I don’t know how I do it, but I’ve written about everything. I’ve written about my shoes.
We’re all about shoes this week, so let’s just do it. You’ve heard about that old woman who lived in a shoe with so many young’uns; what could she do? She starved them and beat them, and put them to bed, at least that’s the gist of what Mother Goose said.
And we also have the story of Rindercella, which concerns a prandsom hince and a geautiful birl who “slopped her dripper.”
*IYKYK.
Didn’t you ever watch Hee Haw?
Who could forget Dorothy and the ruby slippers the Good Witch of the North stole from the dead Wicked Witch of the East and gave to scared and homesick Dorothy and then failed to tell her she could get back to Kansas by clicking her heels and saying, “There’s no place like home,” which could have saved Dorothy a lot of trouble?
This confusion ultimately led to the death of another witch who was just trying to get her stolen sister’s shoes back. So, I ask you: “Which witch is the wickedest witch?” Elvis sang about “Blue Suede Shoes” and sounded a little irrational. I would much prefer someone step on my foot than knock me down, step on my face, and then slander my name all over the place.
But I guess some people have shoe fetishes.
Elvin Bishop wrote a song called “Travelin’ Shoes” in the 1970s, which expresses his displeasure with a woman he refers to as his old lady. He becomes so annoyed that he threatens to take Hank Aaron’s “baseball bat and tenderize her head.”
That’s what I call toxic masculinity.
Speaking of the ‘70s, do you remember The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic books? Fat Freddy Freekowtski, the dumbest of the trio, had a cat who enjoyed pooping in Freddy’s shoes. In every issue I looked at, Fat Freddy’s Cat made a point of filling up Freddy’s shoes with excrement. What an ungrateful feline.
When I was a child, I saw a kid leaping over 10-foot-tall fences in a TV commercial for PF Flyers, and I believed I could make such leaps myself had I the proper footwear.
My parents were unmoved by my ambitions, and I never got a pair of PF Flyers.
Currently, I have five or six pairs of inexpensive Chinese shoes that I purchased online. The Chinese shoe companies seem to struggle with English spelling, though, and a pair I own has this written on the tongue: “Professional Skateboard Shoe.”
At least they spelled shoe correctly.
I also have some wild socks that I bought from China. I bought them as sweat-absorption devices when I learned that feet can produce about four ounces of sweat each day.
I don’t want to ruin my cheap Chinese shoes.
It would be criminal not to mention Imelda Marcos in a column about shoes. According to some reports, she had 7,500 pairs of shoes when she and her husband Ferdinand, former president of the Philippines, were exiled to Hawaii in 1986.
They have a son named Bongbong who is the current president of the Philippines. It’s a similar situation to George H.W. and Bongbong Bush.
I know I swore off baseball writing, but I’m going to ask for your indulgence on one small point as we wrap up this cobbled-together column. See what I did there?
The device the shoe salesman whips out to measure your feet is called a Brannock Device. It was invented by Charles F.
Brannock and manufactured by his company in Syracuse, New York.
According to MLB.com, in 2018, the Syracuse Chiefs baseball team suited up as the Syracuse Devices to honor the iconic foot-measuring machine, donning black jerseys “featuring devices in a red-accented metallic font, while their hats featured an anthropomorphic Brannock Device named Chuck.”
It’s a small world. Bobby Cox managed the Chiefs for four seasons before Ted Turner hired him to manage the Braves. He was then fired and rehired as general manager in 1985, before being reinstated as manager in 1990.
That’s a lot of hiring and firing, but it could have been worse.
Bobby’s mother could have named him Bongbong.
Selah.
* Borrowed from Archie Campbell’s version of “Cinderella.”
Lewis Grizzard