My feet's first steps into the world of dance (Part II)

Along with my decision to abandon my lovely black Diamants in favour of avoiding intense pain (and possible nerve damage) came a mild-to-moderate hatred of Latin ballroom shoes. I'd tried literally dozens of shoes from various brands, and nothing came even close to fitting like those Diamants. But I really did need some sort of dance shoe, so I decided to buy a pair of practice shoes:

The ones I got were like these, but in black leather. They are certainly a lot more comfortable than strappy high-heeled sandals, but aren't the prettiest things... and although they're lace-up, they also stretch over time... so, soon enough, my scrawny feet couldn't be snugly held by these shoes unless, in addition to the insoles I already had to use, I also wore thick socks... even less pretty (especially since I never got around to buying thick socks in black, and instead wore my plentiful white sport socks :P). So I set aside my notions of going dancing in nice skirts, and settled for nice tops with pants.

A couple of months later, partially because I started to really want to wear skirts again and partially because by then I was being... um... "strongly encouraged" by my studio to compete in a Pro-Am (beginner-est beginner level), I recommenced my hunt for decent-looking shoes. I needed something in a low heel though (thanks to my conveniently located nerve x_X), and since at least 90% of Latin shoes have at least a 2.5-inch heel, this criterion made my already impossible task even more impossible. So when one store I went to said I could order a style I was interested in in whatever heel-height and front-width I wanted, I decided to give that a try and ordered this shoe from International (plus a left one) in a 2-inch heel:

The guy at the store told me I needed an extra-narrow width front, so I got that as well. And I patiently waited out the two months it was supposed to take, plus an extra couple of weeks for some mysterious delay, until finally my shoes arrived! I tried them on, only to find that the extra-narrow width meant that the upper opening of the front was too narrow, and the sides cut into my feet. Boo... The other thing was actually something I'd been wondering about when I'd ordered, and I don't think the people at the store understood my question when I'd asked about it... It seems that the whole "custom heel" thing really is just that: the heel of your choice. Which means that they just take the shoe that's designed for, say, a 2.5-inch heel and tack on a 2-inch heel instead. But the angle between the front- and mid-sections of the shoe are still intended for a 2.5-inch heel, so if you take the shoe and hold the front flat against the floor, a 2-inch heel will be suspended half an inch above the ground. And then, when you put this chimeric shoe on, you're left balancing on the rounded back edge of the heel that's too short for the shoe it's attached to. I have no idea if this is the case for all brands, especially when they actually let you choose from various heel heights in a drop-down menu when you order online, but I'm not particularly inclined to invest any more money finding out. Fortunately, these shoes I was able to return.

But I had a spotlight performance coming up at my studio (during occasional practice parties, students can perform a short routine with their partner/instructor), and I was sick of having only my black practice shoes, so when I went to return the chimeric Internationals, I bought these:

They're a make I'd never heard of, called Elegance... 2-inch heel, pretty comfortable once I put in some insoles, and I could wear pretty much whatever color with them. And unlike my black practice shoes, these I could actually tighten enough to fit snugly with bare feet, meaning I finally had shoes I could wear a skirt with! Woohoo! And yeah, they're intended to be practice shoes... but they were by far the best find I'd made so far, so these became my "good shoes" that were only for the studio, to keep the soles nice. Because I'd been wearing them out dancing, where people wear street shoes, the soles of my black practice shoes were by then already pretty awful and slippery on the studio floor... so now they became my designated "beater shoes", which I could continue to abuse with impunity.

