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The Front Row, Tuesday, 11/17/2009 New York University faculty pianist Marilyn Nonken sits down at the KUHF Steinway to perform music from Modern Virtuosos, her tandem recital with violinist Jennifer Koh and saxophonist Valerie Vidal, to be presented this evening at the Menil Collection by Da Camera of Houston! And, singers from Masquerade Theatre treat us to excerpts from the Houston première of a musical version of A Christmas Carol. The show opens Friday night at the Hobby Center... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 11/16/2009 Today, we head out on Houston’s freeways with New York artist Karyn Olivier to look at the billboards that she has transformed into “windows on the world” by mounting on them large-scale photographs of the landscapes and architectural features that lie behind the advertising boards. Then we hear portions of the pieces that U-H student composers, Paul Wadle and Joel Love, created to serve as soundtracks for Ms. Olivier’s billboard images... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 11/13/2009 Music Director Hans Graf, Assistant Conductor Brett Mitchell and piano soloist Jeffrey Kahane (pictured) discuss this weekend’s Houston Symphony program, which includes two orchestral works by Rachmaninoff and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.22. We also have members of the Apollo Chamber Players in the Geary Performance Studio for a preview of their all-American chamber music concert... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 11/12/2009 Today, we chat with the two lower-voiced string players from the Czech Republic’s Pavel Haas Quartet. They’re in town for their Houston Friends of Music debut recital tonight at Rice University. We also preview the first-ever Houston production of a new adaptation of The Dybbuk, to be presented this weekend as the grand finale of this year’s Jewish Book and Arts Fair... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 11/11/2009 Curator Richard Herskowitz talks about the 2009 Cinema Arts Festival Houston. We have a studio performance, previewing Aperio’s next concert, Elemental Soundings: Asian Influences in American Music. And Portuguese fado songtress, Mariza, chats with us! |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 11/10/2009 George Winston, the legendary New Age pianist & composer, performs live! We preview Houston Metropolitan Dance Company's Quirky Works Texas program. And Houston poet, Sasha West, shares some of her writing. |
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The Front Row, Monday, 11/09/2009 At the McMurtrey Gallery we look at the exhibition, When Gorillas Shoot Pigs, featuring the latest creations of Houston visual artist, Howard Sherman, whose paintings - with their darkly humorous titles -- interpolate cartoon-like images into his high-energy, high-density, multi-layered abstractions... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 11/06/2009 Today, two different styles of music in performances direct from KUHF’s George Geary Studio! Austin’s Golden Arm Trio plays excerpts from its original score for the 1929 silent film, Pandora’s Box, which KUHF will screen tonight, with live accompaniment provided by the Trio, at Discovery Green. And, singers from Houston Ebony Opera treat us to spirituals, songs and arias that the company will present on its 2009 Opera Gems Concert: A Celebration of Greatness in Music and Social Change, Sunday at the Hobby Center... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 11/05/2009 Folksinger-songwriter Vince Bell performs for us, as he offers a mini-version of his solo show, One Man’s Music: A Monologue with Songs, that details his real-life come-back from the debilitating automobile accident and traumatic brain injuries that almost ended his career … and his life. Vince presents his autobiographical musical “play,” tomorrow night at the venerable Montrose-area folk club, Anderson Fair... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 11/4/2009 Singers from Opera in the Heights perform live, previewing the company's new production of Manon. And we hear about Hail! Bright Cecilia, the joint concert by the Houston Chamber Choir & Ars Lyrica Houston, celebrating 350th anniversary of the birth of Henry Purcell. |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 11/03/2009 Moores School of Music faculty-artists, violist Lawrence Wheeler [pictured] & flutist Aralee Dorough, perform for us! And Shepherd School singers, along with Director of Opera Studies Richard Bado & Stage Director Debra Dickinson, join us live, for music by Donizetti. |
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The Front Row, Monday, 11/02/2009 Members of the KUHF Chamber Ensemble perform a couple of movements from the Quintet for Flute and Strings by contemporary American composer, Robert Baksa, previewing the recital they’ll give this evening at the Menil Collection. It's the inaugural event in Houston Public Radio’s year-long celebration of its 60th Anniversary... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 10/30/2009 Violist, Jonah Sirota of the Chiara String Quartet, talks about the young ensemble’s Beethoven in Bars tours, during which the Quartet plays full-classical programs in various alternative performance spaces -- including Houston’s Avant Garden. We also hear from the Indigo Trio: pianist, Zoya Shuhatovich, and two of her colleagues from the Saint Petersburg String Quartet. They’re presenting a free recital of Piano Trios Sunday afternoon at the Dowling Music retail store... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 10/28/2009 Howard Goodall, one of Britain’s top composers of film, television and choral music, speaks to us from London about his piecce, Eternal Light: A Requiem, which will have its U.S. Premiere in a performance this Sunday by the Chancel Choir of Houston’s Saint Luke’s United Methodist Church, under the leadership of its director, Sid Davis, who also joins us... