NEW YORK • At a piano bar in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood of Manhattan, just before nightlife shut down across the city, a 71-year-old former model named Shailah Edmonds performed her one-woman cabaret show to a two-drink-minimum crowd.
Edmonds, who stands at 1.87m tall in heels, wore a chiffon dress and a bejewelled head wrap as she told her life story: that of a starry-eyed girl from Portland, Oregon, who came to New York in the 1970s and rose to success as a model during an era when black women were excluded from the elite runways of haute couture fashion.
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