Manolo

Last night we ditched a planned movie outing to go wandering through the Galleria. The appeal of the Apple Store is always great, and yet it always disappoints. There, at 8pm, throngs of Mac-heads crowded the aisles, not as customers but as leaches. Oh, the lure of free internet on pretty machines. That there were as many pockmarked “Geniuses” as customers only added to the congestion. We fled.

The evening’s greatest entertainment came browsing women’s shoes at Nordstrams. Fck-me-pumps (*) at \$400 a foot, perched for all to covet. Singularly fascinating. Not the fck-me part, but the cost: Manolo Blahniks, \$995/pair. And I thought Macs were expensive. Better still was the spectacle of a rude teenager, dressed in a sorority shirt and shorts, rolling her eyes at mother, too concerned with texting and parental embarrassment to realize that mommy would be kindly footing the bill for those pumps, the one’s so desperately important for the upcoming formal. “No mother, those are COPPER!!!”

We ducked into Urban Outfitters on the way out. While Steph pondered hats, I flipped through a stack of low-brow books. I presumed the audience for “what shape is my poo?” and “1001 essential one night stands” might still be trying on shoes at Nordstrams, so I persisted. And then I found it, a book I had to own: 500 Essential Cult Books. Here “cult” meant novels with cult-like followings or cult-like sensibilities. So, Jane Eyre — “early feminist lit” — qualified as easily as Generation X (an old fav) or Valley of the Dolls; Pride and Prejudice (because of Austenites) sat along side Mingus’s Notes From The Underground, and so on. A book about books, perhaps even a book about great books. My kind of late night reading.

* = oh relax, it’s an Amy Winehouse song.