THE PERFECT FOOT
My lover Kelly and I are sitting on the balcony of our bungalow in Paradise. For $4 a day we've rented a bungalow that's made with a coconut wood floor, woven bamboo walls and a coco frond roof. Inside is a bed with a mosquito net, a bathroom with squat toilet and shower. It's 50 feet from the beach on a tropical island in southern Thailand, overlooking warm clear blue-green water of the gulf of Siam. We've just had a lunch of seafood and salad and are now kicked back listening to the mynah birds singing and watching the tropical breezes blowing through the palms.
Plus, we’re smoking some killer weed that the room boy has just brought us for which we paid him $20 for an ounce when we hear, "Umm, that smell good."
"Come and join us." we say and a good looking girl around 25 comes up the steps, introduces herself. She takes a seat then takes a toke. We chat together for awhile with the usual "What’s your name? “Where are you from? “How long have you been here" "Where are you going next?" etc...When we get to what do you do for money, she says, "I'm a shoe model."
We ask her how she got a job like that?
She tells us her story: "I'm from Pennsylvania but a friend of mine and I used to go shopping in New York once a year. Five years ago when we were shopping I saw a pair of shoes that I liked in the window of a shop, so we went in and asked the clerk if he had them in my size and how much they cost. The man, a guy about my fathers age, gets out one of those foot measures, puts first one of my feet in it then the other, looks at it for a minute, then says that he'll be right back and goes into the back of the store. Instead of shoes, he has a different kind of measure and he spends quite a bit of time measuring first my right then my left foot. I think I must have weird feet or something, so I ask him if there was anything wrong. He says, "Wrong? No. In fact, you have perfect feet."
"My friend and I laugh thinking that this is some kind of strange come-on, but he says, "I mean it. Both of your feet are a perfect size 6B and if you like, I can give you the number of a modeling agency that works with shoes. You could make a good living modeling shoes for them." Then he gives me a his card with the agencies phone number on back. "Mention me name when you call them." he says. We left, forgetting all about the shoes that I’d come to see.
When I get home I tell my parents about what happened and they tell me I should give the agency a call, after all, what have I got to loose. I called them mentioning the old shoe clerks name and they gave me an appointment. When I went to see them they spent over an hour measuring and photographing my feet then they tell me that they could get me work in Rome right away. So now I work six or seven months a year in Rome and New York modeling shoes and make over $50,000 a year."
Wow! Talk about lucky. She says, "Don't I know it." I ask her to show me her perfect feet. She does saying, "They're insured for $250,000 each."
I look and they really are pretty little feet, after all they are perfect.