Bridget grew up starving in Weimar Germany in a little village near the Rhineland, the daughter of a farmer and a washerwoman who could never quite make ends meet. There was no money for new clothes, especially for new shoes, and so she wore a pair of worn leather boots rescued from the mayor's rubbish heap when she was eight: they were three sizes too big and the laces never stayed tied and her feet slid around in them awkwardly till she taught herself to walk with a strange gait (one that would later make her famous: Bridget von Hammersmark--not her real name, of course--and her sexy strut were as famous as Dietrich and her voice) to compensate.

When she was discovered, they dressed her up in well-tailored suits and saucy hats and taught her how to smoke like she was making love to the cigarette, but she could never quite get the hang of walking in high heels, not the way she taught herself to walk in those beat-up old boots (the pair of heels she wore that night in the tavern in particular always tripped her up: she should have known that those damn shoes would be her downfall: Bridget has a taste for irony).