Trisha attended an AOPi sorority banquet with Jay Williams at the Georgia Center, a large conference center on-campus. It was a semi-formal event so she wore a nice black dress, black hose and black closed-toed 2-inch mules with a cute bow adornment. She wanted to look her best for this event because she was to receive an award for being the Outstanding Sophomore of the spring semester and also because she had a handsome date, Jay, who was a Beta Theta Pi.
Jay arrived in his Acura Integra and picked up Trisha outside her sorority house. He complimented her for looking so nice and pretty that evening, which she did. Although he didn’t mention it out loud, what really made the outfit work for him was the black hose and the suede mules and how her feet moved gracefully in them as each shoe slapped quietly against her feet with each step. Soon they left for the conference center and talked about what was going to occur during at the banquet and about how they had secured Atlanta humorist Rheta Grimsley Johnson to be the keynote speaker.
The passenger seat was pushed far back - Jay’s roommate and frequent passenger was 6 ft. 3 in. - so Trisha had ample even excessive legroom. This extra room allowed Trisha to cross her right leg over her left and eventually engage in some shoe dangling and bouncing which Jay enjoyed watching when he got a chance. He had to be careful to avoid having a wreck a couple of times on their 2-mile trek across town. She noticed his glances so she began to dangle a bit more playfully by twirling her foot and popping the mule against her foot in rhythm. During a quick brake, the dangling shoe flew off and landed on the floorboard on Jay’s side of the car. Jay looked over and Trisha was flexing her nylon-encased toes almost as if she was asking for him to replace her shoe for her. Jay reached down and found the shoe wedged in between the floorboard and the accelerator. He picked it up and slowly slid it back on her foot, while taking advantage of the opportunity to slide his pinky finger along the side of her soft nylon foot. This seemed to tickle her slightly.
A little later they parked at the conference center. They were dressed nice enough for there to be valet parking but no such luxury existed. They hurriedly walked upstairs out of the basement-parking garage toward their banquet room. Jay had Trisha lead the way so he could enjoy watching her heels maneuver the stairs. About halfway up the second flight of stairs, Trisha decided to have some fun with Jay. Her right shoe “accidentally” fell off and bounced down to the landing making a loud noise in the concrete-walled and otherwise empty stairwell. This “accident” took little effort - all she had to do was relax the grip of her toes for a split-second which was the only thing keeping them on in the first place. She had only intended for the shoe to land on the step immediately below, and was a little embarrassed that it traveled so far down before stopping.
“Oops! exclaimed Trisha as she stopped her trek up the stairs abruptly.
Jay saw the whole thing occur and immediately hopped down to retrieve Trisha’s shoe while she stood with one foot with a shoe on a stair and the other one without a shoe balanced a few inches up in the air. Jay knelt down and slowly slipped the shoe back on her foot like a prince for the second time that evening.
“Your shoes are light as a feather and they seem to slide on and off pretty easily, don’t they?”
“Yeah, we women are always exchanging practicality for style, I suppose. They’re comfortable and they match this dress perfectly.” (And they me look incredible - she thought but dared not say)
They arrived to the banquet room and signed in and stood around introducing themselves to mostly guests of the sorority sisters, but also Rheta Grimsley Johnson. The seating was arranged with a head table containing sorority officers, their guests and the main speaker. There were two long tables arranged parallel to each other and lined up with the ends of the head table. Seating was on both sides of each table. There were about 150 in attendance - a very good turnout for this special event.
Soon after they were seated, the meals came and there was a lot of good conversation. Trisha and Jay were seated near Amber, Jeannie, Shelley and their guests, all fraternity guys from different houses on campus. Trisha started out sitting with both feet flat on the floor and then eventually crossed her right foot over the left (the same shoe that had already fallen off twice). She immediately dangled, performing foot acrobatics, as the shoe slipped down to her toes and she was able to stop the shoe from sliding of by flipping her toes upward, knocking the shoe back down. This happened multiple times. As dinner concluded and dessert began, the conversation got a bit more festive, causing Trisha to have a dangle misfire and the shoe fell off.
Not wanting to call attention to herself, she uncrossed her legs and reached with her bare foot as far as she could trying to find the shoe, but she was unknowingly just a little out of reach. She realized she might have to wait until the end of the banquet, or maybe there would be a break, to locate her shoe, but that would cause a problem when it came time for her to walk to the front and accept her award. She decided to look for an opportunity to look under the table.
