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.

Dolly Parton being sporty

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.

Me being sporty, age 6

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).

My sporty rehearsal/stagewear (photograph: Andrew Cowen)