And abuse them I did! By the time summer rolled around (May, for those of us who are university students), my dance partner had graduated, and not long after that I was wrapping up my own lessons at the ballroom studio -- lessons I'd already purchased months before. I wasn't sure where I'd be in the fall, or even during the summer, so, as much as I loved it, I put the ballroom on hold... but I'd started spending a lot of time in Toronto, dancing salsa in my practice shoes. They've been worn on (dry) pavement and stomped on countless times by dance shoes, street shoes, wedge heels, stilettos and everything in between. So not only are the suede soles a lost cause, but the leather is pretty ravaged in places... and eventually the sole came right off one of the heels:

I affectionately dubbed them my ghetto-ass shoes and continued to wear them all the time, but my acknowledgment of their ghettoness restricted my attire to jeans + tops-of-varying-degrees-of-casualness/niceness (which I guess is probably what I tended to wear anyway). Not that it was great quality to begin with, but even the shoe bag that came with these shoes was starting to get pretty ghetto itself, a hole having been worn in one part, presumably by the heels of the shoes. I continued to use my ghetto-ass bag (to match my ghetto-ass shoes), and the hole gradually grew, and somehow spawned a second hole, until I could put my arm right through the bag without opening it. Eventually, I wasn't even really comfortable calling it a bag anymore:

More like disintegrating-mass-formerly-known-as-bag...

I still used it for a while, despite its highly questionable structural integrity.

I mentioned that this summer I'd been in Toronto a lot for salsa... by "a lot", I mean often four nights a week, occasionally more. I live about 1.5 hours away from Toronto proper (on clear roads, traffic permitting), so I certainly wasn't driving back and forth every day. Fortunately for me, a friend of mine who is as much of a salsa addict as I had become happens to live within blocks of three of the best salsa spots in Toronto, and is awesome enough to let me crash at his place in the name of salsa. So I was saved from being a complete homeless-in-Toronto salsa hobo, with my awesome shoes and "bag", and instead got to be a mere crashing-at-people's-houses salsa bum.

My feet's first steps into the world of dance (Part I)

About a year and one month ago, I started dancing: completely out of the blue, I was invited by a friend to a free beginners' salsa lesson at a local venue, and I had an amazing time despite struggling with the basic step, let alone a right-hand turn. Dancing was something that I'd wished I could do since forever, but it was always that far-off sort of wish, like "Man, I wish I could play the piano..." I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't have taken that first step any time soon if it hadn't been for this, so I'm really, really happy that, that first evening, I'd happened to be feeling miserable enough that I'd badly needed a pick-me-up, but not quite so miserable that I would turn down doing something so randomly spontaneous despite it sounding like it'd be fun.

We started taking lessons the next week.

There isn't much of a salsa scene in my city (and practically nowhere to learn it), so we signed up at a nearby ballroom studio that my friend knew of and started learning almost a dozen different ballroom dances, including salsa. I loved it. Together, we were mostly interested in learning Latin dances (salsa, bachata, merengue, mambo, cha-cha, samba, rumba...), but I absolutely loved waltz and tango as well (and, though I got only a tiny taste of them, Viennese waltz and Argentine tango were even more amazing).

When I started taking lessons, I went in my everyday footwear, which happened to look like this (minus the grimy crap on the toes, which they acquired this past summer):


I've always had a problem finding comfortable shoes for reasons that I'm still not quite sure of (I suspect it has something to do with my arches, or lack thereof, and the fact that my feet are long mostly because I have long toes), so when I stumble upon a pair of shoes that are actually comfortable, I will wear them *everywhere*. So I love these shoes, and it's a good thing that I generally dress very casually (read: jeans + tank/tee/sweater/hoodie), because, well, they're very casual. But what's more, being runners, they *suck* for spinning... uh... and for dancing in general. So, after a couple months of taking lessons, I reluctantly set about finding myself some dance shoes. (I admit I was kind of excited, since this would afford me the added benefit of being able to wear nice clothes -- even skirts (!!) and stuff! -- when I went out dancing. ... I am not generally a skirt person, but I suppose I was getting into the Latin-dance spirit. :P)

Now, I thought I'd always had problems finding regular shoes... turns out those problems did not begin to compare to the impossibility of finding Latin ballroom shoes (not even taking into account that, because they are handmade and generally imported from overseas, there are only a handful of stores in Ontario that sell them, almost all of which are in the GTA... which is a drivable-but-certainly-not-convenient 1-2 hours from where I live).

