When I first moved to Minneapolis, I carried a short list of names in my pocket—people I was told I had to meet. Aldo Moroni was at the top of the list.

A few months later, on a warm late-summer afternoon, I finally made that call. Aldo told me to meet him in a quiet Minneapolis park near his home. When I arrived, Aldo was sitting on a park bench with a suitcase at his feet, like someone waiting for a train that no longer came.

“You must be Remo,” he said, standing to shake my hand. His eyes had that gleam — half curiosity, half trouble. The good kind.

We sat for hours, talking about everything — art, architecture, civilizations, how culture builds and destroys itself. He spoke compassionately, laughed easily, and kept circling back to history. I leaned toward the future, he toward the past. But the conversation met in the middle like two rivers merging into something larger.

At one point I nodded toward the suitcase. “What’s the story with that?”

He smiled without embarrassment. “My wife just kicked me out,” he said. “Guess this is my studio now.”

Then he laughed — a full, booming laugh — and just like that, the tension evaporated. He had this way of turning even his chaos into a shared adventure.

As we stood up to leave the park, Aldo said, “You ever been to the New French?” I told him I had checked it out my first week in town because everyone said it was the place the artists hung out. “But the only person I met,” I said, “was this strange guy in a white tuxedo and a headband who wouldn’t even give me the time of day.” Aldo burst out laughing. “Oh God, that was Scott Seekins. Don’t worry, he’s an acquired taste. Come on, give it another shot. I need a ride anyway.”

So we went. And we closed the bar that night — two brand‑new friends already acting like we’d known each other for years. Little did I know closing the bar on a Thursday night would soon become a weekly ritual for the next ten years or so.

The next day, with mild hangovers and a strange sense of momentum, we met again. It became clear almost immediately that the conversation we’d started on that bench wasn’t finished — not by a long shot. Somewhere between talk of myth and modernism, bar stories and big dreams, we had already begun our first collaboration without even realizing it. We didn’t have a plan, just a shared instinct that something enormous was waiting to be made.

Aldo knew everyone, and within a week he had a new studio at the Skunk House — soon to become legendary for wild parties, artists, theater people, and where we built the “Wax Globe.” But on that day, it was just two young Italian‑named artists in a Scandinavian city, sitting on a park bench, beginning a friendship that would change both of our lives.