Globe documents, fosters foot-fetishism

Yoga instructor Annie Carter, 27, showed the stranger who complained of foot pain a few stretches when he wandered into her studio last Friday afternoon. But after he snatched her sock off, focused his cellphone camera on her toes, and tried to hug and kiss her neck she shoved him out the door....

In [an] April incident...a man wandered into Neena's Lighting on John F. Kennedy Street asking for a "foot light." He took off his shoe and pointed to his foot. When she did the same, he began to massage her foot, a police report said. He made a sexual remark and then moved toward her...

"Talk about a foot fetish," said [store employee Mika] Nakafuji.... "Who does that kind of thing?"

"Is this the Shoe Club?" asks Michelle Wilder as she strolls into the room in a pair of gravity-defying wedges, complete with matching red blouse....

In one corner sits 23-year-old Alyson McEleney of Brookline. Her leg has been in a cast for five months, but the cast was recently removed, and this is the first night she has been able to wear heels. Technically, she really shouldn't be in heels yet, but because it's Shoe Club night, she's ignoring doctors' orders for the sake of fashion and camaraderie.

Shelley Hachman, wearing faux snake Anne Klein pumps, is telling the story about how the Shoe Club helped her through a difficult patch in her life last winter. Both she and her husband thought they had lost their jobs. Hachman, a Billerica mother and shoe fanatic, was devastated and feeling hopeless. Then she heard about the Shoe Club.

"It was like a sign from God," she says....