I Never Owned No Sensible Shoes
On Sporty Models, Dolly Parton, Sweat Clothes & Linda Ronstadt's Wise Words
First thing I saw when I woke up this morning was the headline of an article my friend Karin sent me that read ‘Dolly Parton doesn’t wear sweat pants’. Karin knows me pretty well. Until reasonably recently, I was definitely in the anti-sweatpants-brigade. Or as Dolly calls them, ‘sweat clothes’. She does admit to having what she calls her ‘baby clothes’ cos they’re ‘soft like a baby’. She also reveals she has ‘tennis shoes with little rhinestones’ she slips on to exercise. I like to call my trackies my ‘soft pants’, a little something I picked up in the South. And I will admit to really wanting to buy Barbara Streisand’s beige cashmere sweat pants when I happened upon them somehow on eBay once, but when I saw the price tag I realised they weren’t for me.
I did try to be sporty. It always just seemed to be beyond my comprehension, out of my hands. I have always had a penchant for tennis wear and my big brother Josh was a trophy winning tennis player, so sometimes as a kid I’d hang around the courts where he’d practise and ask him for lessons, so I could justify wearing the outfit. ‘Nup, there’s no point’ he’d reply, knowing me better than I knew myself. I soon realised that tennis balls cut in half were the perfect size to stuff a bra with, so I started doing that instead, and focussed my energies on collecting the errant balls for my brother. When I grew up and could fill my bra unaided, I adopted tennis-wear-as-stage-wear, complete with a visor and white high heels for quite some time.
I have always had trouble with my left and right and struggled with my coordination, so I didn’t participate in any of the schoolyard sporting activities, no jump rope or skipping games or elastics for me, not even kiss-chasy. I can neither throw nor catch a ball without great confusion. I was intrigued by the idea of baseball at primary school because the uniform was some pretty cute red knickerbockers, but I apparently held the bat like I was playing cricket at tryouts and the kids groaned and the teacher told me I should just sit down and read under a tree for the rest of the term while baseball was on, relieving me of my sporting fantasies. I pretended I was glad, and didn’t care, but I remained confused all term about what had happened until I finally realised you were meant to hold the bat over your shoulder.
My friend Betsy reminded me recently that when we first met many many years ago she invited me on a bushwalk and I replied that the only place I ever walked was to the shop for cigarettes. It could have something to do with the fact that I never owned any sensible footwear until the last few years, and high heels are not really conducive to bushwalking. I even put the lyric ‘I never owned no sensible shoes, and thats the truth’ in a song, so it must be the semi-truth (not really).
A couple of years ago, when I’d just started getting into trying to be fit and was taking a lot of hardcore power walks around my neighbourhood in slip on wedge heels, which were my version of sensible footwear, my husband insisted on taking me to the Glendale Galleria to buy some sneakers. I fought him tooth and nail, I simply couldn’t envisage myself in a pair of sneakers. They just wouldn’t go with my dresses. My feet got too hot in them. I fell over in them, they were too big and bulky. He convinced me to just try a pair on and buy them, just so I had the option. Finally, to shut him up, I shoved my foot in one that fit, that didn’t seem too outlandish or offensive, and as was I nominally agreeing they were possibly quite comfortable, I suddenly found myself choking up, right there in the Adidas store. I didn’t even know why. I could only think of the story of a girl I knew whose husband had jokingly said he wished she came in ‘a sporty model’ too.
I would think a psychiatrist might suggest that my sneakers phobia and ‘difficult relationship’ with sport in general, stemmed from a defensive position. As they say in basketball ‘The best defence is an offense’. I’ll pay myself $200 later for that. I knew that to get over a phobia you have to confront it, so I put the damn sneakers on when we got home and set off for my ‘power’ stroll, which somehow turned into an almost jog. The sneakers were really bouncy and supremely comfortable. They might even have assisted me some. Maybe the rest of the world was on to something.Â
I’m a musician. Sport is like a very foreign language to me. My exercise has always come from lugging amps and babies and running up and down my impossibly steep dilapidated stairs and working a variety of weird hard labour jobs. I’ve opened up to attempting to be more open to an active life and being physically outgoing in recent years. I’m now a fan of a good workout as often as I can manage, which sometimes isn’t very often. But some years ago, arriving in Los Angeles fresh from living the good life on a farm in Georgia, and feeling a little peachy after living a life fuelled by French fries ( the only reliable vegetarian food I could find eating out in the South), frozen pizza, wine and midnight dinners, I decided to try exercising for a crazy lark.
There was a CardioBarre class not too far from where I was staying, on Sunset Boulevarde. I didn’t know what this ‘cardio’ thing was, but I liked leotards and pointing my toes and standing up super straight imagining I looked like a ballerina and so I figured it would be right up my alley.Â
If my alley was a comedy of errors it would have been.
