What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [104]
Each time, Myrna directed the parents to gaze into the dining room. There the seven rapt young guests and Nell were huddled over mirrored paper cups on the cherrywood dining table. The cups were sitting on sheets of paper on which Myrna had made mysterious line drawings. The children were coloring intently between the lines with crayons and giggling. It quickly became apparent that commonplace coloring book pictures alone were not generating their intense concentration or their laughter. Every time they looked up from coloring the distorted shapes on the pages before them and at the mirrored cups, they saw something magical. Their drawings were somehow being transformed into their own vivid versions of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. Parents joined their children, exhaling delighted “oohs” and “aahs.”
“It was just an entertainment for me and for Nelly,” Myrna said. But the parents saw more than just amusement in Myrna’s creative birthday party activity. “They kept saying, ‘You’ve got a business there. You’ve got to do something with it!’ ”
So began Myrna Hoffman’s twenty-year, multi-chaptered, sometimes treacherous entrepreneurial epic. The enthusiastic parents promised to find investors and stoked Myrna’s belief in what she had made, her ambition, and her daring. She soon formed her own educational art activities and toy company, which she named Ooz & Oz to echo the beguiled responses. She was possessed by a novice’s naïveté as she launched her quest to make her art toy as familiar to American households as such iconic toys as Etch-a-Sketch and Slinky. That has not happened yet, as close as she has come during two decades. Instead of a fairy-tale ending of a fat fortune made, she has a cache of nineteen national toy awards and a going business that seems poised for a commercial breakthrough. But even without crossing the tipping point, to use Malcolm Gladwell’s phrase, hers is no small accomplishment. Her story is an example of gutsiness, of iconoclastic achievement that comes from personal resilience, creative resourcefulness, and faithful devotion to an idea.
The seeds of her toy were sown one day, a decade before Nell’s birthday party, when Myrna happened into an exhibit in a pocket museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was then still single, childless, in her thirties, and working as a freelance technical illustrator and an animator at MIT and Harvard. She was drawn to the little exhibit by its display of ancient optical astrolabes, sextants, and other esoteric brass optical instruments and devices for measuring distances and movements of planetary objects and stars.
“I loved that stuff. I had always been fascinated by mirrors and reflections. Among the optical instruments, one caught my eye. It was a skinny, shiny cigar tube standing on a little, unrecognizable drawing. When I saw Puss and Boots reflected on the tube, I asked myself, How do they do that? How?”
That was Myrna’s first encounter with an anamorphoscope, a curved reflective cylinder on which a deformed image appears in its true shape. “I fell in love with it and wanted to figure out how it was done. It stuck with me,” Myrna said, nodding toward the living room of the house in West Seattle, Washington, where she now lives. Mirrored cones and pyramids of various sizes sparkled on a glass coffee table, a desk, and a mantelpiece. Her shelves held books about mirror art and optical illusions. File drawers were filled with historical information about anamorphosis. A buoyant, five-foot-three-inch woman with styled white hair, Hoffman, at sixty-seven, proclaimed, “Everything of mine is mirrors.”
After her introduction to anamorphosis at the Harvard exhibit, Myrna began obsessively researching its history and techniques in her spare time. (At the time, there were few books readily available on the subject and, of course, no Internet from which