung down to your knees!!!! When I became a teenager, I started wearing silk stockings, (not nylons, they came later!) but before that our stockings were cotton and came up over the knees and we wore garters to hold them up!! Garter belts, I guess they were. And then the shoes, which were usually good sturdy oxfords and you got one pair if you were lucky, a year!! After I started wearing the silk stocking the style changed for them and we started to roll them down below the knees and then were rolled over elastic bands called "garters!" That was quite the fad, the rolled hosiery!! Then after I got out of High school and started to buy my own shoes or, at least was able to tell my parents what I wanted in the way of shoes and stockings, I bought "heels". They were not as high as the ones that I have seen advertised in some of the recent catalogs, but they were miserable too but what the heck!!! That's what everybody was wearing!!! The highest, I think, that I ever wore were about three inches high! Do I have to tell you as soon as I got home from a date or wherever, my shoes come off and I felt soooo good!!!! Shoes also started either being square toes, round toes or pointed toes!!! These pointed toes were terrible. One's feet were crammed into a space meant for about three toes and since you were in "heels" they really were "crammed" into a tiny space!!! But as I said before, style is style and you HAD to be in "style" When I look at my poor feet today and have to wear "flats" and I do mean "flats" I really thank my lucky stars that I can't be "stylish" anymore!!! I have a bone on the top of my feet and high arches and so when I wear anything that has to press down on that bone, Wow, more misery!!! Now for a little secret! (I still take my shoes off as soon as I get in the house and either "slop" around in a pair of sloppy slippers, or, you guessed it! I walk around barefoot!!!! Second childhood, but, oh how good it feels to let my feet free!!!!!!!!
