THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 16, 1994 TAG: 9409150167
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PAM STARR
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
Longfellows. Barges. Banana peels. Surfboards. Bigfoot. Go on, take your best shot. I've heard 'em all.
I've become immune to the attacks on my king-size feet. It's akin to the feeling you get after someone nags at you continually - your eyes glaze over and you tune them out. Well, that's what I do whenever someone makes a ``cute'' comment about my size 12 feet.
Whoa!
Yes, that's SIZE 12, in ladies', or a 10 1/2 in men's.
There's no way you can EVER make a foot that large look small or dainty, no matter how many salespeople insist that a certain shoe ``cuts my foot in half.'' I've heard enough in this job to recognize a snow job at first remark. And I've never polished my toenails like other women do - why bring more attention to my feet?
At least those guys with foot fetishes bypass me altogether.
But now I have something worse to deal with. I was just told that when a woman is pregnant, her feet grow. One of my friends said that her feet expanded a whole size after she was pregnant. Great.
Doing karate for 18 months in bare feet has widened my feet a bit but at least the length is intact. I'm not pregnant yet, but I want to be soon - until that conversation.
Huge feet run in the family. My dad wears a size 15 and my mom is a size 10. My brother has a size 14, my older sister shares my size, but my younger sister is a tiny size 9 1/2.
It ain't fair. Jan also got the relatively normal height of 5 feet 9, while the rest of the kids are 6-feet plus. Whenever she tells me about the awesome sale on shoes she found I tell her to shut up. You can go into any store and find a pair to try on, I'll say. I go in to a shoe store and feel like a leper when I ask if they have any size 12s.
Nine times out of 10 the clerk will snicker, laugh outright or say something such as ``Size 12? You're kidding! That's some big feet!'' or ``You must be related to Bigfoot!''
I'm not kidding.
Like I would ever comment on a person's obvious physical characteristic: ``Boy, you could ski off that nose!''
Or: ``You know, your rear looks like a Mail Pouch tobacco bag!''
I don't think so.
The rudeness doesn't even faze me anymore. The stores won't have my size, and I'll have to surf through the specialty catalogs. Out of, say, 100 pairs of shoes featured only 10 will go up to a size 12. But they're usually the ugliest ones in the catalog, at twice the cost of the other ones.
The manufacturers must think that women with such huge feet don't want to wear fashionable footwear. The selections resemble orthopedic shoes or, as my mom would say, clodhoppers. I have found some nice-looking shoes, but not without putting in a lot of time, energy and money on my part. And my mom helps by sending me shoes whenever she happens to be in a rare store that sells my size.
I even doubled my casual shoe wardrobe after I married my husband. He wears a size 11 and on occasion I have worn his boat shoes and sneakers. And if he has to take the dog out quickly and his shoes aren't in sight he can slip into a pair of my thongs or tennis shoes. Not that he would admit to it.
A small consolation has been the realization that if I had small feet I would probably fall over half of the time. My feet are in proportion to my height, I tell myself.
So I guess if I get pregnant I'll just have to swallow my pride and start looking through those catalogs for a - gulp - size 13. by CNB