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...