The Scene: is a large window in a suburban Chicago shopping mall. Forming a huge pyramid are dozens and dozens of women's shoes. Signs invite viewers to come in and prepare "your foot for Easter."

Overheard: a young mother telling her daughter, age approximately 5 years, the story of Cinderella and her glass slipper. For, indeed, at the top of the pyramid is a large glass slipper.

"...But, mommy, that's silly! If you wore a shoe made of glass your feet would be hamburger before you got to the other side of the room."

Having delivered that caustic remark, the shoe critic danced off to another more glamorous window.

A digression: An early French teacher once gave out this memorable phrase: "Un ver vert dans un verre vert" (A green worm in a green glass). All the "V" words rhyme with "bear." This leads to the examination of the various possibilities of "ver, verre" and other words that sound alike but have different spelling. Much like the child's question: "What's black and white and read/red all over." (A newspaper, of course.)

Among the possibilities of "ver" etc. is VAIR (fur/fuzzy). Probably a sentence could be made out of a fuzzy green worm in a fuzzy green glass. A disagreeable image at best. French scholar Carol Wolfe-Neu subtly suggests such a construction would be gauche and nail one as an illiterate yankee.

Which brings us back to the glass slipper.

One reads on occasion that the slipper was mis-translated from Charles Perrault's original tale which formed part of his Mother Goose tales. (Contes de ma mere l'oye -1697). But Perrault writes clearly of a pantoufle de verre (glass slipper). So it appears that Perrault knew of what he wrote: Glass (verre) not fur (vair).

Rawson in his book Devious Derivations says that the word, vair, was not used when Perrault was spinning tales. So, he says, it is doubtful that it was a mis-translation from some oral account of the story. Which doesn't mean that Perrault didn't know of the fur connection. If he did he was having a grand time playing a word game.

Should you be interested, VAIR comes from the Latin Varius (varied) and is the root of miniver, originally menu vair, small vair, which referred, possibly to the gray squirrel, a fashion item all the rage in the middle ages for trimming robes, dresses, and probably slippers.

The earliest known rendering of the Cinderella story is found in a ninth century Chinese version, in which the slipper was of gold. In most of the versions in the west Cinderella is helped by her dead mother, who shows up as a cow or goat or some other farm beast. Cindy makes three trips to a dance, a festival and a church. But in these she presumably is bare footed for her gimmick is a ring that fits no other finger.

In his opera La Cenerentola, Rossini didn't think it quite proper to have his leading lady barefooted so he conjured up a couple of diamond bracelets, one of which she loses so that the Prince can scurry about to find the owner. The other he hides until the appropriate moment.

We can return now to our shoe critic, last seen skipping about the mall. She stops, transfixed in the doorway of a prestigious jewelry store. Serried ranks of cases filled with the glitter of diamond merchants, beckon her.

"Oh...mommie...LOOK!"

Already, the young lady knows what's real. Not shoes, but diamonds are a girl's best friend.