Shoes, Glorious Shoes!

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I absolutely adore shoes, and can never have too many. Unfortunately, unlike the legendary shoe aficionados Imelda Marcos and Carrie Bradshaw, I will never have enough money to fully support my habit (god only knows how Bradshaw, a supposed newspaper columnist, did). So I came up with a way to satisfy my shoe jonesing–miniatures.

I come from a long line of collectors. Uncle Yernie collected blue Wedgewood, my mother showcased her hundred or so pill boxes in a china cabinet, my sister’s condo teemed with rams, and, in a previous incarnation as suburban housewife, I collected salt and pepper shakers. But times change, and so do people. Salt and pepper shakers no longer match my self-image—or, more importantly, my soul. Miniature shoes do.

Let me emphasize: I began collecting miniature shoes a full decade before Just the Right Shoe, Imelda’s Closet, or any of the other mini-shoe corporations set up shop. My shoe collection began purely by chance, circa 1989. At that time AIDS was devastating the gay community, and weekends featured yard and estate sales throughout the Castro district of San Francisco. As one might expect, while these events evoked a good deal of sadness, the pickings were of far greater interest and quality than those found at yard sales in, say, Concord or Walnut Creek. One Saturday, a sweet little pale yellow shoe sitting forlornly on a blanket, with a bit of lace at the toe, called to me. It was adorned with a slightly chipped rose, so I got it for a buck. I didn’t mind the chip, in fact, it added to the slipper’s charm, reminding me of some lines by Leonard Cohen: Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack, a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.

I put the little shoe on a shelf alongside other chachkalas, where it sat unpaired for a good five or six years–until my trip to Italy. In a Venetian gift shop four exquisite little wooden shoes covered with fabric were arranged in a semi-circle, nearly dwarfed by hand-blown glassware. The saleswoman told me they were created by hand by some little old lady over near the next canal. The cost in lira came to about 25 US dollars. “I guess I’m collecting miniature shoes,” I told my boyfriend, and spent the next ten minutes deciding which one to buy, finally settling on the brown.

When I got back to the States I began seriously seeking out miniature shoes. The hunt took me to craft shows, dollhouse exhibits, and antique shops. My friends and relatives were put on alert. As noted, my relatives are big on collections, so it came as no surprise when my next shoe(s) were sent to me from my mother in Florida. She happened to be passing a shoe store and spotted some miniatures on display behind the cash register. Upon close inspection, she found they were little shoes, and immediately asked if she could buy them. The shopkeeper, clueless as to their true worth, let her have them for five bucks each. I love these shoes for their realism.

My boyfriend’s daughter was in a fabric shop when she saw this pin cushion:

At 12 years old, she was enthusiastic about my enterprise, and kept her eyes peeled: she found this ruby slipper at a sales table on Gay Day:

My boyfriend was in Venice again; with his legendary directional skills, he found the shop with the shoes and bought me another one:

An old friend and her husband were going to Italy, so I gave her explicit instructions, hoping she’d find miniature shoes in Venice, even if she couldn’t find the exact same gift shop. She ended up buying me a shoe in Taormino, but the shopkeeper conned her into paying $75.00. While this shoe is slightly larger than the Venetians, it’s made exactly the same way–of fabric-covered wood.

This was the priciest shoe in my collection to date, but its status was short-lived: a few weeks later I found a German porcelain shoe in an antique shop on Union Street. I’ve seen nothing even remotely similar to it in all my shoe-hunts.

Carol Queen and her partner Robert are antique hounds who go foraging for treasures wherever they travel, and they travel a lot, since Carol’s in pretty big demand as a sex educator. We were speaking together on an erotica panel at the California Writers Club when she slipped a teensy tiny white slipper out of her pocket and handed it to me.

Even before mass produced miniature shoes made their debut, art museum catalogs began putting out their own line, to be used as Xmas tree ornaments. I don’t usually have a Xmas tree, but if I should decide to do it up big one year, I’ve got a good start on decorations, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By this time shoes were beginning to crowd me out of my studio apartment, what with everyone giving them to me on birthdays or other occasions. I hung up one shelf, then two…they were becoming seriously crowded when someone in my building had a moving sale, and I scored a corner cabinet that lights up inside.

Then came that historic moment when I wandered into my local card shop and there, dominating the entire store, was a giant shoe upon which miniature shoes were arranged. A sign read “Just the Right Shoe.” I shrieked. I really did, I actually screamed, drawing the attention of the owner and several customers. Now everyone and her nieces would be collecting miniature shoes, while up until then the field had been completely and uniquely mine. I glared resentfully as a woman at the cash register bought a rhinestone sandal. Besides feeling resentful, I was panic-stricken: I felt that my collection wouldn’t be complete until I owned every shoe in JTRS’s catalog. By now I own several.

I calmed down–what else could I do?–as miniature shoes became all the rage. Soon enough the mania ran its course and mini shoes were going for five or three bucks on eBay. Here are just a few I lust after:

To give you an idea of scale, here’s a pair of my actual high heels beside some of the mini’s. Notice that some are miniatures of miniatures.

Finally, check out this little sandal; it was made out of potato chip wrappers by a woman in prison.

I had a dream once that illustrated perfectly what my little shoes mean to me: I was eating the shoes, happily biting into them one by one. I can’t say I have a favorite; they’re all my babies, and therefore all are precious. I might love them in different ways, but basically, I love them all.

A note about the pictures: As is quite obvious, I’m no photographer–I don’t even take pictures of my grandsons, that’s how much I dislike doing it. Even with a digital camera, I had a helluva time snapping these, and I apologize for the mediocre quality of the final products. I don’t know how phogotraphers do what they do, especially those like my friend Phyllis Christopher, who frequently photographs still objects like these for newspapers and magazines. It’s quite an art.

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