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 10/27/2009 Playwright Rajiv Joseph chats about the Alley Theatre’s World Premiere production of Gruesome Playground Injuries, his comedy-drama that chronicles the thirty-year relationship between two damaged souls who care about each other but just can’t quite bring themselves to admit it and get together... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 10/26/2009 English recorder virtuoso Piers Adams explains the unorthodox and unrestrained approach that his band, Red Priest, applies to its performances of music from the Baroque period. This is not your father’s early-music ensemble, as Red Priest will prove at its Halloween-themed concert, Nightmare in Venice, tomorrow evening at Trinity Episcopal Church in Midtown... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 10/26/2009 English recorder virtuoso Piers Adams explains the unorthodox and unrestrained approach that his band, Red Priest, applies to its performances of music from the Baroque period. This is not your father’s early-music ensemble, as Red Priest will prove at its Halloween-themed concert, Nightmare in Venice, tomorrow evening at Trinity Episcopal Church in Midtown... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 10/23/2009 Israeli composer Eitan Steinberg and singer Etty Ben-Zaken tell us about the program of English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, German, and Ladino folk songs that they’ll present Sunday afternoon in the recital room at the Dowling Music store. we also hear from Shepherd School of Music faculty pianist Brian Connelly as he talks about the solo keyboard works by Beethoven and Schumann that he’ll perform on the next Context recital, Sunday afternoon at Rice University... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 10/22/2009 Tenor Jason Osborn (pictured) and baritone Liam Bonner tell us about Houston Grand Opera’s new production of Donizetti’s popular romantic comedy, The Elixir of Love, which opens tomorrow night at the Wortham Center... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 10/21/2009 Today, the reigning icon of the American musical theatre, Stephen Sondheim, talks with us about his astounding career as a composer and lyricist! Society for the Performing Arts brings Mr. Sondheim to Houston on Saturday evening for an on-stage conversation at Jones Hall with New York Times critic, Frank Rich. Plus, we welcome singers from the Moores Opera Center production of Rossini's Il Viaggio a Reims to the Geary Perormance Studio... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 10/20/2009 German-born visual artist, Josephine Meckseper shows us her videos and installations made up of everyday commercial goods that comment on contemporary political, media and consumerist issues … on display at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery. And, we preview Village of Waltz, the world-premeire evening-length work being presented by Hope Stone Dance... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 10/19/2009 Acclaimed writer, E. L. Doctorow, author of Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and Ragtime, talks about his latest novel, Homer and Langley, a fictionalized account of the wealthy but reclusive Collyer Brothers, whose obsessive-compulsive hoarding disorder led them to fill their Harlem brownstone with 130 tons of stuff that they couldn’t bear to throw away. Mr. Doctorow will share excerpts from his book this evening at the Alley Theatre on the Inprint/Brown Reading Series... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 10/16/2009 We meet the man who leads what’s been called THE premiere contemporary dance troupe in Great Britain: choreographer and Artistic Director Richard Alston of the Richard Alston Dance Company, which performs tonight at the Wortham Center, under the auspices of Society for the Performing Arts. We also hear music performed by saxophonist Tim Armacost and his New York Standards Quartet previewing their shows at the Houston jazz club, Cézanne... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 10/15/2009 Tony Award-winning Broadway superstar, Brian Stokes Mitchell, gives us a preview of Some Enchanted Evening, the Houston Symphony Pops program in which he’ll be featured this weekend at Jones Hall. We also chat with members of Houston’s Two-Star Symphony and hear selections from their original score for the classic silent film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which KUHF will screen tomorrow night at downtown Houston’s Discovery Green Park... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 10/14/2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner talks about his Drama of Big Issues - his plays in which the characters find themselves contending with - and frequently struggling against - the major political, societal and cultural changes of their day. We alse hear music performed by mezzo-soprano and Artistic Director, Sonja Bruzauskas … tenor Kenneth Gayle … and pianists Anita Kruse and Rodney Waters of Divas World Productions … as they preview When Roar Becomes Aria: Transformations in Fairy Tales... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 10/13/2009 Dancer-choreographer Dominic Walsh previews 1909 to 2009: The Great Collaborators of the Ballet Russes, a program with which his company celebrates the 100th Anniversary of the world’s most influential dance company of the early 20th Century … but which features a Twenty-First Century take on classics from that era. Then cast members from the Texas Repertory Theatre Company perform some of the catchy, off-the-wall songs from their new production of Little Shop of Horrors... