The Red Shoes, by Hans Christian Andersen, has intrigued me since I was a child. I’ve always found it to be an eerie, some-what frightening fairytale, not your typical happy-go-lucky bedtime story you’d normally read to a young child. If you’re not familiar with the story here’s a summary so you get the gist of it:
The Red Shoes
An orphaned girl, called Karen, falls in love with a pair of red shoes. She schemes her adoptive mother, the Old Lady, into buying these for her. Karen grows up very spoiled and arrogant, paying little attention to the Old Lady, who is gravely ill. Karen wears her shoes all the time and when an old soldier comments on what beautiful dancing shoes she has, the shoes begin to dance and won’t stop. Karen even misses the Old Lady’s funeral because she can’t remove the shoes, and she’s dancing around fields and such. As one can imagine all this continuous dancing drives Karen a bit mad and she manages to locate an executioner who agrees to chop off her feet (yes, this is a children’s fairytale, I didn’t make this up!). Unfortunately for Karen, her amputated feet cause her nothing but trouble as they continue to keep dancing in the red shoes, but also get in her way as she tries many times to go to church, where she’s trying to seek solace and to repent all her sins. She begs God for forgiveness, which is granted, and her heart is so filled with joy and relief that it explodes (I didn’t make this up either!) and her soul makes it way up to heaven.
The moral of the story?
Ok, I’m not going to get into all the religious undertones of the fairytale (or how gruesome it is), but I think one moral of the story is for adults; don’t spoil your children as they grow up, show them how to appreciate and be kindhearted towards others. So, on this note here’s my interpretation of the fairytale, telling the story from the red shoes point of view… and taking some artistic license 🙂
The Happy Dappy Red Shoes
A sad little orphan girl, lets call her Kimmy, finds herself adopted by a very glamorous woman who goes by the name of Momager. Momager was the Queen of the Kingdom of Happy Dappy Land.
One day Momager buys Kimmy the most fabulous, sparkly, red shoes she’s ever seen. Kimmy was by now 19 years of age, but still, anything sparkly always caught her attention, and kept her attention for a long time. She admired her new shoes for hours and days and weeks. She took them everywhere with her, to her butt-enhancing exercise class, her beauty salon, her butt-enhancing exercise class, to her plastic surgeon, to her butt-enhancing exercise class, to the hairdresser, all of Kimmy’s favorite places, and of course she even took them to her butt-enhancing exercise class. As the months and years rolled by Kimmy soon realized that maybe she should try them on instead of just staring vacuously at them. By now she was 32 years old and her feet had grown to enormous proportions.
They didn’t fit. Kimmy was distraught. “Fear not,” said Momager, “I’ll make you a star!” Lo and behold Momager kept her word and news spread like wildfire. Not only were Kimmy’s feet of giant proportions, they were beautiful too, the most beautiful feet in Happy Dappy Land. As much as Kimmy loved the attention from everyone in the kingdom of Happy Dappy Land she loved the sparkly red shoes so much she just had to be able to wear them. By now she was 43 and her feet were ginormous, but she was still raking in millions by putting herself and her humongously large feet on display. Still, she thought, I must be able to wear my sparkly red shoes. A visit to her plastic surgeon soon took care of that. Her gigantic feet were removed and soon replaced by beautiful little dainty ones. Kimmy was ecstatic. The shoes fit like a dream. Kimmy and Momager now made plans to reinvent her as an even bigger star, together with her tiny feet.
The shoes, however, had other ideas. The shoes had watched Kimmy for years and was none too pleased at how spoiled and loathe-some she had become towards others. The shoes, you see, had once belonged to a doll named Kenny. He was a God amongst the doll community and loved his shoes so much he often sang to them and created his own funny little dance routines, which the shoes adored, how they loved to dance. You could say he put a spell on his shoes or that he loved them so much he brought them to life. Either way, the shoes had been shown love and kindness from Kenny the doll God and had been most distressed to find themselves torn away from him all because Kimmy had demanded the Queen of the Kingdom do so.
As the years rolled by the shoes had become some-what insane, what with being stared at blankly for years by Kimmy, and now they found themselves on her feet! It was too much to bear. They longed to be back on the feet of the doll God Kenny. They decided when Kimmy went to her next butt-enhancing exercise class they would escape. This was really the only time they would be free of her tiny feet as she spent so long there.
Once free from Kimmy they danced and danced throughout the kingdom of Happy Dappy land searching for the doll God Kenny. Not caring how long it took them as they knew Kenny was out there somewhere. And he was. He had been searching for them too. The red shoes found themselves once again on the feet of the doll God Kenny. Oh how they danced as Kenny sang with joy at being reunited with his fabulous red shoes. All was well.
Kimmy soon forgot all about the sparkly red shoes as she had embarked on yet another money-making scheme. Spending years at her butt-enhancing exercise class had paid off extremely well, so now she had another gigantic asset to show off to the Kingdom of Happy Dappy Land.
The End. 😉
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