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Speak To Us Of Boots

Berrysmom writes that she breaks out into a cold sweat at the mere thought of shopping for boots.

PeaceBang can hardly blame her. There are 123 pages of boot choices on Zappos.com alone, and a plethora at every department store in America.

Boots, boots, boots! What’s a well-dressed cleric to do? PeaceBang herself loves boots and has many pairs, but her favorites continue to be bronze cowboyish ones from Franco Sarto, which she dearly adores and wears everywhere.

A few guidelines:

1. Boots should be leather. Fake materials will just make your feet and calves sweat profusely. This is not to say that PeaceBang doesn’t love her faux snakeskin pull-on boots with the 3″ heel. She just doesn’t recommend them for someone who is boot phobic and buying her first pair.
2. Boots should be classic in style. Avoid anything that makes your lower half look like Sasquatch, and do not fall prey to those squishy camel-colored items with faux shearling trim that resemble bedroom slippers. Stay with structure and a nice line with beautiful, classic detailing. The heel height is up to you. Totally flat boots with long skirts can really make a girl look stumpy, though, I’m warning you.
3. Boots should be weather-wise. Why in the name of the good Lord would I want to go out in a stilletto-heeled boot? What am I going to do if it snows? Get on my butt and slide around?
4. Boots should fit. They should not be so snug around the calf as to cause little puppies of excess flesh to ooze out the top of the boot.
5. Boots should be black or some shade of brown or red or bronze, or some other sane color. They should not be pink leopard skin or flowered or red, white and blue striped.
6. Boots are an investment. They are worth spending $150-$200 for.
7. We should not wear L.L. Been sports boots in the pulpit. Keep a nice pair of shoes in the office if you have to slog to church in bad weather.

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In Futile Search Of The Perfect Black Flat Shoes

It is a sad fact.
PeaceBang is very unhappy with her shoe collection.
She seems to have lots of cute pumps that aren’t really comfortable enough for a long day on her feet, and she’s not dressing up enough lately to warrant wearing them in the first place.
She has loads of fun, frivolous shoes that look like all kinds of fun in the closet but either don’t go with anything, or that just aren’t appropriate for PeaceBang’s busy schedule.

PeaceBang’s lower back has been bothering her lately, and she wants solid footwear. Solid but not frumpy. Say it with me, brothers and sisters!
“Solid but not frumpy!”

She has loads of sandals, but summer is over. Yet it’s not warm enough to wear boots yet, either, and your devoted blogging correspondent has plenty of those. Black boots with heels and without, tan boots, cowboy boots, faux snakeskin boots, zip-up riding boots that threaten to cut off the circulation in her chubby calves but dammit, she wears them anyway. Oh yes, PB has the boots. Her boots were made for walking… the parish and the corridors of hospitals and seminaries.

It would seem as though PeaceBang has plenty of shoes to wear. Which reminds me of a Garrison Keillor joke.*

And yet here we are agonizing over the shoe situation yet again. Is this simply the spiritual emptiness of the materialistic American female rearing its sinful head in the guise of shoe lust? It could be, so help me Jesus, and I freely admit I would ride through the night on a broomstick to dance around a fire with Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo. I would sign my soul to Franco Sarto, in blood even, for a pair of comfortable black flats with a decent heel.

So what gives? All I’m seeing this season are monstrously chunky items that make one look as though one has been shod by the Goodyear Company, or twee little ballet flats that threaten to dissolve in the first puddle, and that make a grown woman look like Henrietta the Hippo. Remember her? She was that passive-aggressive pink-clad creature from “The New Zoo Review” who clearly needed some serious fellowship with Overeaters Anonymous. I do not wish to resemble Henrietta.

And so I look. I look in vain for a black flat that is comfortable, elegant, not boring or too preppy, that has some substance enough to support an extravagantly-sized voman, and that doesn’t hearken back to the days of the god-awful Doc Marten things I clomped around in in college.

Please help, before I swoon from despair.

* This is a Lena and Olle joke, repeated from memory so don’t blame me if it’s not that funny. I’m terrible at remembering jokes. You have to say Olle’s dialogue in a really thick Norwegian accent.

Olle comes home one afternoon early from work and he walks into his bedroom to see his wife Lena sitting naked on the bed and looking rather startled to see him. “Lena,” says Olle. “What the heck are ya doin’ over there in your birthday suit? We gotta go to the luttefisk supper in a half an hour, now.” And Lena says, “Well, I just don’t have anything to wear!” Whereupon Olle walks over to her closet and opens it, saying, “Don’t be silly, Lena! Why there’sa blue dress, there’s a yella dress, there’s a green dress, there’s a Sven…”