Here is an piece from a Philidelphia paper about spike heels and written by a woman. I thought you might enjoy her fine writing and interesting ending. If you would like me to post other news articles I come across concerning trampling please let me know....Kathy

LIGHTNESS IS AT the heart of femininity. It's why women's shoes are so often designed to create the illusion of barely touching the ground.

The Chinese minimized the female footprint by turning little girls' feet back on themselves and binding them so that they couldn't grow larger. The women in the fashion plates that graced Godey's Ladies' Book in the last century had such tiny feet that, had they come to life, they would've had to hold onto the furniture to keep from toppling over. In the 18th century, walking seemed so unpleasantly down-to-earth that young ladies were taught to glide along like Hovercraft.

It's all about weightlessness. Contemporary shoe designers reach for the same effect with a footprint that looks like a narrow arrowhead with a tiny dot a couple of inches behind it: The shoe compresses the forefoot into the space above the arrowhead, and balances the heel (and the weight of the body above it) on a stiletto - a tiny pedestal - that prints the dot where it touches the ground.

The sleek lines of an elegant, high-heeled evening shoe and the apparent fragility of its spike heel seem to defy gravity as surely as the gothic arches of Chartres, which leap heavenward, turning tons of stone into a hymn of air and lace and light in praise of the Eternal Feminine as manifested in the Virgin Mary.

Even now, when women aspire to be taken seriously, when we take a certain amount of "gravitas" for granted and are offended when other people assume that because we're women we must be airheads, some cling to this ancient ideal female weightlessness, and ooh and ah over shoes that enshrine it.

Even if we don't actually wear them (preferring to be able to walk, run, dance or whatever), they remind us of a vision of ourselves - elegant, beautiful, airy, floatily feminine - left over from "Cinderella" and Audrey Hepburn movies and our first 10-year-old look at "Swan Lake."

(Some of us, anyway. And then there was the unromantic little girl who, on being taken to her first ballet, is said to have asked: "Why don't they just get bigger girls?")

The shapes we give the objects we wear and live with are tip-offs to wishful thinking. Sometimes the designer's wish skips ahead of reality, and we get robot costumes and automobiles with aerodynamic fins, but more often it lags way behind, in the comfortably predictable (if prettified) past. Why else are so many end-of-the-20th-century living rooms (or "keeping rooms") chock-full of baskets and teddy bears and stenciled hearts?

It's weird: The visual imagination, so good at conjuring up what doesn't exist, often takes awhile to come to grips with what does.

The house I live in, built in 1868, was probably among the first in Philadelphia to be built with central heating. There are no working fireplaces, never were. Why, the builders undoubtedly thought, would anybody want to lug fuel all through the house and messy ashes out of it when heat could be magically provided by a coal furnace neatly hidden in the cellar?

Yet the living room and the upstairs sitting room have grandiose marble mantelpieces and arched marble chimney fronts surrounding puny little hot air registers. It didn't occur to the builders that we'd want messy fireplaces, but they couldn't quite imagine a room without a mantel.

They also probably could not have imagined spike heels, could not have imagined that their floors would have to support a woman's whole weight balanced on about one sixteenth of a square inch, floors fit to support one ton of focused pressure. In spike heels a woman's lightness is an illusion; a magician's trick. In truth, whatever she trods upon is crushed. One might imagine her wearing a black hood, the condemned strapped to the floor before her spike-heeled feet, whispering his final prayers.

And in the 130-year-old pine floor of my second-floor front hall is the splintery puncture wound to prove it - fixed for the time being with a chopstick and plenty of wood glue - where a stiletto heel bearing the weight of a woman who shall remain nameless betrayed its promise of weightlessness and smashed right through the soft wood of the weakened tongue-in-groove joint with overpowering reality. And yet I am drawn to the illusion. I still wear spike heels and walk with a light and graceful gate, a delicate flower blown along by a gentle breeze utterly crushing all that lies in my path.

Kathy Castro fiftyftwmn@aol.com