Easy Seniors Life

PUSS IN BOOTS

Best known of the fairy tale ‘animal helpers,’ Puss is a bold, swaggering trickster who masquerades as the servant of a great nobleman; eventually, his clever tactics bring his young master fame, fortune, and a fancy wife. The story was probably first recorded in 16th-century Italy, but Puss seems to have acquired his swashbuckling boots about 100 years later in France, in the same book of stories featuring Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Beauty and the Beast, and he’s been rocking them ever since.

What’s with the boots? In an age when the poor mostly went barefoot, shoes were an important status symbol. Think Nike Airs but even more so. And as Sur La Lune Fairy Tales points out, ‘Footwear is important in many popular fairy tales, such as Cinderella’s slipper… and the red-hot dancing shoes found in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Mostly we defy anyone not to find them pretty cute.

Clearly, those boots were made for walking because Puss has managed to travel astonishingly far around the world. Scholars say, ‘The story has been found in all parts of Europe, across Siberia, onward to India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. It also traveled with colonists and travelers from Europe to Africa and the American Indians.’

More recently, of course, the irrepressible Puss has found new fans and stolen the show in Dreamworks’ Shrek movies, voiced by a smoldering Antonio Banderas whose signature introduction is ‘Puss… in Boots!’ When Shrek saves Puss from a hairball, he earns himself a formidable ally. Could any of us ask for better? We think not.