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 10/12/2009 Director Justin Doran and members of his cast talk about and perform an excerpt from The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, a play by Moïses Kaufman, fashioned from the texts of interviews with residents of Laramie, Wyoming, and the friends, mother, and killer of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered; he died on October 12th, 1998. The UH School of Theater is one of a hundred companies nationwide that are presenting world-première readings of the play this evening, on the anniversary of Shepard’s death... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 10/09/2009 Curator Jennifer Ward and artist Brian Piana show us around the FotoFest exhibition, POKE! Artists and Social Media, in which visual artists working in photographic and related fields respond to the proliferation of new information, communication, social-networking and electronic-media Internet technologies. We also speak with guest conductor Joel Smirnoff, Concertmaster Brian Lewis and Founder Alecia Lawyer about the opening concert of the season for River Oaks Chamber Orchestra... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 10/08/2009 Members of Mercury Baroque performs movements from a suite by Telemann, one of four works by early 18th Century German composers that make up the ensemble's Royal Fireworks program, to be presented this evening at the University of Houston - Clear Lake and Saturday night at downtown Houston’s Wortham Center. We also hear from pianist Antonia di Christofono in anticipation of his Houston recital... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 04/25/2009 Today, concert pianist and Houston native, Richard Dowling, sits down at the KUHF Steinway Grand to perform selections from the recital he’ll present Friday night with cellist Evan Drachman, who happens to be the grandson of legendary cellist, Gregor Piatigorsky. We also preview this weekend’s Bayou City Art Festival Downtown, as we chat with one of the participating artists and Jerome Vielman of the Houston Arts Alliance, who tells us about some of the local music and dance ensembles that will be performing on the Festival stage... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 10/06/2009 Former Houston Ballet Principal Dancer, Sandra Organ, talks about her piece, Si Se Puede! - Yes, We Can! - inspired by the legacy of United Farm Workers organizer, César Chávez - which Ms. Organ’s Dance Company will perform later this week at Talento Bilingüe de Houston. We also chat with Raphael Rubinstein, Contributing Editor of the periodical, Art in America, who talks about the tradition of poets’ taking their inspiration from works of visual art. That’s the topic of Mr. Raphael’s Distinguished Critics Lecture, to be presented by Art Lies magazine, this evening at the Menil Collection |
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The Front Row, Monday, 10/05/2009 We talk with Houston Symphony Assistant Conductor, Brett Mitchell, and University of Houston Creative Writing Program faculty author, Mat Johnson, about the first Musiqa concert of the season, Critical Moments, a program of new music and prose pieces that relate to significant events in modern cultural and social history... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 10/02/2009 AURA - The Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Moores School of Music perform for us today. Together with director, Rob Smith, guest pianist Melvin Chen and award-winning composer, Joan Tower, the AURA musicians play Dr. Tower’s Dumbarton Quintet, in conjunction with the Moores School's three-day Joan Tower Festival, Damaged Romanticism: Recovered, being presented a year after it was pre-empted by Hurricane Ike, in celebration of the eminent composer’s 70th birthday. We also talk with Samuel Rhodes, violist of the venerable Julliard Quartet... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 10/01/2009 Today, we have a live performance by Artistic Director and pianist, Keith Weber (pictured), soprano Stacy Weber and tenor Michael Kelly previewing the 3rd annual Concert for Peace, to be presented Saturday evening at Houston’s Saint Philip Presbyterian Church by Grace Song, Inc. We also chat with Ensemble Theatre Artistic Director, Eileen J. Morris, and two of members of her acting company talk about Seven Guitars, this year’s offering of one of the “Pittsburgh Plays” by the late August Wilson... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 09/30/2009 Louis Langrée chats about this week’s Houston Symphony concerts, which feature him conducting Joseph Haydn’s “London” Symphony, and Ludwig van Beethoven’s great Ninth Symphony, with its choral “Ode to Joy.”. We also have a studio performance by musicians from the Divergence Vocal Theater! Company members treat us to a preview of Autumn Spectre, an evening of seasonal art songs and piano, harp and sitar pieces with film, Butoh-inspired dance, spoken text and shadow-puppetry... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 09/29/2009 Maestro Larry Rachleff talks about the season-opening concerts by the Shepherd School Symphony and Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra, both of which he will conduct this weekend at Rice University. And we meet Obie-Award-winning playwright and director, Ain Gordon, and Tony-Award-nominated actress, Veanne Cox, the lone cast member of Mr. Gordon’s latest theatrical performance-piece, A Disaster Begins, in which a woman recalls her experience of the decimation of Galveston Island by the Hurricane of 1900... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 09/28/2009 This Saturday, the Houston Chamber Choir opens its 2009-2010 concert season with a program called Beyond the Battle Royal: Renaissance Music of England and Spain. It features glorious 16th Century a cappella works for voices by England’s William Byrd and Spain’s Tomás Luis de Victoria. Today on our program, the Chamber Choir’s Artistic Director, Robert Simpson, joins us to preview Saturday’s concert and, in fact, the ensemble’s entire season. We also hear performances of pieces by Byrd and Victoria from earlier HCChoir concerts... