Yesterday evening and again this morning, I couldn't help but notice the proliferation of abandoned running shoes, or sneakers, in town. Okay, so two pairs perhaps doesn't constitute a proliferation, but if one sighting is odd, what does that make two?
And these shoes weren't simply lying on the sidewalk or tossed to the side of the street. Both pairs were prominently displayed as if someone wanted them to be spotted by all passing motorists. Tied together by their laces, one pair was hanging from a hydro wire stretched across a main road while the other was suspended from the horizontal arm of a traffic light at a popular intersection. Hmmmm.....
Is there a secret movement, um...afoot?
2 comments:
I googled "hanging sneakers" and found the following site:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/factoids/a/sneakers.htm
Check out the "Straight Dope" link in that posting.
Have you ever seen the movie Wag the Dog? That was the first time I saw any sort of "reason" for the hanging sneakers, but obviously the concept goes back long before the movie. It's an interesting movie, especially in light of what happened to Bill Clinton shortly afterwards. And I found this piece of trivia about the movie: "The scene in which shoes laced together are hanging from telephone and electric wires was shot on East Capitol Street a few blocks behind the U.S. Capitol. The production crew left several pairs of shoes behind and they remained hanging on the wires for years."
Good gawd! I learn something new every day. And here I just thought it was some local quirk. Apparently I need to get out to see more movies too. Thanks for the info!
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