It’s full-on winter where many of us live, with full-on winter weather, yet some people are still wearing flip flops. At my local coffee shop, people close the door quickly, shiver and remark how cold it is. They wear parkas and puffy coats. They’re in warm pants. Yesterday, a pleasant couple read their Sunday papers, sipping and chatting. Both wore fuzzy vests. Both wore turtlenecks. Both wore winter pants. She wore boots with thick socks. He wore flip flops.
Flip flops do not go with everything. They don’t go everywhere. No, they don’t. Have we learned nothing from that photograph of the women’s soccer team at the white house? There were all those lovely young ladies dressed for a party on top, but then, on the bottom, some of them were wearing flip flops.
We girlfriends talk about how hard it is to get men to dress up these days. One friend’s mate refused to attend a wedding when told he’d need to wear real shoes with his dress clothes. Another friend agrees with him, and says that she prefers not to go any place where she can’t wear sandals. “I’m a casual kind of person,” is the reason she gives. Except her favorite footwear isn’t sandals. It’s flip flops.
People who campaign for their right to wear flip flops everywhere are not always the ones who adhere to good foot-grooming. It’s icky to be looking at someone’s scruffy bare feet when ordering my food in a restaurant. You can’t not see the feet. There’s the foot, and then there’s the rubber thingy between two toes, and then there’s rubber on the bottom. That’s not a shoe.
So the discussion continues, with both sides making their points. Here’s my argument: Flip flops are not shoes. Nuh uh. Are not.
© Anita Garner 2010
Tags: dressing up, real shoes, sandals, soccer team in flip flops, White House
A wonderfully entertaining post with a great deal of old-fashioned Southern wisdom. (I don’t know why I invoked the South in that comment. Your views simply seem well and properly grounded in your church social upbringing.)
Here in SoCal, as you well know, we rarely have a day of “full-on winter” and people wear flip-flops and shorts everywhere, everyday. I don’t take offense at restaurants so much but it annoys me to no end to watch people buying Christmas trees in flip-flop and shorts.
Notice, I have added shorts to the discussion to take some of the pressure off flip-flops. I don’t even own a pair of the torturous things but I’m often worse. I have four pairs of Crocks.
Oops. I mean “Crocs.” ®
Here in North Dakota, it’s -5 degrees and students are outside on their way to class wearing pajamas and flip flops - sliding across the ice on their way to the building across campus. The parent in me wants to take them by the shoulders and shake them until their teeth fall out. Each semester I get on my high horse to lecture them about appropriate footwear for music performance ensembles and still I get some yahoo that arrives in “new” or “formal” flip-flops - whatever the heck FORMAL flip flops are. I send them back to change. The entire idea of “formal” wear is gone. It’s not just here (way off the beaten path), it’s everywhere.