People You Should Know in Racing: February 2010 Archives

When I was a little squirt, my Mother nicknamed me both "Mare" (how prophetic) and The Barefoot Contessa.   (I had no idea that she got the phrase from the title of a hotsy-totsy film starring Ava Gardner.)  For some reason, Mom associated my penchant for going naturally-footed with my Italian ancestry on my Father's side.  I think she thought I'd grow up to be Sophia Loren.  When she was feeling fanciful, she'd wave her arm and pronounce grandly that I was La Barefoot Contessa Ahl-TYE-ree, attempting to properly pronounce my foreign surname which (in the 1960's, in upstate New York) sounded to the locals to be tres exotic.

To me, shoes were an unnecessary cultural construct, created solely to be tolerated on Sundays as I sat cross-ankled, wedged between Mom and Gram in our stark, white Presbyterian church. 

The minute church was over, I ripped off the white patent leather Mary Janes and tossed them into my Mother's waiting hand.  She never tried to cut off the call of Nature to my wild-child heart, for which I am grateful.  I rode my cousin's Quarter Horse barefoot, also--a singularly remarkable experience.

My favoritest, most freeing thing to do was to wear a long skirt and run out into our overgrown grassy yard.  Grabbing a bunch of lilacs as they clung desperately to Grandma's huge, treasured lilac bush (they saw me coming, and ducked their fat little heads)--I relished that first big sniff.  Then, my head full of that fragrant opiate, I commenced to twirl 'round and 'round in the tall, soft green beneath my liberated toes.  I'd spin until I dizzied out, and collapse into that grass, under the sacred purple bush.  I can still feel the cool dampness of the unmown grass as it wrapped itself around me like so many tiny green angels' wings.  Staring up at the clear blue skies, my young spirit knew absolute freedom--the kind of bliss for which adults pay millions of dollars a year to self-help gurus and bookstores.  I often go back to that place and that time in a frail attempt to recapture some of that unbridled bliss...