https://widgetworld3.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/part-3-if-youre-going-to-do-a-job-do-it-right-cinderella/
Canadian pumpkins
Martin Doege
“If you’re going to do a job, do it right”. I took that on board at an early age and anyway, Cinderella was worthy of the best I could offer.
The next problem was the flight of stairs at the palace. There were a lot of them. St Assumpta never held the book up long enough for me to count them all. I rarely got past eleven before she’d move onto the next page, but at a glance there must have been at least thirty. They were all white and shiny, and laid out in a long curving arch that fanned out and down to the road beneath, where her pumpkin was parked when it was a coach. You could see the pumpkin in the picture too. It sat in the middle of the road at the bottom of the steps, surrounded by a few bewildered mice that looked completely out of sorts with their environment. 
Photo: George Shuklin
I often wondered if those mice ever found their way home after the ball. It bothered me some nights before going to sleep. I reckoned that if Cinderella needed a carriage to go to the ball, that palace must have been a couple of miles down the road from her house. I knew she got home safe and sound, albeit at a mad gallop. The book said so. Clearly a couple of miles of a run was no bother to her. And she was fit too, from all the cleaning and scrubbing and washing floors. But what about the mice?
Mice are pretty fit too. In fact I’ve never seen a slow one, unless Minnie our cat hit it a few swipes first. They eat anything and everything and they never get fat because they’re always scuttling around, full of energy. They’re well able to run, that I was sure of.
My real concern was the distance they had to cover. A couple of miles to the bauld Cinderella would seem like hundreds of miles to a mouse. They’ve only tiny little legeens. Climbing a wall be like climbing Mount Everest so imagine what a two-mile hike would feel like to them? To make matters worse their height did them no favours. They’re so close to the ground a dandelion is like a small tree, a pothole the crater of a volcano, a field of grass a forest. Being vertically challenged also made it impossible for them to see more than a few feet ahead. That must make for hard work on a normal day’s travel in familiar surroundings. A strange place like the steps of the palace must have been terrifying. How could they even begin to find the road home or what direction to take home? It occurred to me that perhaps they could follow the direction Cinderella took off in, but if she took a short cut through a field they could be thrown off track. She was so fast and so far ahead they’d be likely to miss it. If they came to a crossroads they’d be ruined entirely. I’ve never heard of a mouse being able to read a signpost. 
Narvik, Norway – 2407 km from North Pole
Markus Bernet
I asked Mother if mice could smell their way home, like dogs. I didn’t tell her why but she told me not to be an egit and lay the table. I had nothing to go on.
Those homeless mice were a worry indeed and after much thought I came to the conclusion that those mice got the rough end of the stick. They were left to their own devices.And did Cinderella care? Not a skerrick. She just casts them adrift in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in the cold, and runs off without them.
Schneewittchen; Darstellung von Alexander Zick (1845 – 1907)
Grot’scher Verlag, Berlin.
Alexander Zick, upload by Adrian Michael wikipedia.org
You wouldn’t catch Snow White neglecting animals like that, not in a million years. She let birds and rabbits and deer and all sorts into her kitchen and the dwarfs didn’t seem to mind. Mind you, she was twice the size of them so she was likely to get her own way. Anyhow, wasn’t she cooking their dinners and washing their smalls, they’d have been right bloody egits to complain. No. In my opinion leaving the mice behind was a big failure on Cinderella’s part and it might have been no harm if she landed on her head going down those steps for such neglect. But she didn’t and I still had shoes to test.
Next on the agenda were stairs.
Tag: Cinderella
Cinderella wasn’t dressed for mass – part 2 testing my theory
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A few factors had to be taken into consideration prior to analysis. First of all I didn’t possess a pair of glass slippers. I only had the leather ankle boots Mother bought us each and every September, to last the winter. Each and every September we were led out, like ducks in a row, to Coen’s shoe shop. ‘Twas in town so we were all dressed in our Sunday best, including Mother.
Mr Coen was a thousand years old, as bald as an American eagle and he wore two pairs of glasses. One were always on his nose, the other hung on a chain around his neck. He called Mother ‘Lily’ which I thought a bit impertinent, considering he wasn’t married to her. Only daddy called her ‘Lily’ and that was only sometimes. Most times he called her Mother, like we did. But Mr Coen was nice so I forgave him that indiscretion.
