Family hopeful plate meant for fundraiser will turn up

A few hours before her fundraiser, Mireya Tusing still had hope. Earlier this week, a plate that was set to be auctioned Saturday went missing from its display inside a clinic at MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Tusing didn’t know what happened, but part of her wished the plate pilferer would come to her silent auction and pay up, supporting ovarian cancer research in the process.

The plate was one of 25 artist-designed creations set to be sold Saturday night at the third annual TCP Art Auction. Tusing and her siblings started The Cristina Project in honor of their mother, Cristina Garza, an educator who died of ovarian cancer in 2012. The plate auction is one of a few different events they put on to carry onher legacy and support causes she was fond of.

Why did they decide to auction off custom plates?

“My mother loved to cook for everyone,” Tusing, a speech pathologist, said Saturday. “That’s the way she showed love, and the plate represented that.”

Last year, the fundraiser brought in close to $5,000, and this year, they hoped to double that. Proceeds go to the Sprint for Life 5K, which supports ovarian cancer re- search at MD Anderson. Tusing liked this option because funds would provide a grant for a researcher dedicated to ovarian cancer.

The missing plate had been on display for about a week and a half at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Thursday, Tusing got a call from her father, a volunteer at MD Anderson, asking if she had picked up the plate. She had not.

The turquoise plate featured a monarch butterfly and had already gotten several “likes” on Facebook. Tusing thought it would have sold for a few hundred dollars at least.

“There’s no way of knowing what happened, but we’re hoping for the best,” she said.

Requests for more information from MD Anderson on Saturday afternoon weren’t returned.

This was artist Sue Donaldson’s first time designing a plate for the auction. Donaldson, based in Kingwood, typically paints on canvas or wood. She likes to paint nature or convey messages of how she communicates with nature, she said.

Donaldson wanted her plate to show a message of hope and transformation and looked outside for inspiration. She featured a female monarch butterfly with orange and yellow pat- terns on its wings, spread out above a turquoise background with white dots.

“I thought the monarch butterfly would be perfect,” she said.

She got the idea from the milkweed plants in her backyard. There, she’s seen monarch butterflies come and lay eggs, which became caterpillars. Eventually, the caterpillar would come out, eat the milkweed plant and grow into a chrysalis, before one day spreading its wings into the best of the butterflies, the monarch.

Donaldson would let the butterflies sit on her finger. Then “off it goes, into the wild blue yonder,” she said.

Tusing and her family filed a report with MD Anderson and hope to get more information on the plate’s whereabouts. Saturday, Tusing was busy making arrangements for the auction. While these events can require a lot of work, that is precisely where she said she feels her mother’s presence the strongest. She also thinks her mom may have something to do with the unexpected bright and sunny Saturday weather.

“We always get lucky with the weather,” she said. “I’m convinced our mother has a hand in that.”