4. Kat F

Have you ever been served a meal in a restaurant and dreamed of what it would be like to serve it on your own china for a dinner party at your own house? I mean, the whole kit and kaboodle, with the rosemary garnish and the sauce dripping invitingly over a plump steak or pooling beneath a crisp golden filet of fish.

My friend Kat would surely have that dream... and then she'd do it. She would lick her fingers after the meal and pick out the individual flavors. "Oh, that is spicy, tart... must be a balsamic reduction... What is that herb--ooh it smells like thyme." Her brain would keep ticking as she drove home, as she sang along to Jack Johnson and then even when she laid her soft brunette hair on her pillow that night. Weeks later you could show up to her brightly lit kitchen and watch as she danced around in an apron, light-footed in her childlike glee and creating just that dish.

Kat is the picture of creativity. Even the way her mahogany locks fall around her freckled face makes you want to take a picture. As you follow her through a tour of her house she will humbly, yet confidently point out her artwork. Not work she bought at an art sale, which would easily be another of her hobbies, but pieces she painted from images in her minds' eye and any medium she could dream up to make it occur on canvas. My favorite is a picture she did in browns and greens, completed with a splatter of puff paint. I thought puffy paint was the stuff of childhood, for old tee shirts and hot pink binders you carry in a Lisa Frank backpack, but Kat takes this immature art tool and turns it into the stuff of masterpiece. She is rolling her eyes right now, and giggling a bit, but her husband is nodding his head. It's hard not to be impressed by her.

The thing that really strikes me though is not her innate artistic ability. Kat's imagination is one that takes her all the way through an art studio, past the kitchen cabinets and herb shelfs, and into people's lives. She can find the beauty in any person and blend it with her own passion for relationships, mix it with the friends she has already gathered, and create a party that cannot be rivaled, or denied. Kat looks at people in a way that makes them look up from their insecurity and embrace their own gifts simply because she is so excited to draw them out.

This girl is on YouTube dancing and singing, in the halls of people's houses with her paintings, happily filling friends' bellies with her delicious concoctions, but she is always most proud sitting in a corner, sipping a glass of wine, and watching her friends laugh in her home, happy to just be themselves in her presence.