The Unexpected Thing That Happened When I Bedazzled My Cast
Early last month, I broke my foot. It happened on a perfectly sunny California day. I was walking down a disability ramp on my way to get a poké bowl for lunch, when all of a sudden, I felt a terrible, sharp pain and I was down on the ground trying to figure out what happened.
I had never broken a bone before, so I had a lot to learn. There was the business of using crutches, trying to get up and down stairs, taking showers while seated, and relying on the help of others to do things I normally did so easily on my own.
With the injury, I instantly became part of a fraternity I never knew existed. I was out at dinner one night when a guy who had his arm in a cast gave me an air fist pump and called out, "Cripples unite!" Numerous strangers in elevators initiated conversations with me so they could tell me their stories of that time they got really drunk and tripped on the stairs.
Anyone outside of the fraternity - that is, able-bodied people who weren't used to the sight of a seemingly healthy person limping around on crutches or occasionally rolling around in a wheelchair - didn't know what to do with their feelings of fear and pity. They would back away apologetically or look at me with sad eyes. I wanted to assure them that I was going to be fine.
When I got back to New York and was mobile enough on my walking cast to commute on the subway as I usually do, I learned another lesson, which is that New York City is horribly inaccessible (subway stairs everywhere with hardly a urine-soaked elevator to take), and people are kind of mean. "Hurry up!" one person said as I hobbled on the train one day. I never once had anyone offer me their seat, though plenty of people would look right at the boot and go back to scrolling through their phones while seated (I ♥ New York).
Around my sixth week of having a broken foot, I had plans to see a screening of Clueless at the awesome new Metrograph Theater in New York. The writer and director of the movie, Amy Heckerling, was scheduled to do a Q&A afterward, and I couldn't wait. Neither could my colleague and the biggest Clueless fan I know, Charles Manning, who was going to go with me and my boyfriend to the screening.
"I am so FUCKING excited for our date on Sunday!!!" Charles texted me a few days beforehand. "Let's dress up! I'll wear my tuxedo. We'll go super glam." Charles is probably the only person I know other than me who would dress up in formalwear to see a regular-ass movie.
We were getting carried away talking about dresses I could wear when I realized a critical issue: My boot. It was so glaringly boot-like and would effectively ruin anything nice I was wearing. "I'll look kind of dumb, now that I think of it," I texted. A boot doesn't go with this outfit, much?
"We could do it anyway. Whatever! Ugh!" he wrote back, telling me that I should bedazzle the boot. He got me the crystals from Swarovski, and I spent a few hours that night attaching loose stones of different sizes onto my cast.
With E6000 glue getting sticky all over my hands, cancer warning on the label be damned, I attached a total of 219 crystals to my boot. I stayed on the couch the whole next day so the glue could fully dry (not that I was complaining).
At the event the next night, Heckerling gave a charming interview, explaining that she had wanted to write a "psychotically optimistic" character, which is how she came up with Cher, the total opposite of Heckerling. And then it dawned on me: That was my boot! My boot was the psychotically optimistic Cher Horowitz of casts. It was perfect.
In the following days, my life went from slightly dreadful to utterly fabulous. The outward sign of my injury was no longer a disability, it was a celebration of life. Random people everywhere were practically shouting at me with their props. "She bedazzled that boot!" "She must shit diamonds!" "Oh, that's fancy!"
The timing couldn't have been better: Six weeks in, I was healing, walking like a champ, and close to taking off the boot for good.
Kids especially loved the bedazzled boot. One girl told her mom that she was going to do the same thing to her cast if she ever got one. Her mom then took a picture of me.
People standing right next to me would start talking about me in the third person as if I couldn't hear them. "Look at what she did with her cast!" they'd say. "So cute!"
Another woman got on a crowded train and practically did a dance, she was so excited about the bling. "Shit, I'm about to break my foot myself!" she said. "That shit is lit! I have to put this shit on Facebook!"
And the best part? People are constantly offering me their seats on the subway now - and with a smile, no less. I would have never thought I would say this about bedazzling my boot, but it was way existential. I highly recommend it.
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