The Red Shoes

Hello, boys 'n girls. I have a treat for you today.

Here they are, the feet that everyone dreams of.

This is what Cinderella's feet looked like at 52.
After jamming her pink pieds into too-small glass stilettos for 35 years.

These are the feet of some Italian peasant woman who has stomped grapes for so many years, her feet have become marinated and ready for the grill.

The feet of a Chinese princess, agonizingly wrapped in tight bandages until the toes turned under and broke under the strain of trying to walk.

If you prance around on stilts for decades, no matter how chic you may look, something awful happens to the feet. They are squished into a pencil point shape, the arches forced into a line parallel to the ankle.

I've seen something called ballet stilettos, which are the ultimate fetish shoe (or at least I think they are - maybe there will be worse ones where women can't walk at all). Literally, you walk on the ends of your toes, the heels jacking up the feet to the point that the top of the foot buckles forward. Oooooooh, sexy.

I don't know what it is with women and feet. They have to be ow-y to be sexy, I guess. Me, I went into ecstasy when I found a pair of gold-and-white high-top Skechers on sale at Winner's for $20. I have one pair of chunky heels, maybe 3 or 4" high, but I always fall off them, and suffer cramped calves the next day. Yes, they make your legs look longer, leaner, sexier, and etc. etc. But look at Sarah Jessica Parker, balanced on skyscrapers that look like extensions of her twiglike, painfully bowlegged thighs. Sexy? You be the judge.

So, OK, I'm coming to it now: whose feet are these, do you think? One hint. Of the four gals from Manhattan, you know, the ones in that new movie, she's been crushing them the longest, which maybe explains their painful array of blisters, corns, bunions, calluses and other hideous pustulating deformities.

She did it voluntarily, of course. There is a price to be paid for beauty. But when she stands up, I'll bet she walks around on tiptoe.

Everyone knows it's slinky

So what's the connection between the image on the left, a coiled spring, an insufferable racket, and bad popcorn?

I'll tell you.

When I'm in the mood for a bad movie, there's no stopping me, so paying about $25 at my local cineplex (named Scotiabank, after the bank that took it over from Paramount) wasn't quite the horror I thought it would be. I wanted some sparkling entertainment, some sleazy laughs. I wanted to see The Girls again.

I did watch Sex and the City. I DO watch it once in a while, '90s relic that it is. The highly improbable sexual frolickings of Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha were usually good for a guffaw, and once in a while you'd even see a flash of nudity.

But now the franchise has moved on to big box movies. They should've stayed on that other box, the smaller one, but never mind. This has very little to do with a pretty bad movie that went on far too long (2 1/2 hours, when a comedy should clock in at about 90 minutes, tops).

For an early matinee, the place was unusually crowded, and I had to climb like a mountain goat to find a seat, popcorn and drink smashed against each other so I wouldn't lose my purse, dripping umbrella (this is Vancouver) and 5000 napkins to keep my jeans from being saturated with grease.

Finally found a seat up in the gods, top row, with a young couple entwined just on my left. I mean entwined, like those photos you see of mating snakes.

And then.

Bom, bom, bom. . .

What walks downstairs, without a care, and makes a slinkety sound?

I swear! I could hear that theme song as a bizarre noise sank into the left side of my head.

Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

This sounded for all the world like the metallic shoop-shoop of an ancient Slinky. But the thing is, it went on and on. And on. And on. And on And Andandnadndndnndd

I had to peek, to see what the hell was producing that sound. The guy was sitting on the left, with his bare forearm on the seat rest.

The girl was rubbing his arm.

And rubbing his arm.

And rubbing

And rubbing

And rubbing

Swoosh, swoosh. Shoop, shoop. Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhh,

shhhhhhhhh.

Now I've sat beside or behind some humdingers, mucus-snorters, knuckle-crackers, popcorn-macerators, but - never this. A "rubber".

It might have been OK, well, more or less, if she'd stopped at some point. But she didn't. She rubbed his forearm all through the previews. She rubbed his forearm all during the opening credits.

SHE RUBBED HIS FOREARM ALL DURING THE GODDAMN FUCKING MOVIE.

The same patch of forearm. Her clothes were some sort of noisy nylon that shhhh-shhhh-ed when she moved, and every few minutes she squirmed around in her seat like a two-year-old being forced to sit still.

I tried everything: shooting them poisonous glances (they probably just thought I was nuts). Eating my popcorn really loud, except that there was someone on the other side eating hers even louder.

An hour went by. Shhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhhh, shhhhhhhhh.

An hour and a half. The Girls went to Abu Dhabi or Timbuktu or somewhere, to get laid. It wasn't funny.

How could this guy have any skin left on his forearm? Why was his forearm suddenly an erogenous zone? Was this just a promise of another kind of rubbing that would happen after the movie? What the fuck was wrong with these people?

At about the two-hour-and-fifteen-minute mark, I was hearing the Slinky jingle in my head and couldn't shut it down:

"It's Slinky, it's Slinky, for fun it's the best of the toys

It's Slinky, it's Slinky, the favorite of girls and boys. . . "

This was preposterous, it was just unendurable, not to mention bizarre. I had to stop it. There had to be a law against public rubbing. I kept thinking how I would phrase my complaint. Excuse me, miss, but you're rubbing your boy friend too loudly in public. Excuse me, people, but you're acting like total weirdos.

I tried to focus on the movie, which was essentially inane and a waste of money (with only one good line: during their Middle East adventure, Samantha spies a desert hunk and exclaims, "It's Lawrence of My Labia!"). It was nothing more than a parade of Pravda and them other guys, who knows who they are.

But the endless, irritating, bizarre shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop-shoop went on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and. . .

I wonder why reality is so full of tortures like this, at least for me. Someone with less sensitive hearing might have ignored it. They were sitting on my left, next to the ear which is constantly attuned.

Finally I said to myself, that's it, this is ruining my $15 movie, I HAVE to do something. I can't just sit here and play victim to a whole lot of obscene shoosh-shoosh while Boyfriend gets a 2 1/2-hour hard-on. So I took a deep breath, and took action.

I got up and moved.