Van Gogh’s Chair
He would start by greeting Mother and putting out a nice soft chair for her by the window. That way she could watch the street and us at the same time. Then he would set to measuring our feet. One by one we’d have to stand in a metal picture of a shoe and he’d narrow it down until it touched our toes. Then he’d pull it back, just a bit, to give us room for growth. Then he’d tell Mother how big we’d got since last year and pat us on the head. After that, out would come the footwear. God there were millions of shoes in that shop, mostly in boxes. Mr Coen had boxes lined from wall to wall and from ceiling to floor. He had to use the ladder he kept near the till to get to some of them. I always wanted to climb it and so whenever he went within an asses’ roar of the thing I’d offer to help him. 
Alessio Damato
wikipedia.org
Mothers are smart.
Most of the shoeboxes were white. Mr Coen had written the size of the shoes inside with black marker on the edge of every single one of them. No wonder he looked so old. It must have taken him years. Here and there, like currants in a cake, you’d get the odd fancy box. Some were brown with squiggles around the rim, a couple were blue, but there was one red one, right up high, all on its own. I always wondered what it held.
Shoe Fluoroscope on display at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, manufactured by Adrian Shoe Fitter, Inc. circa 1938, that was used in a Washington, DC, shoe store.
The fecker was never happy with the answer.
You’d have to spend the next ten minutes walking up and down the room while he stared at your feet. Then you’d have to stand still as a statue and straight as a tack while he tried to crush your big toe through the top of the boot, then you’d have to walk again. After that you’d have to sit while he tried to pull it off and it laced. In my mind there was no logic to that element of the procedure at all. The whole process took forever. You’d lose the will to live waiting for him to finish.
And all the while Mother would sit in the chair by the window, in her best hat and her best coat and her brown handbag that she only used for business, and she would watch quietly. And by gum, when Mother was watching you did what you were told, without question. Mr Coen could have set the boots and myself on fire to test them and I wouldn’t have uttered a word. But fair play to him, those boots always lasted the winter or until we grew out of them. He knew his job. He sold Mother footwear that went the distance. Of strong and durable leather, not glass.
Jonas Bergsten
wikipedia.org
Because of that, when I undertook my Cinderella tests I had to take into account the strength of my boots. I decided that ‘twas the landing more than the fall I had to concentrate on. If the boot stayed on the step, there was hope for the slipper. If it fell off the step it was bound to chip or break. That being the case the real truth behind the Grimm Brothers would be exposed. They were only a pair of chancers with black spots on their tongues from lying.
Cinderella wasn’t dressed for mass
1899
Wikipedia.org
I was particularly fond of ‘Sleeping Beauty’s’ man. God he was lovely, with his dark brown hair and his big broad shoulders. He had sense too, not like Cinderella’s.
There was a lot wrong with him. Indeed there was a lot wrong with the whole story.
Even as a child I thought it a bit odd that you’d marry someone because they could fit a stray shoe.
And a glass one at that.
Who makes a glass shoe in the first place? That fairy godmother must have been a card short of a deck to send the poor child out in those things.
How did she walk without chipping them and how in heaven’s name did she dance the night away in them?
Why didn’t either one or both of them break on the steps of the palace when she ran home?
The steps were all marble. We had marble steps on the altar of St. Joseph’s and you’d nearly rupture a knee if you knelt too hard for communion. There was a long leather cushion on it and all but that didn’t make a blind bit of difference to you or your knees if you went down too fast.
Thank God they put an end to that.
Now you can stand if you want and you can even get the communion put in your hand.
I like that.
But I learnt plenty about marble steps in the meantime.
The bauld Cinderella wasn’t dressed for mass anyway.
How the hell did she get down those marble stairs with her shoes intact? And how did the shoe that flew off not break?
I reasoned that maybe it was because it was near the ground, as shoes tend to be when you wear them.
It hadn’t far to fall so maybe that was why it survived.
But she was running. They told us so in the book.
There’s an added impediment worthy of consideration.
If you combined her momentum with her angle of descent that shoe should have flown clean off, hit the steps with a clatter and shattered into smithereens, most likely taking half her foot with it. Mind you, if that happened the prince wouldn’t have had to run around the countryside like an egit looking for her. He could have followed the bloody trail of her torn feet home. He mightn’t have been too keen on seeing her though, with her toes in tatters. It would put an end to her dancing as well. No doubt about it.
But even though she ran and even though she ran down marble steps, and even though she wore glass shoes, and even though one fell off, it didn’t break. Why not?
That was a real conundrum for my young mind. .
I thought that maybe it only fell a little bit, or slid more than fell. That might have saved the shoe.
But I had to know for sure.
So I went home and tested my theory.
The Burren and Beyond 