Stilettoes

Left: Just prior to 'Song On The Sand': Albin (Ryan Adame) and Georges (Martin Lehman) in Tuesday night's "La Cage Aux Folles" rehearsal.


Prior to starting rehearsals, for me, the most anxiety-producing part of "La Cage Aux Folles" wasn't the gender-role stuff, but whether or not the high heels would work. I have such strange feet - wide, stiff, flat, with bunions - that failure could be an option.

The character shoes we have been given seem nice, however - stable, OK on stairs, even a bit flexible. I am mildly uncomfortable wearing the high heels - left bunion inflaming slightly, slight plantar fascitis on the right sole, right calf cramping a bit - but not anything like the agony I expected.

I could get used to this.....

Which reminds me of my favorite story about stilettoes (which I blogged about once, but which I repeat, because that's what old guys do). At the time, I was a college student living in Albuquerque. It was the Seventies, and most everyone was dancing:

I was dancing in a discotheque, looking all suave, when someone stepped on my foot. I didn't glance around and seek out the person at fault. Instead, I surmised I was just too close to this particular dancer, and started boogeying away across the dance floor, in order to find more space.

There was a problem, though. My foot still hurt. Indeed, the pain seemed to be increasing as I continued to dance. What could it be? Finally, I looked down, and I was shocked: a high-heel shoe was affixed to the outside of my own shoe. The stiletto heel had become firmly wedged between the outer surface of my foot and the inner surface of my shoe. I looked up, and I was shocked again: the owner of the shoe, an elegant beauty, was frantically signalling. Apparently I had wrenched the shoe off of her foot, and as I boogied across the floor, she had limped after me, desperately trying to catch up.

And so, with the shoe issue apparently under control, I can now focus on the show itself - the challenges of makeup, line memorization, songs, and dance steps - and in particular, the atmospherics, so well summarized by that distinguished musical-theater authority, Mel Brooks:

Keep it happy, keep it snappy, keep it gay!