Setting: A high-end metropolitan art gallery with avant-garde works of art on canvas lining the walls with small placards containing information about the artist, title, etc. Several very well dressed and pompous art enthusiasts and buyers drink champagne and mingle with the artist and her patrons. Light piano music plays in the background, and the lighting is subtle, but for the spotlights on each work of art – all contemporary and rather impressionistic. It is evening and the traffic passing by has died down. The artist, a youngish looking, thirty-something, pale faced, square bob cut, floating pencil diva-type with an eye on her watch and the other on her masterpieces, excuses herself and leaves the room to tend to something rather inconvenient seeming. Two quite snobbish, overly makeup’d women in stuffy, uniform gray dresses, far too expensive to be beautiful, discuss a piece they have found lying caddy-corner to the main artwork installation. They eye it with meticulous and shrewdly critical frowns of discernment that only the best of taste and refinement allow in public. They are serious art lovers and only buy the finest pieces.

Buyer One: “Darling, have you ever seen anything as terrifically post-modern absurdist as this? It’s simply unbelievable!”

Buyer Two: “My God, it’s like a contemporary Matisse meets early Gauguin! The brushstrokes are simplistic yet unbridled - it’s cautionary and dispassionate - almost pious - while still being rapturously abandoned! I’m enchanted!”

Buyer One: “Darling, I couldn’t agree more. It’s like she’s been reborn after a lifetime of waiting to be seen and suddenly there she is - bold, powerful and unapologetic. Such a grand confluence of emotion, restriction, conflict! Like she’s the embodiment of earth yet cosmic and still uniquely feminine.”

Buyer Two: “I know. This piece is like the artist’s subconscious dream inseminated her self-conscious hidden desire and gave birth to her super-consciousness as an entity no longer bound by form,

shape or gravity!”

Buyer One: “Darling, I’m actually moved.”

Buyer Two: “Even the placement is unconventional. Strewn on the floor like something misplaced. Like the female ego, no longer framed by the limits of patriarchy. Astonishing! Brava!”

Buyer One: “Undoubtedly, darling. And I thought the rest of her work was just a bourgeois Dada derivative. Don’t you think it would look incredible in our guest house in the Hamptons? I must have it.”

Buyer Two: “But where’s the label? I don’t see one.”

The artist returns with a darkly dressed, adorably sullen looking five-year-old girl on her bony hip.

“Everyone, this is my daughter, Juliana. She told me just this afternoon that she wants to be an artist, just like her mother.”

The artist moves next to the two women buyers and smiles falsely as they move aside.

The little girl points toward the misplaced drawing on the floor that the woman have been examining and exclaims, “My ‘Chocolate Chips,’ Mama!”

The artist laughs a bit too hard and agrees, “Yes, dear. You’re very first gallery showing!”

The crowd laughs and the gray dressed women frown as they grin. The first takes the second by the arm as they exit.

“Darling, I told you it was derivative!”