The All-Nighters
Some of the season’s hottest looks are inspired by work clothes with an edgy ’80s vibe. Suit up sexy, work late if you have to, and, by all means, take care of business.
Sep. 19, 2017

Cyndy Garza Roberts, Stephanie Ramos, Michele Leal Farah, Vicky Dominguez and Leisa Holland Nelson Bowman
WITH A GOAL of ensuring access to quality healthcare for underserved families in Houston’s East End, El Centro de Corazón has been making a difference for 30 years. Its annual Making a Difference luncheon, this year chaired by Vicky Dominguez with honorary chairs Leisa Holland Nelson Bowman and Leila Perrin, raised more than $150,000.
Emceed by Cyndy Garza Roberts, the River Oaks Country Club affair honored Michele Leal Farrah for her commitment to El Centro and similar causes all over Houston. The organization’s CEO, Marcie Mir, thanked supporters and shared why El Centro must still expand its services to reach more Houston residents. Notably, 74 percent of El Centro’s 12,000-plus patients live at or below federal poverty level ($31K annually for a family of four) and more than half are uninsured.
Then Stephanie Ramos gave the keynote address; the ABC News correspondent and Army Reserve Major spoke about channeling inner strength to make a bigger impact.
Andrea Godea, Larry Savala, Amalia Savala
Sippi Khurana and Donae Chramosta
Blanca Lopez, Julie Garza, Hoda Sana
Shelley Ludwick and Elvia Taylor
Elizabeth Ramos, Marcie Mir and Michele Leal
Esmeralda De la Cruz, Lorena Gomez, Vicky Dominguez
Neena Arora, Diana Grair, Kavon Young
Maria Smith, Diana Ospina
Mari Trevino Glass and Cinthya Reade
Evelyn Leightman, George Connelly, Helen Perry
George and Michele Farah
Lisa Wilmore, George Connelly
German Ibañez, Melanie Rodriguez
Linda Flores Olson, Vicki Luna, Graciana Garces, Jorge Gonzalez
Jan Mendenhall, Xochitl Ljuboja, Miriam Zatarain
Jolene Trevino and Vicki Luna
John Cisneros, Marco Perez
Lisa Wilmore, Ed Emmett and Leisa Holland Nelson Bowman
ONE CANNOT ACCUSE Houston’s Axiom Quartet of playing it safe. When it comes to exploring the outer limits of string quartet repertoire, engaging audiences who don’t normally attend classical music concerts, and putting in the collective time necessary to nail the gnarly idiosyncrasies of 20th- and 21st-century composers, Axiom continues to walk the walk as they talk the talk.
They’re a dapper bunch; relatively conservative in appearance. You’ll never see founding member cellist Patrick Moore, violist Katie Carrington, or violinists Timothy Peters and Matt Lammers rocking a rainbow mohawk or dressed in studded leather jackets onstage.
Instead, the quartet, who have weathered some recent changes in personnel, embraces an unpretentious, hip-to-be-square attitude, engaging their audiences in down-to-earth language while bringing great classical music to unexpected places, be it a pizza parlor, George Bush Intercontinental Airport, or literally underground at Cave Without a Name in the Texas Hill Country.
On Sunday, Oct. 6, Axiom opens its '24-'25 season above ground at Lambert Hall in the Heights with Risky(er) Business, an intense, historically informed concert that explores the sounds of dissent. The program includes Dimitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 and the American premiere of Ukrainian-born composer Nikolai Roslavets’ recently discovered and unrecorded String Quartet No. 5.
Roslavets, a cantankerous modernist who nevertheless wholly embraced the experimental innovations of his time, composed this his final string quartet in the early 1940s, toward the end of his life, and in a decade when his music was officially repressed. Thanks to the efforts of dedicated musicologists and ensembles like Axiom, the extent of Roslavets’ repertoire and contributions to contemporary music are finally coming to light. (On Sunday, Axiom will unpack Roslavets’ biography and life under totalitarianism for the Lambert audience.)
Axiom describes Shostakovich’s second string quartet as “a now-celebrated masterpiece written with feverish frustration … giving voice to the Russian people through a transformed folks song.” Musicologists believe Shostakovich used the string quartet as a platform to communicate, albeit in cryptic, even contradictory language, his true feelings regarding Soviet censorship, oppression, and violence.
The second movement of his String Quartet No. 2 is quintessential Shostakovich, with its impassioned recitatives and romantic folk melodies ascending over inverted dominant seventh chords that sit undisturbed like pools of black water.
By the time the movement’s haunting and dissonant chorale appears, you can almost imagine what it must have been like to compose music under Stalin, a time when art was politicized to the point of absurdity, and Shostakovich found himself living a life of relative safety under totalitarian scrutiny.