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.