I once held an Egyptian party at my home. My loft was above a theater. I painted a huge mural of a row of standing men on the wall. They stood between columns. Each man had different characteristics such as skin color, headdress, and hairstyle. I depicted one bald man. You know, bald men were priests in Old Egypt. All of them had strong eye contact, just like deaf people do. I painted their eyes in clear detail until they were just so. I made sure their bodies had details: jewelry, bracelets, and slatted skirts with wooden beads and fabric, overlapping almost like a collage with a mixture of paint all over.

It was nice, the way the men stood, their hands resting on shoulders, touching each other the way deaf people touch each other for attention. They all connected, not standing stiffly or gesturing. It was more of a physical thing, like deaf culture itself. I wasn't trying to put in deaf culture, but I felt I needed to break the rules of the Old Egyptian traditional art to accommodate my style. I wasn't trying to connect it to deaf issues. It just came out of my artistic preferences while I drew the mural for the party.

Painting the mural took me a few days, and then a month passed. I surveyed the mural. I turned to my tall deaf roommate Charlie. "Something's wrong with that man in the middle."

He said, "Yes. The bald man standing over there."

I checked each man I liked. Fine. Fine. That bald man--something's wrong. Fine. Fine. Fine.

I kept going back to the bald man. We looked at each other and agreed: "Right. I'm missing something. But I don't know why." I kept looking at the bald man. His eyes and body were okay. His eye contact and physical contact were okay. All that was okay. I couldn't understand why. I was frustrated. The party was that night. The food was ready.

I kept looking at it. I wasn't satisfied. I had to fix it somehow. But what?

Then the buzzer lights flashed...