POLYSEMY Online ©2006

I had dinner last night with the person, who is ultimately responsible for leading me to do what I do as an artist as well as my being the mother of my particularly unique child. No, he wasn't one of my art teachers. I hadn't seen him in at least 20 years. He was once the young music student of my parents, who gave their creative sponge of a five year old daughter a board game called Voice of the Mummy. So last evening, as he looked at my work and asked me how I ever got into metalsmithing, I told him the story I've recounted countless times to collectors, students, fellow artists, and writers, who have interviewed me, about this wonderfully mischievous rebellious teenager, named Roddy, who sparked my passion for ancient Egyptian art (even if his goal was really just to make my parents groan). He didn't believe me.

Prior to the King Tut craze that swept the U.S. with the tour of Tutankhamen artifacts in the late 1970's, there was hardly a plethora of pharaonic chachkas or books available to anyone but the serious art historian or archaeologist. Unless one lived in a major city with a permanent Egyptian collection, such art was far under the radar. There wasn't even any Steve Martin roller skating across the Saturday Night Live stage, wearing a nemes headdress and singing, "Now if I'd know they'd line up just to see 'im, I'd taken all my money and bought me a museum."

So, when I was confronted with the Milton Bradley styrofoam step pyramid, the pith helmeted Egyptologist figures that moved around the board, the gold plastic sarcophagus, hiding the record player that gave the game its name and instructions where to move, and the heavy cardboard, insert tab A in slot B boxes to hold the green plastic gems, gathered by said Egyptologists and covered with the most mesmerizing and not so cheesy reproductions of Egyptian tomb paintings, my world was forever changed. An only child, I played that game hours on end for years, staring at the mysterious iconography, taking turns with all for explorers and usually letting the blue one win. I still have it.

Five years later, Tut made his Western debut, and though my parents couldn't take me, an uncle sent my mother a reprint of Howard Carter's account of discovering the tomb. Immediately, I recognized the sarcophagus on the front as the model for my game and begged my mother to let me have the book. She thought I was loony but well understood the significance of such sudden interests in a kid. Inside that book I saw the metalwork that still gives me an intense physical craving to pick up a hammer. Eventually I went to Egypt, met my son's father, and nearly became an Egyptologist but chose making art to digging it up.

My original gift bearer's disbelief at his influence got me thinking into the wee hours, that most of us are lucky enough to have had some serendipitous person somewhere in our early life, who sparked some creatively important part of us that would otherwise likely have remained dormant. Who was yours, and how did it ultimately change the direction of your life? I thought of a child to whom I taught French in elementary school (way back when I could actually speak it a little), who went on to get his masters in French literature. Like Roddy, I've negated the possibility that his decision had much to do with my influence, despite his mother's making a point to tell mine several times.

No matter the gratitude we feel to souls, who, perhaps inadvertently or even most intentionally, fired off the rockets of our creative direction, we easily downplay the power of our own influence on the children of others. With one gesture we can impact which doors a child will go through, encountering different possibilities and paths that direct purpose and passion for the rest of their lives. It's enough to make me want to go to the toy store, find an outside the box sort of game, and give it to an unsuspecting precocious child as a basic ingredient to a recipe of who knows what.