Delman Shoe Sale: Portrait of a Lady

Dara writes:

When my mother asked me yesterday if I wanted to accompany her to the sample sale of a shoe company whose elegant footwear I admire, Delman, I quickly said yes. But when I arrived, I almost very quickly lost my lunch.

What I walked into was a sea of writhing bodies, women on their haunches, on their knees, bending over, waving their arms about, fighting one another for a delicate pink nubuck ballet flat or a flame-red strappy stiletto. My immediate thought was one of revulsion: "I am not one of these beasts with no dignity."

Ah friends, but I am. Who wouldn't in her right mind crawl on a floor, however soiled, if the end result were a tasty set of sling-backs on the cheap?

I am a prude. There, I have said it. My mother, however, is a maniac. She dove right into the fray, sleeves up, ready for a jousting. And she came out with one suede, one floral-patterned lovely of her very own. When it comes to bargains, Mother comes with her boxing gloves on.

The dueling began at the coat check. According to my mother, she was pushed by a woman which caused her to knock into another woman. This other woman groaned loudly. My mother of course apologized, to which the woman responded, "I've just had a lumpectomy." My mother is beside herself: "My goodness, I'm so very sorry," to which the woman then responds, "just kidding." Then my mother was really beside herself. "Just kidding. Just kidding? That is JUST NOT FUNNY." The woman and her friend thought my mother a tad prissy. Then they saw her on the shoe floor and knew otherwise.

I noted the aptness of the shoe sale's being in the Playboy building. Playboy, like popular companies who hold shoe sample sales, debases women. But that's not right. Playboy allows women to act out our baser (sexual) instincts, but it's not liberating because it's only for men. Shoe companies allow women to get in touch with our bestial sides purely for our own self-advancement. And I embrace that (or attempt to).

Tar-jay

You've heard hipster friends on Bedford Avenue call the discount mega-store by this quasi-Gallic moniker, right? Tar-ge, as though there were an accent aigue over the "e," as though this nickname conferred on the speaker both pride and self-consciousness in her patronage.

I too found my first visit to Target, at a strip mall outside of Baltimore, transcendent, and I too bought $15 plether Isaac Mizrahi pumps that fell apart in three weeks. I agree the store exceeds Kmart in style and Walmart in integrity. But the latest issue of the New Yorker gives me pause.

Is Target too hip to be square with us that what it calls an artistic "project" spanning numerous pages is just one long ad? And for what, I ask? Don't be fooled, right: coming to an abandoned Gristedes near you, I'm sure. But the absence of actual ad content made the spread more insidious.

Put it another way: I don't like to feel that the supposedly intelligent magazine I'm reading is something I could have picked up along with the weekly circular in one of those metal bins at the front of the store.

And I was going to post about Anthony Lane and how I'd weathered being sick of his literary cuteness and reverted back to savoring his bitsy metaphors and sharing his nostalgia for the 1930s--speaking of the hunky but thin-voiced love object of a new flick he writes, "Where have all the vocal coaches gone?"--when instead I was distracted by the sense what I had in my hands wasn't a magazine at all but a Target mailer.