The Prodigy's Cousin by Joanne Ruthsatz and Kimberly Stephens

Jonathan’s fascination with film scores. There were jazz festivals throughout the United States (he “pluckishly improvised—using the Lone Ranger’s theme” at the Sacramento Jazz Jubilee) and a music tour in Hungary (he watched
Star Wars
in Hungarian). Jonathan put out a few self-produced CDs, all of which included his improvisations. He played with Wynton Marsalis at Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center as part of the Nursery Song Swing concert series when he was thirteen. At fifteen, he performed the improvised violin segment of
One Night with Fanny Brice,
an off-Broadway production, three nights a week—“sprightly contributions,” as described by the
New York Times
. But Jonathan’s heart was incomposing movie scores—a path that Eve, herself a classical musician, had never envisioned for him.
    â€œWe did have to make him practice; that’s what he hated doing about everything. But the improv came from him. Nobody could have taught this kid to improvise when he was younger, and the composition end, which he owns even more, that was the driving force behind him,” Eve said. “We couldn’t have made him compose, we couldn’t have made him sit for hours like he did, but we made him practice.”

    Lauren Voiers grew up in Westlake, a suburb on the west side of Cleveland. She’s five feet eleven inches with long hair—sometimes blond, sometimes brunette—a round face, and caramel-colored eyes. Her father, Doug, is a cosmetic dentist, her mother, Nancy, a nurse turned stay-at-home mom who has now returned to nursing.
    From the time Lauren was two or three, she had, as her father put it, “a very, very, very, extremely strong desire” to create. “Sometimes I would come home from work, and my wife would brace me for the carnage that had occurred at the home,” Doug said. “She did destroy good parts of our home over the years.”
    At three years old, Lauren got her hands on a permanent marker and drew on all four walls of a bedroom, “broad strokes, as high as she could reach,” Doug recalled; the Voierses had to tear the wallpaper down. She drew on the carpet until it had to be ripped off the floor. She carved designs into the woodwork, once etching into a custom-made window seat in her bedroom.
    As she got a bit older—four, five, six—Lauren’s creative urge persisted, but she channeled it onto more traditional surfaces. She drew faces and objects in great detail without looking at any sort of reference material. She painted by number; she painted on backpacks and clothes. She assembled jewelry from kits, made a jewelry box out of clay, and poured colored sand into bottles. She had a knack for making posters that won her a couple of school contests. In middle school,Lauren grew interested in architecture and sketched out designs on graph paper, creating modern, angular homes and geometric spaces.
    Nancy and Doug both enjoyed the arts—Nancy played the piano; Doug took a ceramics course in college and dabbled with watercolors—and they bought Lauren markers and crayons and other art supplies on Christmas and her birthday to support her interest. Art, they thought, made for a great hobby.
    In seventh grade, Lauren’s eye wandered to her dad’s painting supplies. Inspired by one of her dad’s art books, she borrowed a canvas and some paints and tried to replicate a Thomas Kinkade painting of a river running through a forest. Over the next few months, she produced a few other small landscapes—a couple of houses, another nature scene. She painted a couple of times a week for four or five hours at a time. “Eventually, it got to the point where she was producing things that were fairly amusing,” Doug said. “But of course, we wound up with four kids, so we’re making babies, and my wife’s a critical care nurse, and I’m a cosmetic dentist and building a business,