windowshopping: bespoke loophole

   When I was in high school, the cool thing to do if you had the money was to customize your Vans. Since we never had the dough, someone figured out a loophole. It all hinged on the fact that you did not have to pay for your sneakers until you picked them up. So my friends and I would pile into one car, blast the music as we drove up the 405 all the way past the Irvine Amphitheater to the Costa Mesa store. That's where you had to go to belabor over the choices, put the order in and then wait. Weeks later like dominoes, one by one we would receive our phone call letting us know the shoes were ready to be picked up.
   Weeeeelllllllllll, if you never picked them up in a certain amount of days, the store had to put them on the clearance shelf. Knowing the exact amount of days they were obligated to wait, that weekend we would pile back into someone's car and proceed to get our bespoke kicks at a cheap ass price. Looking back on it, even though I felt like I was stealing, the store had to know what we were up to and not give a shit anyway (i mean, like they wouldn't recognize a tattooed 5'11" girl with dyed henna hair and a nose ring with her 4'9" sidekick that looked the same- along with the same group of guys, one of them named Grey?!!).
   Anyways, stopping the Nirvana cassette playing in my head, celebrity stylist, Robert Verdi asked Vans to make some electrifying sneakers out of Hermes scarves. If only I had picked that out back then.