On Mumps and Pules

IT'S TIME ONCE AGAIN to pack -- this time for a three-week jaunt to Massachusetts, New York, and then France for a drive-it-yourself, drain-your-own-locks, uncork-your-own-bottle barge trip in Burgundy with my friends Julian, Barbara, Rita, Neville, and Elise. More on that, of course, as it unfolds.

During my last trip with this group -- to Tuscany -- Elise, Rita, and I wandered into Siena so Elise could grab a fix for the shoe-shopping-obsessed monkey on her back. Strolling through the city's winding, cobbled streets, we stopped to look in a shop window that displayed more than a few pairs of shoes where the design of the right and left were identical except that one was backless and the other not, and I commented that that was a fascinating fashion that I had never seen before. The two of them looked at me with that expression women reserve only for men when discussing fashion that says clearly but without the actual words, "you are such a moron," and informed me that they were only for display and one was called a pump and the other was a mule, and of course they were not the same pair, but just for display to show that the design was available in both styles.

But then we passed another store with more identically designed shoes in mixed backed/back-less pairs, and I told them that I thought perhaps for once it was the gentler sex (gentler on the surface, actually, and at times quite vicious just below it) that was lacking in shoe style, and that indeed the latest thing was to wear one shoe with a back and one without. Perhaps some Tuscan cobbler-genius, likely a man, had come up with this, and these new pairs of shoes were quite de rigueur. Perhaps they had a name that transcended the mule or the pump. Perhaps they were called "pules" or "mumps."

Rita, the stylish and worldly Type A-personality chairman of a highly respected multinational management consulting firm, dismissed the idea with an I-am-the-chairman-of-a-highly-respected-multinational-
management-consulting-firm-and-you-are-a-clueless-idiot wave of her hand. I think her exact words were, "Pfft." Elise piped in to say it would be impossible to walk in a pair of shoes like that because you would have to clench the toes in one foot (to which I sensibly replied that men have been designing cruel and impossible-to-wear women's footwear for centuries and that was certainly no argument for why these displays were not offering a new and fabulous way for women to look good while at the same time submitting to their societal subjugation by men).

At the third window with yet another enticingly displayed array of mumps, I felt more emboldened, and I told Rita that I was surprised such a stylish and worldly woman as herself was unaware of this new trend. What fashion magazines does she read on all these plane trips she complains about having to take, or does she just read the emergency cards in the seat backs? I told her that just because she never saw a woman wearing pules, it didn't mean that if she walked down Fifth Avenue wearing a pair on her next trip to New York, that in a year the city would not be filled with women shuffling down the streets with the toes of one foot clenched in the backless halves of their mismatched shoes.

Obviously, I struck a nerve because Rita, undoubtedly insecure about the possibility that the world of high-level international megacorporation machinations in which she was immersed had made her oblivious to the popular culture that was evolving around her, began to doubt herself, and by the fourth mump-filled window we came to, I think she was actually envisioning herself limping chic-ly down the Champs d'Elysees, clenching the toes on one foot. It was this store that Elise decided to enter to try on an ordinary pair of shoes, and Rita and I followed her in. As Elise absorbed herself in her purchasing experience, I finally convinced Rita of her narrowmindedness and lack of imagination, but told her, "if you don't believe me, just ask that salesman."

So Rita walked up to the man, and very politely, if just a tad uncharacteristically lacking in confidence, asked, "Excuse me, Signore, but perhaps you can tell me: Are these shoes two different pairs, or is this the way one is supposed to wear them, with the pump on one foot and the mule on the other?"

The salesman stared at her for a moment with that look that Europeans reserve only for Americans that says clearly but without the actual words, "you are such a moron," and told her "of course they are not the same pair, Signorina" -- I suspect this "Signorina" business was a bit of condescension on his part, especially the way he italicized it -- "but just for display to show that the design is available in both styles."

I think I started to cry, I was laughing so hard, and after Rita was a safe enough distance from the store to stop blushing, she thought it was pretty funny, too. But I was forced to buy her two gelati at the next caffe to keep her from killing me.

To get Rita excited about this next adventure, I have told her that in June all mismatched pairs of shoes go on sale in Burgundian chausseuries, and I have promised to go with her and stand outside while she steps inside and asks self-abashing questions of the sales clerks. (Hey, I need material to keep my readers amused, and I can use all the help I can get.)

Watch this space.