Celebrities Sign It With Flowers

Let’s say you have a great home life going--meaning a comfortable place to live and friends who like to hang out there with you. And let’s say you’d like a permanent memento of the fun times and the people who make them happen. What are you gonna do? Take Polaroids?

That’s way too hokey.

Victoria Leacock has a better idea. Whenever the good times rolled, she’d ask her guests to draw a flower in a book she kept for that purpose. Some drew literal flowers. Others did whimsical riffs on flower power. Some just doodled or wrote flowery messages. All expressed their personalities better than a photograph could have.

Of course, Leacock’s friends almost always had famous names: Martin Scorsese, Ben Stiller, Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, Celine Dion, Lena Horne, Robert De Niro, Ginger Rogers, Liza Minnelli, Leonardo DiCaprio. Their drawings seem to leap from the pages--a botanical Rorschach of some of the cultural hotshots of our time.

Leacock’s collection was so fine that it’s become a book, “Signature Flowers,” (Broadway Books / Melcher Media, $25). Thirty percent of the profits will go toward AIDS charities.