A/N: I apologies for the lateness of this. I had fully intended to finish off this series before Christmas. However, my computer blew up (not in a cool, flaming, loss of hard-drive way, in a sort of quiet, tired loss of hard drive way)… and it took me a month to replace my machine. I am again using my personal cannon in this piece… its slightly cross-over. Without any more ado, here is Tina.
Tina Cohen-Chang: Beauty and Service
Tina Cohen-Chang loves beauty. She could spend days in museums, looking at the paintings. The quiet and the gentle lighting fill her. She will pause for hours to take photographs of flowers. And, she adores music. She never stuttered when she sang, even when she was the most shy. Of course, she only sang in the shower, so it hardly counted, but still.
Her mother, the high powered lawyer and cultural jew isn't sure what to do with her artsy daughter. Liz Cohen doesn't have extra time to talk to Tina about God, she's too busy assembling notes for her court case next week and making sure the women at the domestic violence shelter have enough blankets. Liz doesn't exactly believe in God, but she's a big fan of good works. And so, noticing her daughter's interest in the arts, Liz wants Tina to teach a class to children. Asian summer camp is a compromise.
Tina's father doesn't much care for art, either. He is the cosumate scientist, always reading the latest papers and looking for the latest evidence. His practice is flourishing, and he barely has time any more, either. In some ways, he's like Tina in that he loves beautiful things. They just have different definations of beautiful. The intricate workings of the patellar tendon will never fascinate Tina the way they do her father. In other ways, he's like his wife, always looking out for someone. After being dragged through numerous butterfly houses, and watching his sensitive daughter sigh over the captivity and eventual death of the colorful creatures, he has given up trying to talk to her about much beyond the day-to-day.
The person who most feeds Tina's emptiness is her uncle Mark. He sends her little presents from the East Village and, when she visits him, introduces her to all sorts of interesting people. He's the first one who ever talked to her about protection, and even though she was nine, and too shy to even talk to a boy in Ohio, she appreciated it. He took her to off-Broadway shows and the Metropolitian museum of Art. And, Uncle Mark showed Tina his work, helping AIDS patients re-connect with their families before its too late through videos.
Mark is so passionate about his work that he gives his niece strength. Some day, Tina wants to be like her uncle. She believes in using beauty to touch people's lives and make them better.