What Happens When You Wear Uncomfortable Shoes to Your Nephew's Bar Mitzvah

1. They will match your dress perfectly
2. You will acknowledge they are uncomfortable and still wear them because your outfit needs the texture
3. After five minutes you will realize that it would have been less painful to snap mousetraps directly onto your feet
4. After ten minutes you will begin to embrace the pain, thinking about all the colourful imagery this will provide for your writing
5. You will then realize that your novel already contains the foreshadowing line "I squeezed my potato feet into the french fry shoes" proving that you don't need to actually feel pain to write about it.
6. At minute thirty you will slip off your shoes, lose one in the pew in front of you and send your eleven year old daughter crawling on the floor after it
7. Her necklace will then catch on the delicate fabric of her brand new party dress and your fifteen year old niece who is the sister of the Bar Mitzvah boy and very good with her hands will have to extricate the chain
8. You will rise above the pain for the sake of navy velvet, and wear the shoes for at least two more hours for appearance's sake
9. You will realize that you may be permanently crippling your feet, and that even though you will lose two critical inches of height, your shoes need to come off
10. You will remove your shoes again
11. You will have more blisters on your feet than any of the four times you walked 60km for breast cancer including the year you fell head first into a pile of bricks 
12. You will wiggle your toes
13. You will send your eleven year old daughter up to the cloak room to get your flip flops and you will wonder where your two teenage sons are.
14. You will regret cancelling the pedicure last Wednesday just because you had a major work deadline
15. You will wear flip flops for the rest of the luncheon
16. You will bring the beautiful shoes home, wonder where you stashed the receipt and try to figure out when in the name of Lucifer you will have time to return them to the store
17. Your cousin from out of town will stop over the next morning to say goodbye 
18. She will try on your shoes, they will fit her perfectly
19. You will tell her that they are ancient foot binding torture chambers that would not have been out of place at Guantanamo Bay 
20. Yes she will say. But navy velvet.
21. "Take them if you want" you will say to her. "It will save me having to find the receipt and return the shoes."
22. She will take the shoes. She will then say to her daughter "These will be perfect for you."
23. Your cousin's daughter will tell her mother that she does want the shoes, but doesn't need to bring them on the plane with her to New York. She will get them when she comes home to Toronto for the High Holidays.
24. Your cousin will put the shoes in her suitcase and keep them for her daughter.
25. You will close the door behind them, look down at the pillowy blisters on your feet, your cramped baby toes and your cracked heel and you will say to yourself "The shoes weren't so bad."