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 09/25/2009 Grammy-nominated classical guitarist Paul Galbraith sits down with his unique eight-string “Brahms” guitar - played vertically, like a cello - to treat us to selections from the recital he’s presenting tomorrow evening at Emerson Unitarian-Universalist Church, kicking off Guitar Houston’s 2009-2010 concert season... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 09/24/2009 Music Director Hans Graf chats about the Houston Symphony’s North American premiere of Der Rosenkavalier - Film and Music, a screening of the 1925 silent movie that was lost for decades which is now united with a live performance of Richard Strauss’ score for the film, adapted from his opera that, in turn, inspired the movie... |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 09/23/2009 Today, Artistic Director, Stanton Welch, and Twyla Tharp Ballet Mistress, Elaine Kudo, give us a preview of Houston Ballet’s Fall Mixed-Repertory program, Without Boundaries, which includes Twyla Tharp’s signature work, In the Upper Room and the World Première of Mr. Welch’s newest piece, Elements... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 9/22/2009 Singer Andrea Berri & pianist René Casarsa perform tangos for us! And we hear songs from Masquerade Theatre's new production of Oliver! |
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The Front Row, Monday, 9/21/2009 Violinist Sean Wang & pianist Brian Suits [pictured], both Visiting Associate Professors at the Moores School of Music, perform for us! And we chat with two authors who kick off the 2009-2010 Inprint Brown Reading Series: best-selling novelist Joseph O'Neill & Pulitzer Prize winner, Marilynne Robinson. |
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The Front Row, Friday, 09/18/2009 Music Director Hans Graf and piano soloist, Ingrid Fliter (pictured) talk about the pieces by William Schuman, Frédéric Chopin and Piotr Tchaikovsky that they and the Houston Symphony are presenting on the Orchestra’s first Classical Series Subscription Concerts of the year, one of which took place last night and which continue with two more performances, tomorrow and Sunday at Jones Hall... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 09/17/2009 Pianist Tali Morgulis (pictured), sits down at the KUHF Steinway to play selections from her Sunday concert at the UH Moores Opera House. And, we hear romantic chamber music, performed by an all-star ensemble of artist-teachers from Rice University! |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 09/16/2009 MFAH Curator Alison de Lima Greene and film-maker Megumi Sasaki discuss Ms. Sasaki’s documentary, Extraordinary Collectors, Ordinary Means - it’s the story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel (pictured), a middle-class couple who have consigned half of their family income over the past forty-five years to the amassing of a world-class collection of contemporary art. Portions of the film will be screened tomorrow evening as this month’s Artful Thursday program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston... |
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The Front Row, Tuesday, 09/15/2009 KUHF's Chris Johnson chats with Clive Greensmith, the cellist with the world-renowned Tokyo String Quartet. They discuss the music by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Haydn that make up the opening program of the ensembles 40th Anniversary season and the 49th season of performances for Houston Friends of Music... |
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The Front Row, Monday, 09/14/2009 We speak with New York artist, Jill Moser, who has stepped away from her painter’s easel to produce Sixteen Street, a collection of new works on paper, currently on view at Wade Wilson ART. We also head over to the University of Houston’s Blaffer Gallery, where artist Jon Pylypchuk shows us a ten-year survey of his paintings, drawings and sculptural pieces... |
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The Front Row, Friday, 09/11/2009 Russian-born Houston pianist Zoya Shuhatovich plays some of the keyboard preludes of Dmitri Shostakovich, previewing the recital she’ll give Monday evening at Houston’s Russian Cultural Center. We also meet singer-actors Emily Padgett and Eric Schneider, who play the uncertain high-school lovers, Sandy Dumbrowski and Danny Zuko, in the new national tour of the Broadway musical, Grease, currently being presented at Houston’s Hobby Center by Theatre Under The Stars... |
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The Front Row, Thursday, 09/10/2009 Shepherd School of Music faculty pianist, Brian Connelly, tells us about the first of this year’s Music in Context period-instruments recitals, focusing on Piano Trios by the man who more-or-less invented the genre, Franz Joseph Haydn. We also speak with members of the creative team from one of the city’s newest theatrical companies, Doorman Actors Lab, whose inaugural production is Maria Irene Fornes’s dark drama, Mud. . . . |
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The Front Row, Wednesday, 09/09/2009 Craft-artist Omar Angel Perez gratefully acknowledges the indignities, expense and even physical pain women endure in order to be fashionable. The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft currently has on display the latest of Mr. Perez’s Stilett“O”s … exquisitely crafted … outrageously stylish … but also extremely dangerous high-heeled women’s shoes - made out of layered wood and decorated with such pain-inducing accents as barbed wire and band-saw blades! |
