Shoes are our bread and butter here at Ped HQ, so we’re always interested when we run across news items focused on footwear (beyond what celebrity wore what because, well, ho-hum…). We thought you Ped fans might be interested, too, so we’re starting an occasional series about recent news featuring shoes, just in case you overlooked, er, overstepped it.

1) Hullabaloo over White House Counsel Kathryn Reummler’s Shoes

Question: If you were a White House lawyer in President Obama’s inner circle, what would you like The Washington Post to notice about you? Your impressive education? Your career path to the top? The legal advice you offer the leader of the free world? How about your shoes? No to that last one? Well, too late because Juliet Elprin already wrote an online piece all about Kathryn Reummler’s fondness for fancy footwear. Amusingly, the White House responded to the Post‘s request for a photo of Reummler’s shoes by sending over a pic of Reummler doing her job at a meeting in the Oval Office. Kudos, White House press office!

(Official White House photo by Pete Souza.)

To be fair, The Washington Post did publish this more journalistic profile of Reummler in the hard copy of the paper. Nevertheless, when has a newspaper ever deemed a male politico’s shoe choices worthy of multiple paragraphs? Quite a few outlets offered pointed critiques of the Post‘s sexist treatment of Reummler; two of the best are Irin Carmon’s take-down on Salon and Debbie Hines’ opinion piece on the Huffington Post.

2) Kinky Boots wins Tony for “Best Musical”

We are all smiles about the Broadway sensation Kinky Boots winning “Best Musical” at the Tony Awards on June 9, not only because Cyndi Lauper(!!!!) wrote the music and lyrics, but also because the show is a theatrical remake of the 2005 British film of the same name. If you haven’t seen either and you can’t get to NYC, by all means check out the movie because it is a hoot! The plot is based on a true story about a man who saved his family’s shoe factory by making boots for transvestites! It’s big fun! (And congrats on the multiple Tonys to Cyndi Lauper, playwright Harvey Fierstein, choreographer Jerry Mitchell, and lead actor Billy Porter!)

3) Graduate Student Finds Sole in Romance Novels

We first read about artist and grad student Rudi Bremer’s stunning shoes on Jezebel, but we got the lowdown (with lots of photos) at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, which aptly calls Bremer’s heels, “The Most Awesome Shoes in the Universe.” Bremer designed her decoupaged shoes, which feature steamy book cover art, to declare her identity as a lover of romance novels, noting,  “Often when people find out that I read romance novels they tell me I ‘don’t seem the type’ by which they mean I seem too smart/cynical/young/anti-cats to be a romance reader.” She calls her functional artwork, “The Sole of a Romantic” because she says, “I live for puns.” Shoes and puns?  She’s talking Ped’s language!

Rudi Bremer’s “The Sole of a Romantic.” (Photograph by Phil Verness.)

That’s a wrap for our first roundup of “Shoes in the News.” If you see something we should include in our next post, by all means, send us a link!

Step lively out there!