Soonish

I'm awed and touched by this Soonish-themed collage made by Ellen Petry Leanse. Browse the scans, and continue reading below for the story behind this gorgeous piece.

Ellen is a startup coach and consultant based in San Francisco, and she's been a dear friend since 2010 or so. She flew all the way to Boston to attend the Soonish launch party and my 50th birthday party on the weekend of January 13-15, 2017.

On the day after the launch party, Ellen and I met up for a tour of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and I showed her the fortune I'd gotten the night before, at an afterparty at Chang Sho in Cambridge, MA. It was a pretty awesome fortune, and she asked if she could borrow it and return it in enhanced form. Of course I said yes!

A couple of days later, before Ellen went home to California, she presented me with the amazing collage booklet. It incorporates not just the fortune (on the third spread), but three varieties of the Soonish business card, glimpses of Piermatteo D'Amelia's Annunciation, and other references from our Gardner visit, such as the Calderwood auditorium and materials from the "Beyond Words" exhibit on incunabula. There's even a little door that opens up to show...a monorail!

Turns out that after our museum tour, Ellen had lingered at the Gardner's Education Studio and used materials there to complete the book.

What did my fortune say? "Put your mind into planning today. Look into the future."

A Silicon Valley veteran, Ellen was the first user evangelist at Apple and went on to work with Google and numerous other companies. Here's a TEDxBerkeley talk she gave in 2016 on "Happiness By Design." Thanks Ellen!

Extras