Shoes

Posted March 28th, 2006 by Sean Williams

It isn’t like a fetish or anything. Mostly, I think it’s just the best way to tell what sort of person you are dealing with. During the casting of Fleet Week, once everyone had been offered jobs and had accepted them, the director and I were talking about which of the actors playing gay roles might actually be gay, and one of them we thought for sure wasn’t because of his shoes. We were right.

I’ve always loved shoes, and I’ve always sort of hated women’s shoes. They don’t make any sense to me, the heel, the straps, they just look awful. To tell the truth, I don’t really like women’s clothes very much. Historically, I’ve always thought that women who took men’s clothes and made them their own were so much more beautiful. My wife, of course, wears men’s clothes better than anyone I know, but my sisters, Michelle and Tessa, have made it incredibly elegant. Tessa and I shared a surprise party for our birthdays some five years ago, and Tessa happened to be wearing an oversized sweater with a hole in one shoulder, and, honestly, she made it look like nicer than a ball gown.

Anyway, back to shoes. My closet has as many shoes as it does shirts. The shoes I’m wearing right now…

… are Hush Puppies, and I bought them as much for the fact that they look like little kid shoes as for the name. My favorite shoes ever ar these Timberlands, which used to be Carolina Blue when I bought them, but two home renovations and countless snowstorms have left them thus…

You’ve got to have shoes for whatever function is required of you, sure, but they should also match whatever costume you’re wearing. Yesterday, it was warming up enough to wear my leather jacket, and as I was grabbing a hat, I decided to change my shoes. Because, you can’t wear a black leather jacket unless you’re sorta trying to look like a Queens goombah, and so I grabbed my Coast Guard baseball cap and changed into brown leather zip-ups.

I really think you should have some stuff on hand, just for having fun with. I know that you’re supposed to throw out anything you don’t wear in 18 months, or something, but instead I’ve just given away every pair of shoes that no longer fits, or if I haven’t worn them in three or four years. Shoes are supposed to be with you a lot longer than, say, socks.

Don’t get me started on socks.

Plus, how could you throw away any of these?

And even these shoes, which I’ve only left the house in *once*, are still really fun to wear around the house.

…and if you don’t have some good house shoes, what’s the point in even having feet? If I couldn’t have fun shoes, just for wearing indoors, I might seriously consider having my legs removed mid-shin. Jordana could carry me around, and when she got tired of doing that, she could call my friend Mac over to carry me around. Withouth the lower half of my lower leg, I probably wouldn’t weigh that much. And without shoes? Come on, shoes weigh, like, twenty pounds.

Which is why we like the strong wooden shoe rack…

… to hold our most hilarious shoes. I know those white ones look pretty reasonable, but man, you have to be *very* careful about your sock collection. Some shoes aren’t as awesome as you might think until you consider the sock options.

But as I said, I’m not gonna talk about socks.

Except to say that these two new pairs of shoes I got…

… have their own sock considerations. First, the red shoes, which work great with white socks, but imagine them with BLUE! Or GREEN! And the other pair, which are *AWESOME*, only just fit my feet in regular socks, but then I remembered that I would probably be wearing them with nice thin socks, so I bought them anyway. A grand total of about $40 for two pairs of shoes, because DSW gots what I needs.

And no, I don’t have a problem. I like shoes.