You know how in movies like My Fair Lady when a girl is going to a dance there’s always all sorts of commotion going on downstairs until she appears at the top of the staircase? The pandemonium stops. She silently regards them all and descends the staircase with queenly grace. Her shoes are tiny, her gown white satin, her hair swept up in some lovely and impossible way. The people downstairs are dumbstruck and can only watch her as she glides slowly down each mahogany stair. I think it’s supposed to be that way with prom, too – the nervous boy and proud parents watching as the radiant girl descends the stairs. I think we must have gotten this archetypical entrance from Cinderella.

She’s gone to all sorts of lengths to get to this ball: sorting linseed from the ashes, weeping on her mother’s grave, and being utterly shocked to find household items changing into accessories for the well-dressed princess. The accessories are particularly important here – you simply can’t have a Cinderella story without a good description of the lovely dress and perfect glass slippers. So she finally gets to the ball and there is inevitably a scene in which she arrives at the palace. She leaves her golden coach and ascends the marble stair. (I think there must be two staircases, one up and one down, because she also has to lose the slipper while running down the stairs later in the night. You simply can’t have her losing a shoe while running up a staircase, nor can you rob her of her descent at the beginning of the ball. It’s not graceful. Anyway, if you only had them going down it would mean having the ballroom in the basement.)

So Cinderella somehow reaches the door to the ballroom. She pauses a moment at the top of the stairs to look at the lovely room, and as she does so, everyone catches sight of her. The guests stop dancing. The music stops. I think this was rather unprofessional on the part of the musicians – I can only imagine what the conductor said to them afterward about losing the beat and stopping entirely just because a pretty girl walked in. But most importantly, the prince sees her. He drops the gloved hand of his partner and advances as the lovely stranger descends, her glass-shod feet clicking softly on each broad slab of white marble. He offers his hand. Wordless, she takes it. The musicians regain their senses and a waltz begins.

I have a point here, I really do. The reason I’ve been thinking about this so much is that last week I went to Christmas Country Dance School in Berea, Kentucky. It’s my mother’s hometown, and for decades the college has held a dance week every year after Christmas. They teach English and Appalachian folk dancing: everything from clogging to longsword to Morris. My mother used to go every year, but the last time she attended the school was when she was four months pregnant with me. Last spring on her birthday we were sitting on her bed finishing breakfast when she proposed the idea of my going to Christmas School. I was delighted, of course, and we managed to get me in. I was technically too young to go by myself, but she worked things out.

My first thought upon hearing that I would be going was that I wanted character shoes just like Mom’s. When I was little my sister and I would sometimes go into her closet and put on her shoes – the boring black pumps she wore to church in winter, the boring white sandals she wore to church in summer, the leather and wood clogs she got in the seventies. The best, though, were her character shoes: black, with a narrow strap that went across the ankle and a beautifully tapered heel. These were special, like the clogs, because we rarely saw her wear them. The clogs were unworn because they were out of style, but the character shoes stayed in the closet because they were dancing shoes. My father had a pair of dancing shoes, too – black leather ones with metal taps. I’m sure these were the shoes my parents were wearing when they met each other in a clogging class. These were the shoes they wore when they danced that last winter with the fetus that would be me growing between them. The character shoes were the only real heels my mother owned, and though we were permitted to clomp about in them, we were never allowed near the stairs in them so we wouldn’t trip and go tumbling down. As we grew older we stopped playing dress-up, and by the time I grew interested again my feet were too big to hope of trying them on.

And so I knew that I needed dancing shoes and that I was going to have character shoes. The only store in town that had them in adult sizes was Elman’s, so the Sunday before Christmas we went down to Cary Street. I ended up with a pair of one-inch heels, not tapered like my mother’s one-and-a-half-inch ones. But they would be more versatile, and they were real leather, not like her vinyl ones.

That afternoon when everyone else had left the house, I went up to my room and put on the shoes. This was ostensibly to break them in, since I would be dancing in them all week and my feet would be taking enough hard knocks without having brand new shoes as well. The greater reason, though, was because I wanted to see them on my feet. When I put them on I felt as if they had elevated not only the heels but the status of my feet, exalted them to a higher plane of existence. These were the feet I was meant to have. These were the feet of a dancer, of Cora Crandall’s daughter who was finally going to Christmas School.

I continued glorying in my shoes as I sorted the laundry. And when I reached the top of the stairs to bring the basket down to the washer, I realized that I was doing something important. This was my Cinderella moment. Here I was, about to go not to one dance but to week of dances. I had spent all this time sorting linseed and sending emails to try to get myself into this place, and suddenly all the obstacles had disappeared. In three days I would be in Berea, tripping lightly about a dance floor with whatever prince happened to be there. I was no longer a little girl trying on her mother’s shoes, forbidden to go near the staircase. I was sure of my feet now and I knew I would not fall. I was not wearing my mother’s shoes, but my own shoes adapted to my own life.

Proudly, laundry on hip, I descended the stairs.