For the beach bum who has everything…

The other day, my sister Kathleen forwarded an e-mail she’d gotten from Zappo’s and suggested I take a look.

I combed through it, and what to my wondering eye did appear but a blurb for some high-end flip-flops with a built in church key.

First off, I want to say how gratifying it is to know that the term "church key" is still in use.

It is something I associate with being in high school - not with my being in high school. No, I was a non-drinking, non-smoking, clean-living nerd. (I was even in the Latin Club for a few years, and occasionally have a flash back to the goofy blue and yellow toga like costume I had to wear when I recited the opening lines of the Aeneid for the annual Catholic High School Latin Festival. ("Arma virumque cano….")

But the party girls - who, I must confess, I always thought of as morons, but now realize were just having fun - joked about church keys. They were the ones with the nice clothing - Villager skirts, Papagallo shoes, Bermuda bags; the nice cars - Mustangs; and the dates with boys who weren’t so much nice as they were cute. Ah, high school.

One of the traditions at my school was the freshman welcome, where the girls from an older class entertained the newbies with skits and parody songs. I remember one such song, which went to the tune of "Try to Remember", that had the line "forgot the church key" in it. I guess it’s not so amazing that the nuns - who had to approve everything - let this one get by them. They also approved my home room’s entry the year we had a jug band and sang "Chug-a-Lug." Not to mention the year that someone danced to the tune of "The Stripper." But these were innocent times…

In any event, I now know that there are expensive, glorified flip flops with a church key embedded in the sole.

Which I’m sure comes in handy for beach-going beer drinkers who drink the kinds of beer that don’t come in flip-top cans or twist-off bottles.

Among other things, this development demonstrates the evolution of the lowly flip-flop, an item once purchased for less than a buck from a bin in a surplus store, worn for a few weeks until it fell apart (or until you got sick of having a permanent sore between your toes), and discarded. Flip-flops were actually quite useful at the beach that, in my beach-going days, were littered with discarded filp-top tabs from beer and soda cans. As bottle opener was to church key, there was also another name for flip-flops. They were called "thongs" - pronounced "tongs" - after the plastic pieces that held the flip-flop onto your foot.

Flip-tops were are real innovation because you didn’t need a church key anymore. Instead, you pulled the flip-top off of the can. If you were a careless jerk, you threw it in the sand, where someone could slice their foot on it. If you were a good citizen, you shoved it into the can and risked choking to death on it if it came back out the hole.

Flip-top innovation continued apace, and soon the filp-top tabs were tethered to the can. Sure, sometimes they break off, but, altogether, it’s a big improvement.

While can technology was improving, so was bottle top technology. Twist off caps replaced the kind you had to pry off with a bottle opener, errrrr, church key. If you didn’t have one, you could always use that hollowed out part of the door frame that the door knob lock turns into (whatever it’s called). Of course, there are no doors at the beach, so some people used their teeth - or so I heard.

Meanwhile, flip-flop product innovation was keeping pace with can and bottle innovation, and suddenly people were paying lots of money for some pretty fancy flip-flops that were a lot studier than the ones you paid $.39 for. Not to mention a lot prettier - with designer-y thongs with polka-dots, lobsters, madras. I’m sure the party girls from my high school would have had all kinds of fancy, expensive flip-flops, if they had existed in my day.

Anyway, sometimes product innovation is good. Sometimes it’s useful. Sometimes it’s just plain fun.

If you’re in need of a pair of pricey flip-flops with a church key embedded in them, then Reef Fanning’s got just what you’re looking for.

Maybe next year’s edition will have a corkscrew in them!

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