Kinky Boots On Parade

 Macy's Parade

The cast of Kinky Boots on Broadway did a few turns in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, inflaming certain elements of the population, who were shocked that Macy's would have men dancing in drag on TV. One person wondered how, oh, how, he would explain such things to his children, who were sitting in front of the TV, taking it all in.

I seem to remember this. In the front room at my mother's where we were prepping the bird and starches and veggies, the TV was hugely plasmatic about 9:00, filled with the two parades: Detroit's and New York's.
I was getting the wires straightened about for the hot plates. I looked over and saw some figures moving in what seemed to be synchronicity - an event I deemed to be "dancing"... my sight is not all that great and I need new glasses - and heard the announcer yell "Blah, blah, blah, Kinky Boots cast, blah, blah!"


(Now this dancing and synchronicity thing had already been a crux of discussion twixt Moms and Self.
Thanksgiving eve my other had told me she was seeing double. This was the first instance of my accusing her of eating too much bourbon soaked fruit cake - a cake which she had dotted with bourbon that Monday afternoon.

I said that we should mention it to the doctor, and when was the next appointment, and maybe we should move it up a bit.
Now that I had the hook in my mouth, she sought to bury it deeply.
"I don't see everything double. There was a girl at the far end of the lawn. I think she was dancing. I saw two of her."
I asked if she had closed one eye.
"Oh, no. I did not see anything else double. I didn't see the light posts double. The bridge [over the St. Clair River] wasn't double. Just the girl. Now why would that be?"

I said that maybe there were two girls, and that they were dancing.
"I thought of that," she said. "But every movement was the exact same. If it was dancing, it wouldn't be synchronized."

I explained that all dancing was not like that of the Astaire siblings, wherein each partner has their own pattern to follow. There was indeed something - which, I confess, hitherto I had almost completely ignored - called synchronized dancing, synchronized swimming, synchronized swim-dancing... the list is unfortunately interminable.
And the point was, believe it or not, to move in a synchronized manner.

She was having none of it.
A recondite and arcane explanation, reached by some torturous and circuitous logic of the watches of the night, had already occurred to her, and she would give voice.

I realized we had reached a point when she was about to blindside me with science, some explanation which would strain the imagination of even those physicists that still believe in Dark Matter.
So I jumped in. "Well, do you think it was witchcraft, or perhaps some supernatural deal?"

She shook her head, amazed at the depth of my stupidity. How jejune it was, she must have thought, to split the world into your two categories of Sense and Nonsense! Poor schlemiels were her offspring, indeed!)


I just thought briefly that Kinky Boots might be an odd choice for the parade, but that thought was a brief candle extinguished by the hundred mile per hour winds of Hurricane Gobble-Diddly.

Anyway, that is a problem the great minds of the country will have to sort out. Personally, if my parents had mentioned off-hand one Thanksgiving morning that those men on the TV screen liked to dress up as women and dance, I would probably have thought of Halloween costumes, or of Ensign Parker and Tinker of McHale's Navy dressed up in hula skirts.

Of course, I was also devastated when I found out that the Synchronized Marching Lawyers With Briefcases were not really lawyers at all. I should have known.... when I had asked them for their autographs one year, not one had added "Esquire"!

Where was I?
Ah, Kinky Boots.
I actually was watching the 2005 film Kinky Boots this morning at 5:00 am, the punctuated type of watching one does when one is doing something else and needs the reassuring white noise of TV in the background.
I became interested in it. Even though the plot was extremely predictable, some of the characters in the shoe factory were very well done and interesting, and the cinematography by Eigil Bryld was arresting.
The scenes that featured boots and shoes were beautiful. I have never seen shoes that way before. It was as if Vermeer had painted them, and I got a distinct impression-memory of The Girl With The Pearl Earring. The footware did shine, just as does the pearl.

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