If you have a shoe, you have a story. From squeaky-clean and shiny to scuffed and soiled, East Dallas neighbor Cynthia Mondell wants to collect them all.
All the stories, that is.
Mondell is a filmmaker, and she has been working on a documentary called “Sole Sisters” about the female experience as told by women and their shoes.
“It’s about telling women’s stories — their lives and their memories — through their relationships with their shoes,” Mondell explains. “It’s the shoes that have affected you, whether they’re your own or your mother’s or your grandmother’s.”
Somewhat ironically, it’s Mondell’s very own shoe story that was the inspiration behind the project:
“It’s a mother-daughter story,” she says. “My mother was dying of pancreatic cancer. She was very, very ill — on a morphine drip. My sister and I went into her closet, and we found all these shoes. We found this box of brand new shoes she hadn’t opened. She’d never worn the shoes, and they were red high heels. We took them into her room and said, ‘Mom look at these shoes. You never wore them.’ And she actually sat up in bed and talked to us for half-a-day.
“Those shoes did something to her, and we thought, ‘My gosh, the doctors were wrong. She’s going to recover.’ The whole thing offered us hope, and we kept saying, ‘You’re going to get up, and you’re going to dance in those shoes,’ and we laughed about it. Of course with pancreatic cancer, she passed away shortly after, but it was like for that part of the day we had so much happiness. That always stuck with me.”
Mondell has been filming the project for more than two years. Already she has found thousands of stories like her own, and although she has more stories than she can use, she hasn’t stopped looking yet. If you have a story you’d like to share or know someone who would, go to solesistersfilm.com and submit your story.