Latin ballroom shoes seem to take innumerable forms, but tend to look something like this:


The important features to note are that they are (a) high-heeled, (b) strappy, and (c) open-toe (unless they are practice shoes), and each of these aspects can be problematic to dancers with non-average feet. For me, (a) was primarily a nuisance, but a tolerable one. I don't typically wear heels, and when I do, it's for some particular occasion -- and then my feet are assured a nice restful return to the world of flats, where they can proceed to recover from the traumatic experience. This doesn't work so well when you're dancing almost every day, but this problem seemed relatively unavoidable, so I took the "suck it up and deal" approach.

The variety resulting from (b) contributes greatly to the innumerable forms that Latin shoes can take. There's the traditional strap, the T-strap, the cross-strap (around the ankle or around the arch), the double cross-strap, and then miscellaneous variations of the above. I didn't expect that this would be a major consideration for me until I tried on several pairs of shoes and came to the realization that I don't have "big" feet, as I'd always thought (I'm 5'6" and I wear a size 9): I have *long* feet (as mentioned, primarily because I have long toes, which comes back to bite me in the butt for (c)). My feet, not to mention my ankles, are actually pretty damn scrawny. This means that, in order for my foot to actually remain secured in the shoe, my foot itself, not just my ankle, must be tethered down, making the last two options (around-arch cross-strap and double cross-strap) the only viable ones for me. (Ironically, the T-strap style, designed to better hold the foot in the shoe, is actually far worse for my scrawny feet than the traditional strap alone: the T-strap part, connecting the ankle strap to the front of the shoe means that you can only tighten the ankle strap so much before you start contorting the shoe in bizarre ways... i.e., I can't tighten them nearly enough to actually secure my ankle, let alone the rest of my foot.)

But (a) and (b) pale in comparison to (c), which ends up conferring the most impossibility to the task of finding a shoe that fits me. As a rule, larger shoe sizes mean bigger shoes -- not just longer, but also wider and deeper (or "taller", as the case may be). As I said, my feet are scrawny, but they are also flat, in more ways than one. The front couple inches of my feet consist pretty much solely of my stupid, long toes, which, also being scrawny, are not particularly tall... and so my toes slide right through the vast majority of open-toe shoes and onto the floor. This is obviously bad. The fitters at every shoe store I've been to therefore tell me that I need narrow (or extra-narrow) width shoes, so I won't slide through. But my feet are in fact not only average width, but my arches collapse (as opposed to having rigid flat feet), so when I'm standing, my feet are even wider still around the (non-)arch. So narrow-width shoes are too narrow behind the ball of my foot and cut into my feet, yet they're often still too loose around the toe to fit like a glove, as dance shoes ought to. Really, what I need is a shoe that's normal width, but has less of the top material, making for a "flatter" shoe. Unfortunately, they do not make shoes in varying flatnesses. :\

Despite all this, at the second dance shoe store I visited in my search, I found these:


And they were exactly what I was looking for, and best of all (and more importantly), by some strange miracle, they *fit perfectly*. And I didn't even have too much trouble dancing in the 2.8-inch heel, though it would've taken some getting used to to become really comfortable with it.

But it was not to be... after dancing in them a couple of times, once or twice for one hour, and then once for two or three, I couldn't feel my toes. At all. Except for this weird tingly sensation when I wiggled them just right. At first I kind of thought it was the cold (it was freezing out around this time), but no. A weekend went by, and still no feeling had returned. Then a week, then two. And then I just accepted that I no longer had feeling in my toes. I think it was a full two months later that I eventually realized I could feel my toes again.

Now, I liked these shoes so much that I was tempted to just wear them anyway and give up feeling my toes forever. But it was somewhere around this time that my teacher was starting to put more emphasis on proper technique... and apparently my feet are configured such that when I put my weight on the inside of the ball of my foot (as one must in Latin ballroom) while wearing heels over 2 inches, some bone in the ball of my foot is perfectly positioned to crush the hell out of some adjacent nerve, which... hurts. A lot.

So my search for dance shoes continued...