Self confidence, with ego in check, and a quick wit

Here’s a shoe story for you Liz–––– This from an essay on John O’Hara by Larry McMurtry: O’Hara prided himself on a certain comphrehensive knowingness, but his knowingness was of a sort that will make him the most heavily footnoted writers of all time, if his reputation does recover. [he gives several examples, I will give you the one that has to do with shoes] *In the years that she had been Mr. Monkton’s secretary Mary had had to learn about Charvet and Peal and those people. she knew how much it cost to have a pair of shoes sent back to Peal for rebuilding.* Charvet sails over me like a wild pitch, but I do know that Peal was a firm of English bootmakers, now defunct; I know that because my agent, Irving Lazar, as much a dandy and as much an Anglophile as John O’Hara, once had his shoes made there. I don’t know for a fact that it was his Peal shoes that did Irving in, but it does seem that his refusal to religuish his tight-fitting, custom made English shoes began his swift decline. What, be seen on the dance floor without his English shoes? Those fine shoes proved to be fine killers in fact. they cut off his circulation; he got gangrene, a bad disease for a dandy to have. Eventually it cost him a foot, then his life. The last time he took me to Chasen’s he wept in bitter humiliation because he had to dine in tennis shoes. And that’s a John O’Hara story if I’ve ever read one.

Ah, yes! That’s what I keep telling myself. If I ever get close to a man again, it’ll be one who puts on a fresh laundered shirt and a well-chosen tie at least once a day. A man who cares about shoes would just be over the top for me.

Yes Liz, No sense of desperation in men. We are all maturing together, no need to panic.

Girls, have fun, its so funny! If I ever found a man that was mature enough to see that he was in the wrong, I would marry again.