In an aspirational story out of Queens, NY, 28-year-old Alyssa Waterson just stepped out in a pair of shoes that can only be described as “universally inappropriate.”
“I’ve always liked to stand out,” Alyssa told reporters. “I used to wear my mom’s stilettos to elementary school just to be different, and I think you can tell just by looking at me that I wore converse with my prom dress.”
However, Alyssa said that, prior to this pair of shoes –– which seem to be made of both mesh and crystal and contour to every single one of her toes –– she just didn’t find any footwear to be sufficiently inappropriate.
“Rolling down the aisle in my adult Heelys at my sister’s wedding came close,” she said. “But even though I was told my choice of shoes during the ceremony was ‘wildly selfish’ and ‘an embarrassment to the family,’ the Heelys ended up being a huge hit at the afterparty. It was then that I knew I needed to find the shoes that would earn me a side-eye no matter the occasion.”
Alyssa managed to do just that when she purchased this pair of shoes, which seem to be a cross between platform stripper heels, jazz shoes, steel-toed workmen’s boots, and, inexplicably, a live raccoon.
However, not everyone shared Alyssa’s enthusiasm for the shoes she thrifted from a store she described as “there one minute, gone the next.”
“Look, I’m all for a funky pair of shoes,” Alyssa’s roommate, Willa, told reporters. “But these aren’t funky…they’re not anything. They aren’t even good for just wearing around the house. If I’m being frank, they’re inappropriate, nonfunctional, simultaneously too much and too little, distasteful, weird, morally repugnant, and offensive to me on a soul-level.”
Alyssa’s mother, Jeanne, felt similarly.
“I just don’t know where they get the audacity to call themselves shoes,” Jeanne, told reporters. “Whenever she puts them on, I can literally hear the words ‘gay atheist’ as clearly as if someone were standing next to me, whispering them in my ear.”
Jeanne continued, visibly emotional.
“You can’t walk in them, you can’t run in them, you can’t dance in them in spite of the fact that they do, actually, have the metal heel and metal toe of tap shoes, they don’t look good with a dress, they’re a nightmare to wear on the beach, they react weird to water, they’re toxic to animals and small children, they’re somehow less comfortable to wear on a plane than brand new, too-small Doc Marten loafers while also being more nasally-offensive to your fellow passengers than if you just kicked them off and hung out in your shoe-warm socks for the duration of the flight.”
Reporters thanked Jeanne and assured her this was more than enough––
“They’re too fancy for lunch but too casual for dinner. Wearing them to a benefit gala would be a glaring faux pas, but wearing them on the subway platform at night would almost certainly get you robbed. Calling them ‘shoes’ is an insult to cobblers, and no daughter of mine would ever be seen wearing them around. I thought the roller wedding shoes were as bad as it could get, but I was wrong. I was so, so wrong…”
As of press time, in spite of just having been, for all intents and purposes, disowned by her own mother, Alyssa’s stance on the shoes hadn’t changed.
“They’re so ugly-chic and give me the biggest blisters,” she said, fondly.
