Pop Artist

Irina Patterson has a job that's full of hot air.

The Start of a Magical Life

The balloons on top of her head stop people in their tracks. They're not your ordinary birthday balloons, but spheres twisted into multicolored, outlandish, towering crowns. Irina Patterson, known in South Florida as the balloon lady, also fashions bubble flower sculptures, mermaids, even monkeys hanging from trees.

Growing up in the bleak Cold War landscape of Soviet Russia, Irina, now 46, never imagined she'd one day make a living as a balloon artist. The daughter of an engineer and a teacher, she won top academic awards in high school, went on to medical school and became an emergency room physician in Izhevsk, the small city where she was raised.

"I loved the science of medicine," she says today, "but being a doctor was very hard. I saw things people don't normally see -- women giving birth in the street, people getting drunk and killing someone." Medications were scarce, making it very difficult to treat those in need. In 1992, when Irina was 33, a girlfriend showed her a correspondence magazine photo of an American psychologist named Wes Patterson. "He was gorgeous," Irina says. They began exchanging letters, and six months later the divorced Patterson invited Irina to visit him in Miami. "He said he knew by the way I expressed myself that he wanted to marry me," says Irina. "If someone had told me this story, I wouldn't have believed it."

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