I’m a ballroom dancer. These used to be my shoes. […] This is the third pair of dance shoes I’ve owned. I didn’t hold onto the first pair, it’s lost to the ages, and second pair disintegrated. And these are halfway there, I don’t know if you can see, there’s a hole right about there. So I felt like these are, if anyone knows the story of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, they danced all night and they danced their shoes until they had holes; it didn’t take me one night, it took me about two years to do that, but I still think of it as an accomplishment.

Anyways, these are the shoes that I wore to my first dance competition. [… B]allroom dancers, when they look at their shoes they can sort of tell how well they’re dancing. For smooth dancing, which would be your Foxtrot and your Tango, you want to have the balls of your feet brushing together. […] Now I was very proud of the front of these shoes because of the wear pattern and then I looked at the back, and I don’t know if you can see, it’s a little bit shiny, there’s a little bit of wear. But this is not a good thing, because if I’m dancing my rhythm dances, like Swing or Rhumba or Cha Cha, instead of the front rubbing together, the heels are supposed to rub together, so several years ago I had a lot of work to do on my dancing. I keep these shoes as a reminder of where I was back then and hopefully where I’ve come since then. 

Exhibited by Stephen Closs