Wear Ballerina Shoes

Wow; wear ballerina shoes. Doesn't THAT sound like fun?

You know what is even better? If you wear ballerina shoes in a public place, like a Dollar Store or something, 'eh? Doesn't it sound like...you know what? I bet you will be the next person to wear ballerina shoes in a public place tomorrow, won't ya'?

And so it begins...

I had work for the last day this summer before I go to college. It was a perfectly normal day, as usual. Nothing could make this perfect day go awry. Even the weather was agreeing with me.

How wrong I was.

Late in the afternoon - I worked from noon until 5PM - at about 4:00PM, a woman came in. Now, there was nothing special about this woman at all. She was wearing shorts, seeming to be in her late fifties, and a plain gray T-Shirt. Nothing out of ordinary here.

What first caught my eye was how white she was. Was this woman albino? Or did she just not go outside at anytime in her life?

Whatever the reason was, I looked down at her shoes, and she was wearing hard-toed honest-to-goodness ballerina shoes! At first I stood there staring as she adjusted the picture frame section to her liking.

Now, the woman was rather short - the top shelf of the picture frames coming slightly above her head. What was weird about her shoes is even though they have the hard toe, they toe wasn't dirty like a normal ballerina's-shoes-who-had-been-using-them-in-the-proper-way would be.

Could it be that this woman was a ballerina when she was younger? Maybe she has always dreamed of becoming a ballerina, but just never wanted to be famous? Possibly she was a horrible dancer, but had the hallucination that she was very popular?

Whatever the reason, those shoes were tied around her ankles so tightly I thought that it was cutting off the circulation of not only her feet, but her legs as well, causing the severe depletion of color in her skin.

I snap out of my daydreams, clearly imagining watching her skin turning purple before my very eyes, and I see this woman staring at me.

"Oh!" I say in surprise, and quickly look down into the display case, pretending to be concentrating on the fireworks in there. I steal a glance at the woman, and, finally coming to my senses, I go around the counter to ask politely if she needed any help.

"Oh no honey, I know what I want. I just need to see..." She motions lightly to the picture frames on the top shelf.

Then, in one, sweeping motion, she stands up taller, and I took down only to see - she is standing on her ballerina shoes!

I gawk at her as she tippy-toes her way over to the shelf, picks out a particularly large frame on the top shelf, and gracefully comes down from her 'high' perch.

She looks at me guiltily and says almost child-like, "I knew these would come in handy someday!"

Whether she was talking about the shoes or her ballet move, I couldn't quite figure it out; I was still in a fog of dream as I checked out this woman and her picture frame.

Hopefully the 'Plié' (The ballet move she did) will end up better in her next performance. :-)

* I understand that the past few entries have been "Wear (Insert Object Here)" entries. My apologies. *