I have known Vicki for a long time. Her story doesn’t surprise me. She is exuberant, funny and strong-willed. We share a certain irreverent humor. It doesn’t surprise me that she was getting her way as a young girl in such a unique way. She shared her story after seeing SHOE CONFESSIONS. Read on and you too will fall in love with Vicki.
“When I was just seven years old, my mom noticed that my feet had a pronation. For those who have never heard of such a thing (I had no idea what that was either), it’s when your feet start to turn either inward or outward more than is normal. Kids who have a pronation typically run their shoes over on one side or the other, something no child of my mother’s was going to do!
So the only solution to this horror was for me to be stuck in dark brown orthopedic shoes. Yes, at the tender age of seven when a girl is just beginning to experience girlhood and when you’ve moved into 2nd grade and cute boys are all around you, your mom decides that brogans (as the kids used to call them) were your only shoe choice! I was mortified because even at the age of seven, I was very into being a pretty girl and pretty girls definitely did not where brogans! So for three years I had to wear these ugly, clumsy-looking brown shoes to school and be the brunt of jokes, or at least that’s what I told my mom. Truth is, I discovered a way out of this shoe dilemma early in the game in the form of my best friend Janice Parker, who had a pronation far more extreme than mine and who gladly traded shoes with me every day at school. Janice wore the latest style saddle shoes, the ones with the little buckle on the back of the heel. She wanted to correct her pronation but said her mom couldn’t afford to buy her orthopedic shoes (they cost a slight fortune), so she happily switched shoes with me. I had no interest in correcting anything except my status as a pretty girl. So every day I traded shoes with Janice at the beginning of the school day and switched back to my ugly brogans at the end of the school day with my mom being none the wiser. I guess I really only needed to wear them half a day anyway because my pronation went away after 3 years. To the day my mom died, I told her the reason I have 3 closets filled with shoes is because she made me wear those hideous shoes in my formative years, depriving me of the joy of wearing fashionable shoes like all the other pretty girls.” -Vicki Meek
Vicki Meek is the Manager of the South Dallas Cultural Center.
Now it’s your turn. Share your shoe story today for a chance to be included in our film.
