"Can High Heels Cause Damage To Flooring?"

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 7th, 2004

Above is the title of a page from the National Civil Engineering Education Resource Library which concludes that a 150-lb. person can indeed cause damage to “soft flooring” materials. The formula goes like this: Presssure on the floor = weight of the person divided by the area of the heel. To put it another way: A 150-lb. person, wearing heels that are 1/4-inch X 1/4-inch (or 0.000434 square foot), would exert 345,622 lbs per square foot of pressure on whatever surface is unfortunate enough to be underneath that heel! Read the rest here.

We only bring this up because Tommy James has forwarded an item about how John Pinette is hitting the stage (“Comedian John Pinette Straps on Edna’s Pumps for Hairspray Tour Starting Sept. 7”). Or how, as they put it in Playbill, “Girthy comedian John Pinette will join the national tour of Hairspray playing plus-size matron Edna Turnblad starting in September, according to his official website.” Now, we wouldn’t mention his weight (or, as Playbill might so poetically put it, his “girthiness”), but Pinette himself is not shy about exploiting his statospheric weight percentile for personal or professional gain. Indeed, Playbill (again!) ended the entire article by adding that Pinette “recorded a comedy CD, “Show Me the Buffet,” and often exploits his overweight state for his comedy.”

Read the rest here.