Have you checked out the fall shoe styles lately? If your 1950s and 60s grandma shopped where my grandma shopped, then your as stymied by the style pictured above as I am. Me and my cousins had only one name for them.
Grandma shoes.
Nobody under the age of sixty wore shoes like that. We wouldn’t have been caught dead in them, not if we wanted to show our faces without being laughed out of school. Not even my mother, who was a school teacher and thus queen of sensible shoes, wore them because she didn’t want to be laughed out of the teachers’ lounge.
Grandma shoes.
The shoes my grandma wore. In those days she was a big woman. A beefy woman. Stout and matronly, her feet always clad in sensible, totally non-sexy shoes. They were the perfect match for her dowdy print house dresses and her grey hair permed into tight little curls. She was a grandma, not a cool dresser.
And these are not cool shoes.
They are the kind of shoes girls wear when they dress up as little old ladies for Halloween. Or when they’re cast as the grandma in the high school play. I ought to know. I wore a pair – in fact borrowed them from my grandma – when cast as a hard-of-hearing, scotch-tippling nursing home resident in our high school production of The Silver Whistle. The shoes were the finishing touch of a stellar costume, which included a pillow padded bosom and corresponding derrière. The footwear garnered more snickers than the bosom, even amongst high school boys.
Now that’s saying something.
I learned something else during my run as a drunk old lady. Grandma shoes aren’t comfortable. At all. Sure, they stay on your feet and the arch support is top notch, but they have no cushion, no give, no bounce. They suck the spring right out of your step and make you walk funny. Like an old grandma, to be exact.
Think about it.
Who wants to walk old lady sooner than necessary? Maybe women under the age of 50 will give it a whirl since they still think they’re immortal. But for those of us over 50, old ladydom is approaching at lightning speed, and we don’t want to dress the part any sooner than necessary. So I’m not jumping on this fall’s fashion bandwagon, no matter how popular the shoes become. I’m sticking to my footwear guns and hoping something better comes along next year. Ask as often as you like, but my answer will be the same.
No Grandma Shoes for me.
