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At the meal following the YoungArts gala, I had the privilege of being seated near Michele Oka Doner, the renowned sculptor, jewelry maker, fashionista, space maker.  Her work can be seen at MOMA, the Louvre, the Cooper-Hewitt, and the FIU-Wolfsonian, where a mural painted by my great uncle Lloyd Morgan, an architectural designer in the firm of Schultze and Weaver, is hung (below).  Michele's art can be experienced in retail stores (Tiffany's, say, or Macy's, or Fifty One East, the luxury superstore in Doha, Qatar), in public sculpture gardens, in the Herald Square Subway Station of New York City, and at the Miami International Airport, where she created a nearly mile-long floor of dark terrazzo celestial sea forms in bronze and mother of pearl. 

Actually, I'm just scratching the surface here.  Michele's work is everywhere.

I'll be joining Michele as one of her new pieces gets cast, and I'll be writing about the experience for the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

This is how fate takes us.  This is the experience we lean toward.

My great uncle Lloyd Morgan, a visionary architect, painted this imaginary skyline of the many buildings he helped design as a member of the Schulze and Weaver design team—the Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Sherry-Netherland, the Miami Biltmore, the Breakers—and hung the painting in his Tarrytown, NY, home throughout the years when we visited him as a family.  After he passed away, the painting was adopted by my father, who ultimately had it restored and shipped to the FIU-Wolfsonian.  I was able to reconnect with the painting for the first time two weeks ago, when I visited the quite beautiful Wolfsonian during my experience at YoungArts.

My cousin Libby gave my brother the gift of family photographs years ago—slides, mostly, taken by my father's father, which my brother systematically recovered and scanned. This is the mystery photo in the bunch. My father's father and mother to the left. My Uncle Lloyd (architect of the Waldorf Astoria and other grand buildings) and Aunt Anne beside them. The gorgeous Marilyn Monroe-like creature and the woman behind her (we don't know who they are).

And then the child—dressed so finely in blue silk and turned-up sleeves and determined to sour the family pose. I wonder who she is. I wonder if she recalls the moment, or would, were she to find this picture here.