Platform for a fight, then a bit of reality

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Do you have any idea how far a mother's voice can carry in a designer shoe warehouse with 28-foot ceilings? Far. Really far. All the way from the dress shoes on the back wall of the store, off the vaulted tin ceilings and up to the sandal display near the front doors.

I discovered this as I walked into the store. That's when I heard Prom Mom and her snarky daughter duking it out over a pair of 4-inch platform heels. It was a match worthy of HBO on a Saturday night.

"You called me all the way over to this store to ask my opinion. I'm telling you right now you are not wearing 4-inch heels. Now, if you're going to ignore me and wear what you want to wear anyway, why did you drag me here in the first place?"

Ding! Round one to Prom Mom for the classic one-two punch: A maternal decree and some good, old-fashioned guilt.

"If I get these sandals, I can wear them after prom with my sundress for graduation," the daughter hit back.

Translation: I'm kicking these off the minute I get to the prom anyway. Why do you care?

"They don't go with your prom dress. They don't go with any dress. What are you thinking?"

Round two to Prom Mom for including the rhetorical question that cannot be answered by a teenager.

You're probably wondering how this prizefight ended. So am I. Unfortunately, I got distracted trying to find a pair of flat gray shoes to go with slacks in an odd shade of pewter, and in my quest, I managed to block out the ambient bickering.

I'm not sure what I would have done had I been Prom Mom. The knockout punch clearly would have been to walk out of the shoe store, credit card firmly ensconced within her heavily guarded wallet, muttering something like, "You want 'em, you buy 'em."