AMBITIONS:
To live life to its fullest, have a beautiful family and a successful career.
TURN-ONS:
A romantic candlelight dinner overlooking the ocean at sunset with someone I
care about.
TURNOFFS:
People who are always late. People who are dishonest, self-centered and have
no ambition.
THE WAY TO MY HEART:
Is by spoiling me with attention. I love for a man to make me feel like I'm
number one in his life.
IF I WERE INVISIBLE:
Life would be less challenging, because it would make it too easy to find the
answers to my questions.
I MAY BE TINY:
But haven't you heard? Good things come in small packages.
I WISH I HAD:
The ability to read minds.
It's an hour before closing, and the Historical Museum of South Florida is
nearly empty, just the way Maria Checha likes it. Slowly, as if treading on
hallowed ground, the Bogotá-born Miss August wanders through the exhibits
and stops, transfixed, in front of a 19th century photograph of a huge banyan
tree. "As a child," relates Maria with a faint Colombian accent, "I
would swing from the vines of a tree just like that one and play for hours under
its maze of hanging roots. This picture brings back a million wonderful memories.
That's the power of great photography." Maria should know. She's a photographer
herself, having studied the craft since she was 17 years old. She shoots primarily
with black-and-white film and develops her own pictures, usually portraits of
friends or photographs of the art deco architecture in Miami's South Beach neighborhood,
where she lives. But this self-proclaimed visual artist expresses herself with
more than a camera. Maria also paints in acrylics and watercolors, sketches
with charcoal, sculpts and creates three-dimensional mixed-media art. Back at
her studio apartment, where she has painted a tromp l'oiel sky on the wall,
she pulls a painting from behind an antique armchair that she's re-upholstering.
Monet, Maria's Himalayan cat, jumps onto her lap for a closer look at the bemused
figure on the canvas.
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