A young woman waits demurely in a stark room. Before her on a table sit scissors and one half of a pair of Crocs.
For the next two minutes and 35 seconds, as a jaunty Cole Porter score plays, she takes scissors to shoe, shredding the rubbery yellow thing into sad little slivers. The slivers she pulverizes in a blender.
A smile never leaves her face.
The dismemberment, enjoyed by more then 60,000 people on YouTube, comes compliments of the folks behind Ihatecrocs.com, an Internet site dedicated to the elimination of Crocs and those who think that their excuses for wearing them are viable.
Though that mission is failing miserably -- sales of the pliable, holey, cloggish Crocs are as relentless as their fans evangelistic -- Crocs haters remain convinced of the shoe's in-your-face obnoxiousness. They want to cut them to pieces, burn them and feed them to woodchippers.
Woodchippers?
In a world of fashion that has more than its share of don'ts -- what exactly is it about a toy-like little shoe with holes that provokes such vitriol?
Is it the candy colors they come in? The plasticity? The cheapness? Is it the brazenness with which Crocs owners have introduced the former boat shoe into polite society, shuffling and shlumpfing around grocery stores, shopping malls -- even offices.
"They repulse me," says Vincenzo Ravina, who founded Ihatecrocs.com with his friend Kate Lesh, the happy snipper. "They are to your eyes what secondhand smoke is to your lungs."
Cancerous?
Ravina's Web site tops 1,000 hits a day.
His products -- including the $17 T-shirt with the slogan "Friends Don't Let Friends Wear Crocs" -- have found devotees internationally.
Judy Rudo, who owns the fashionable Joanna Gray Shoes in Cross Keys, put her decidedly un-Croc'd foot down when her husband recently expressed some interest in a pair.
"I said, `You are not getting those. I don't care who's wearing them and what they say. I'm not walking around with you with those on.'"
When it comes to washing the car, going to the pool or gardening, J.S. Edwards owner Edward Steinberg will give Crocs some leeway. But just a little. He doesn't want to see them in a workplace -- ever. And he's not going to stock them in the store next to the $900 suits.
As he anxiously awaits the end to what he hopes is a fad, he worries what will become of all the seemingly nonbiodegradable castoffs.
