SOLES

The Quest for Feet

A Synopsis

In Enzo’s Shoe Repair, five pairs of shoes lament that they are unable to fulfill the Purpose of a Shoe, which is “to protect and to serve feet.”

Their owners have not returned to reclaim them. One plus in their lives is that they love Enzo, the owner, who cares for them as if they are his children.

What Enzo does not know, however, is that when his shop is closed, the shoes rehearse a song-and-dance act that they hope to perform on national television in order to find their original owners.

One pair, Prima, Italian-made leather-booted ice-skates, has been in Enzo’s only seven months. Young and restless, she had toured the world as stakes for her ballerina owner and desperately wants back in the action.

The other shoes, though sympathetic to Prima, cannot possibly leave the repair shop on their own. They are stranded there.

Another shoe, seventy-year-old Oxfords, has been spying on the shoes. He has pursued a rumor on the street that a group of shoes can sing and dance. The Oxfords, with great detective skills, are named Gum Shu.

After searching all over town, Gum Shu finally locates the shoes and witnesses their act. He reports this to his boss, Ferragamo loafers named Valentino, who serves an eccentric talent manager (human) of novelty acts.

Valentino and Gum Shu devise a plan whereby the shoes can escape so that the talent manager can get them a gig on TV. But Prima is overruled by the others, who fear that the talent manager is too nutty to be of any help.

Prima determines that she must escape by herself. No sooner does she leave the shop while the others sleep than danger quickly befalls her, and the others are forced to come to her aid. This puts all five pairs into the dangerous world of automobile traffic, stray dogs, and suffocating crowds.

Their journey to locate the talent manager is an adventure that is thrilling for its perils and emotional for discoveries made by them in the absence of their loving, one-time proprietor, Enzo.

They get word that, discovering they are gone from his shop, Enzo suffered a heart attack. The shoes are torn between trying to return to his shop for his health or pursuing the opportunity to perform their act on national television.