Platform shoes were the bane of my existence as a youngster. By the age of 13 I was 5’9″, and the guys really hadn’t caught up with me. I soon leveled off at 5’11” and pretty much stayed in my jeans and deck sneakers and sandals till age 18, when finally I started dating someone three inches taller than me who was into all that John Travolta garb when we went out. In his platforms he was about 6’4″, so I could wear whatever shoes I wanted (by then, of course, plain old pumps and flats were back in vogue). Sometimes in high school I would wear clogs (they made a great banging sound on the all-metal staircase running up to the 7th floor tower, where my homeroom was). That was fun. We could all recognize each other by the sound of our shoes, so to speak, and stop to meet and hang a bit in the stairwell on the way up to class.