These Nashville boots were made for ...
It was late afternoon on the first autumn-ish day of the year — Saturday, to be exact. It was supposed to be our last patio dinner of the summer. The last hurrah.
Sure, Labour Day is technically summer’s last hurrah but it can also be the busiest weekend of the summer so we pushed it, expecting we’d still get a taste of the sweltering temps that turned us all into sticky frizz balls last week. Um, nope.
So with a fall outfit in mind, I opened my closet door and looked down at a pair of boots, tags still attached.
Was today the day? Would I finally christen these babies? Do I have the nerve? Do I have the outfit? Can I pull them off ?
Back in April, I forced my friends to wait for what felt like hours while I tried on every single pair of cowboy boots in that shop on Lower Broadway, Nashville’s touristy downtown strip.
For those of you who might be planning a trip to the country music capital, be warned you will be tempted by the cowboy boots. I see you shaking your head. No, you’re saying. Not you. You don’t need them or want them and they’re definitely not your style. Yes, I know. I said the same thing.
But then you get there. And it seems like every single person I speak with these days is planning or has just returned from a trip to Nashville. The Tennessee landmark has apparently been overrun by bridal and bachelorette parties of late.
One local, bemoaning the recent influx of rowdy tourists looking for tables upon which they can dance, referred to it as Las Vegas Lite.
And yes, there is a strip of rowdy honky-tonks and plenty of sturdy-looking tables and music pours out of every open window and doorway into the street, making it hard to not get swept up in the atmosphere and wish you were the kind of person who tosses her hair to the wind, throws on a pair of beat-up old boots and hops onto a table, whiskey in hand.
Interspersed between the honky-tonks and barbecue joints, there were boot shops.
So many boot shops.
This one sells five pairs of boots for the price of one. That one boasts a three-for-one deal. This one has marked down all of its boots by 70 per cent.
And so we walked into one, and, after recovering from being walloped in the face with the smell of leather, gazed up at the ceiling-height racks and shelves lined with pointy-toed boots encrusted with rhinestones, embroidery and other embellishments.
It was in the five-for-one place that we caught the bug. We all tried on several pairs of considerable muted versions — boots whose styling leaned more toward moto than cowboy. We live in Ontario, after all, not Alberta, and are therefore more clenched about these things.
After satisfying our initial curiosity about what a pair of $700 jewel-encrusted boots look and feel like on a fish out of water, it could have gone one of two ways: we either lose interest entirely or embark on a mission to find a pair we would actually wear for a price we would actually pay.
My travelling buddies chose the former, I the latter. But they indulged my need to find the perfect pair, as I indulged their need to explore every single boutique near Vanderbilt University a day earlier. It’s what we do.
Of course, I finally found them — a comfortable pair of worn looking brown boots with muted embroidered flowers in forest green, powder blue and ivory — ignoring the cancer-warning tag courtesy of California’s Prop 65, which I’m told is required on anything deemed even a little bit carcinogenic, including beef and leather from cows. And I brought them home. And I waited. When will I ever wear them, they asked? A fair question, but wearing them was not necessarily the point. They are lovely to look at and seemed a far more practical souvenir than a Johnny Cash T-shirt or a cowboy hat I’d never wear.
But to answer their question of when would I ever wear them? How about out for dinner downtown during Canadian Country Music Awards weekend in Hamilton?
I wasn’t the only one in a pair of boots, either, although I can’t say I spotted too many.
And even with the boots, I am far too clenched to stay out late dancing on tables in Nashville North, but I’ve no doubt many of you embraced the spirit and did us proud.