Meanwhile Shelley, who was sitting to the left and facing her, had felt something hit her leg and it was indeed Trisha’s dangled shoe when it came off. Knowing Trisha's infamous shoe history, and being jealous that she had defeated her for the Sophomore award, she reached with her foot and pulled her shoe over closer to her and next to her purse. She excused herself and, as a prank, reached down under the table without looking and opened her purse, stuck the shoe in it and left toward the restroom. On the way, Shelley saw a table with a tray of dishes sitting on it. She took the shoe out of her purse and sat it on the table behind the tray of dishes. She planned on someone coming to get the tray of dishes, seeing the shoe and coming over to the table to locate the owner, thus embarrassing Trisha a bit - maybe someone would make a crack about sipping champagne out of a slipper or something.
While she was in the restroom, however, the busboy came and wheeled the cart away completely and took it downstairs through the service elevator and into the dishwasher area. There were trays from six other banquets in the area in the queue to be unloaded and washed. When Shelley returned she saw a new cart was in the place of the old one and that an empty dish tray was there with no shoe. She worried about what to do now; this prank was going further than she wanted. The emcee announced a 10-minute break before the keynote speaker and the awards ceremony and Trisha sat back in her chair to glance under the table for her shoe.
She looked all around for her other shoe to no avail. She leaned over and whispered to Jay, “Remember that shoe that came off in the car and in the stairs, it came off under the table during dinner and now it's gone!"
“Where could it have gone? I’ll help you look by going over to the other side to see if it fell across to the other side or something.” Jay had no success finding it either, but he did enjoy crawling on the floor and getting some glances at her black nylons and one dainty mule..
Shelley, meanwhile, during the break got the attention of one of the servers who went back to the kitchen to tell the staff what to look for. They were curious about how a shoe ended up on the dirty dish tray, but she only said it was an accident. Shortly after that, the emcee called everyone back to order and Ms. Johnson began her speech. So far, no one had noticed that Trisha was missing a shoe but Shelley knew it and was paying attention to what Trisha was doing. During the keynote, Trisha sat with her stocking foot on the floor and dangled her left shoe nervously but managed to keep it on somehow, despite active dangling and bouncing off her foot.
The awards ceremony started and the kitchen staff had yet to find the shoe and bring it out to Trisha as Shelley had requested. Trisha pondered asking Amber or Jeannie if she could borrow their shoes to go to get the award. She glanced at Amber’s feet and saw that she was wearing tan slingbacks - a color that would look awful with black hose. She looked the other way to Jeannie’s feet and saw she was wearing a pair of brown demi-boots - another awful style and color for her dressy black dress.
Trisha was still nervous about losing her shoe and having to walk to the front that way.
Jay suggested, “Why don’t you take the other shoe off and walk up there in stockings. I've seen ladies - Helen Hunt for example - do that at the Oscars."
“I don’t know, I really feel weird going up with no shoes at all.”
“What’s the better choice?”
Trisha eventually decided that was a good idea and that it would attract less attention. It would look like she was being comfortable instead of missing a shoe. Her time came and this strategy worked fine. In fact, all around the banquet hall, of those girls in the sorority who noticed her stocking feet, about half of them removed their own shoes to be more comfortable. The subsequent Junior and Senior class point winners each left their uncomfortable heels under the table and went to accept their awards in stocking feet.
Shelley was partly disappointed that her plan to embarrass Trisha had backfired, but she also felt less guilty about her escalated prank because of how the situation had turned around to Trisha’s advantage. Instead of being made fun of for missing a shoe, she was being silently applauded for having the guts to accept her award in comfort instead of agonizing in high heels.
Dinner was over and everyone began to leave after first offering their congratulations to Trisha and the others who received awards. Trisha and Jay lingered afterwards to better search for her missing shoe some more. After a few minutes of futile searching and pulling out every chair and looking under much of their table, they gave up. It just seemed to disappear into thin air.
Trisha carried her single mule in her hand by the heel and twirled it like a top while gliding across the carpet in her stocking feet. Her loss would be less obvious unless someone noticed she was only carrying one shoe. As they started to leave, one of the servers approached them and asked if this (holding shoe) was her missing shoe?
Trisha was elated and asked, “Where did you find it?”
“It ended up in the kitchen with the dirty dishes somehow.”
She happily accepted it, put both shoes back on and they continued on back to the car. Trisha and Jay discussed the mystery but decided that one shoe was just a troublemaker and never did link Shelley to the prank.
This was Trisha and Jay’s last date before the end of the semester. Jay stayed in summer school in Athens over the summer and worked part time in the Men’s’ Department at the Rich’s in the Georgia Square Mall.
NOTE: This story can also be found at Dangling.Com.
