Leonardo’s Mona Lisa Trunk - The Monday Morning Memo

When the wizard and Princess Pennie bought this 400-year-old renaissance trunk at auction, Christina Gressianu volunteered to pick it up near her home in Colorado, store it, then drive it to the Wizard of Ads partner meeting in Fort Worth. Christina is a highly celebrated and award-winning photographer. During the weeks the trunk was stored safely in her studio, it served as a prop for the occasional portrait. How cool is that! Christina Gressianu and Vi Wickam, a Wizard of Ads partner, were married at Chapel Dulcinea. Sadly, our trunk is not quite old enough to be the one in which Leonardo da Vinci stored the Mona Lisa. It was found in a trunk similar to this one when he died in 1519.

“The Samburu warriors have arrived – four of them, two holding drums, a child in the shadows minding a yellow longhorn cow. They came yesterday, too, after the morning game run, when Lou and Mindy were ‘napping.’ That’s when Charlie exchanged shy glances with the most beautiful warrior, who has scar tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back.

The warrior smiles at Charlie. He’s nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But he’s sung for enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child. Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He’ll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions.) He’ll marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where he’ll invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security. He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather’s hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight.

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- Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

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