Frankie in Paris Read Free

re-hanging bikinis and listening to grunge
music through a dusty ceiling speaker in a dressing room at Southgate Mall. You
can only listen to Smells Like Teen
Spirit a few hundred times before you wish you could hunt down Kurt Cobain
and ask him what the hell he was thinking.   I know this from personal experience.
    What was I supposed to pack?   How does one prepare for a European
holiday?   Visions of chic black pantsuits
and little red cocktail dresses danced through my head.   I owned neither.   I knew what Lulu would pack:   Liz Claiborne suits and high heels.  
    You can pretty much depend on my grandmother to
wear a designer silk suit—or something that resembles a designer suit:   a boxy blazer and slacks with sharp
creases.   And she always wears super high heel shoes—not necessarily stilettos,
although she does have some of those.   She wears chunky heels, peek-a-boo toe shoes, and shoes with pointy
toes:   When you buy them in a ladies'
size five, they look like midget witch shoes.  
    I imagine—and I’m really not exaggerating—that
she probably owns around one hundred and fifty pairs of shoes.   All of them have heels that add at least two
inches to her height, although I have, on occasion, seen her in four-inchers,
and I am usually afraid that she will trip and break her hip.
    Did I happen to mention that Lulu is almost short
enough to be an official “little person”? She is 4’8’’, if she is standing with
an iron rod back and teases her hair. When she's piloting her enormous car, and
you are driving behind her, you can see her little fluffy white head barely peeking
over the steering wheel.  
    She is one of those little old lady drivers.   Only she is legally blind.  
    Lulu’s footwear is usually very tasteful, but
when you go shopping in the three to four inch heel department, you eventually
run into Lucite or red plastic heel straps.   Sometimes she forays into the tacky shoe territory.   Such was the case when she came to my church
confirmation.    
    I was fourteen at the time:   the prime age for being humiliated by the
physical appearance of any relative, or even letting other people of this age
group know that you actually have a family.   Statistics show that most people have—or have had at some point in their
life—a family.   Try telling that to a
moody, hormonal confirmand.  
    My mother’s mother arrived at my Lutheran
confirmation wearing stilettos with a metallic gold city skyline wrapped from
heel to toe.   It was pretty evident that
she had experienced a lapse in judgment.  
    Now this is not a woman who attends church with
any regularity.   She comes as a visitor,
for the “Big Events”: Christmas Eve, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.   I’m not sure that she realizes that weekly
attendance is an option.   She has a
cousin in Maryland
who is a Lutheran pastor—maybe she thinks this makes her exempt from regular
worship.
    For this   Big Event, she must have panicked when trying to find something suitable
to wear.   She must have forgotten about
the two-dozen classy silk suits that she wears on a daily basis.   She clearly looked in the far reaches of her
many closets—all five bedroom closets in her house are filled with her clothing,
and there are three racks in the garage, bowing with the weight of silk—and
found what she believed to be the perfect outfit for Lutheran Confirmation
Sunday:   a purple suede mini skirt and a
black rayon button up blouse.  
    The stilettos with buildings on them were the
cherry on top.   Or rather, at the
bottom.   There was a New York skyline wrapped around the shoe.   Don't ask me to explain it, because I
probably can't.   Use your imagination on
this one.   Trust me.  
    I have looked everywhere for a photograph of
this outfit, but all I can find are pictures of myself in my white confirmation
poncho-thingy with a constipated look on my face. I think I was just barely
holding back my brain from