I took my purse (or handbag or pocketbook depending where you are) into class with me and placed it at my feet at the barre. It wasn’t til we were going at it hell for leather that I realised everyone else had sensibly put theirs away in a locker. Mine, on the floor next to me, was constantly underfoot, in the way, spilling out its mess.
The students were a veritable variety pack of California Girls, all dressed in matching, flattering ‘active wear’ with highlit hair, pumped up pouts and insanely long eyelashes. I had two-inch black roots, an ill-fitting old t-shirt of Aden’s and those terrible cheap leggings one buys at Walmart or Target that immediately burst at the seams and show your underwear to strangers. I was barefoot, with a nasty red exczema rash on my ankle that did not endear me to my glamorous Stepford Wives-go-to-Hollywood neighbours.
The class was led by the impeccably named Rocky, a short, elegant body builder type in a hot pink ensemble, who barked encouragingly and nonstop ‘You got this sister!’ ‘C’mon mama, work those glutes!’, as I jumped and floundered around, wondering what the hell a glute was and having so much trouble identifying my left from my right that I would have been a great Saturday Night Live sketch if anyone had been looking at anyone but themselves. I wasn’t half as fit as I imagined I was and worked up a sweat pretty quick, seeming to be huffing and puffing far more than my Hollywood sisters. Practise makes perfect, I told myself, persevere! Â
An enticingly refreshing water spray bottle placed by the barre seemed to beckon suggestively through the sweaty haze and I made my way to it, spraying my face lavishly in an effort to cool down and keep up. As my eyes began to burn, the smell hit my nasal passages – this was not water but methylated spirits. What the fuck. I raced to the bathroom and washed my face with copious amounts of tap water then soapy water, until mascara was streaked all over my face and my hair was dripping, stuck to me. I couldn’t budge the black track-marks on my face so I gave up on my dignity and steeled myself to re-enter the class and explain my situation, expecting some sympathy and some empathetic giggles at least, only to discover that no one batted an eyelid nor would they even make eye contact. Years of witnessing the weirdest shit possible in Hollywood had all but inured them to any and all human calamity. Carry on girls. Tits’n’teeth.Â
I resumed my position and returned to working my abs and my core and other things I never knew I had as though nothing had never happened, despite the obvious physical evidence to the contrary.
When it was over, and it was time to pay the impossibly gorgeous, cool and coiffed fiddler at the front desk, she informed me first class was free in a bored tone like she had to repeat the same sentence all day, which maybe she did and then with an sudden attempt at sincerity, enquired how I went. So, I told her the whole sorry story of the methylated spirits and politely and helpfully suggested they should probably write on the bottle what it contained. I said it with the confidence that she would be horrified by their oversight and appalled by my terrible plight and terrified of being sued. She simply blinked, looked at me with the complete and utter blankness of a baby before smiling brightly and asking if there would be anything else. I didn’t bother answering, just fake smiled back through gritted teeth, and made my way outside to join the Sunset Boulevard throng of hobbling, scratchy, living skeletons and tattered superheroes, fitting right in, momentarily safe amongst the freaks before I made it home to the relative sanity of the Hollywood Hills.
A little while ago, now back living in Australia, I headed to the local park with my family and a ball to shake a little action. Suddenly we were playing a ball game with rules about passing and kicking and invisible lines that bewildered me so utterly, I felt impossibly frustrated like a rat stuck in a maze. All the feelings I experienced as a kid completely unable to join in normal activities with the others around me surfaced, and I burst into hot tears and had to stop playing. My youngest son came and hugged me and said we could just play catch if I wanted, which he knows is my favourite sport; literally just gently throwing a ball back and forth, preferably with a toddler. I can do it for hours.Â
Competitiveness always felt wrong to me. I simply have no interest in ‘winning’. Sometimes I wish I did. I just want to create stuff, do things I love, work hard to feel proud of my own achievements. I am definitely a team player when it comes to bands, I just don’t like teams. Though I do love matching outfits.
Linda Ronstadt obviously also liked a bit of sporty attire, apparently wearing shorts, Dodgers jacket and roller-skates to sing the national anthem at a World Series game against the New York Yankees at Dodger Stadium before wearing the same ensemble on her ‘Living In The USA’ album cover that is seared into the minds of anyone who was alive then, says ‘I always thought competition was for horse races and it never belonged in art’. Linda also pointed out ‘In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.’Â
I’m on Linda’s team. Let’s play music.
Dear Loene,
Enjoyed this so much. I understand the anger regarding sport’s alignment of free and joyful physical movement with rules and competition, even though I had sporty siblings who were very patient. I feel like this playing that horrible Singstar karaoke game, which isn’t about music at all.
And I have kids who have taught me how to play cards happily. Thanks for your fine words.