There is a scene in the wonderful movie Best In Show, which, strangely, I have seen four times, liking it more each viewing, which suggests I didn't understand it initially, but I did.
I just like it more each time, nuances and all that, where the beautifully-named Cookie Fleck wrecks her knee and walks with the funniest half-wobble half-hobble ever filmed.
Is there funnier physicality in modern cinema than this?
Well yes, there is.
The Graduate, where Benjamin bangs his head against the wall in a hotel bedroom with Mrs Robinson.
And this scene was not in the script; it was Dustin Hoffman fending off hysteria as Anne Bancroft pretended to rub imaginary lint off her bra.
In spite of repeatedly watching Best In Show, I remembered Cookie breaking a boot-heel to produce her loopy walk; lucky I checked.
But for the sake of this story, I will stay with the broken heel.
Nit-picking is the domain of the office wretch.
Men don't wear rickety high heels as a rule, so while many of us go through life wishing we could walk like Cookie Fleck just for the sheer thrill of doing something difficult and dangerous, of nearly breaking an ankle but not - severe mountain-climbing is the only comparison I can muster - very few of us ever get that opportunity.
In fact, in my experience, only one man in my inner circle, even in my outer faraway circle, has ever walked along the main street of Dunedin like Cookie Fleck.
Me.
My boots don't have laces, zips or velcro.
There is probably a name for these in the shoe industry but I am not IN the shoe industry, so I will just call them slip-ons.
They are actually tremendously difficult to slip on; I need a long shoe-horn, so let's call them horn-ons.
On any day when I consent to wear these boots, I have to think many steps ahead to predict whether the boots will be taken off, because once taken off - I am thinking here of going swimming or maybe being driven over by a bus - they will not be able to be put on again.
Oh, women readers will be sighing wearily, only a man would come up with such clumdrum as this.
Wrong.
My cousin Deborah Coddington, a fine writer and one-time member of Parliament, hence I unreservedly drop her name, wrote on Facebook that with her partner in England, she has nobody to help wedge her long boots on in the morning.
She feels helpless, and naturally, Facebook was the place to say that.
So there I was; would it be a boots day?
I decided yes.
I did have a hospital appointment, but only a check-up; the feet were not scheduled.
However, Murphy strikes in many below-belt ways, and that day last week when I was being checked up, a third-year medical student sat in there to learn.
So the feet were involved.
Get yer boots off, said the associate professor.
I was done for.
I got them half back on after the examination, and inched my way out of the room sideways.
I then wrestled with a pen and a credit card in the toilet to absolutely no avail.
So I waddled crookedly, just like Cookie Fleck, into the main street in search of a shoe store with shoe-horn.
Then I remembered how in the closing years of Records Records I kept a loaded shotgun under the counter to wave in the face of people asking for parking meter money.
This would be the same. I wasn't buying shoes; I would be shot on sight.
Swaying elliptically in the middle of the Edinburgh Way, walking twice as crazily as Cookie Fleck, I suddenly spotted the Carlson store.
They had recently added shoes!
Like any well-dressed man, I knew the Carlson people, they would help me.
I bounded through the door, and Beth produced a shoe-horn even before I cried out.
The worst day of my life - public humiliation and two broken ankles - had been turned into an absorbing and two-thirds true story.
Cookie Fleck walked much better than me, but for 15 minutes of infamy, I was funnier.
● Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
