Tom Hanks, America’s Dad and consoler-in-chief, is also a curator of melancholy images. In recent years, Hanks has used his social-media accounts to document the accessories he comes across that, normally part of a pair, have been abandoned without their mates. These items range from gloves to mittens to flip-flops to socks and more. But there are rules to his art; a method to capturing the maudlin. On the red carpet for a tribute to his film career at the Museum of Modern Art last night, I learned them—fast.

“I’m going to drop something on the ground, and I want to know how you would caption it,” I said as Hanks and __ Rita Wilson__, his wife of 28 years, approached me on the red carpet. I let a small glove, still stained with red turf-marks from my high school track-and-field days, fall to the ground. I had carried this glove in my bag all day, nervously anticipating the execution of my hopefully clever party trick.

As my glove hit the floor, Hanks studied the small, black-and-white-striped accessory.

“Here's the thing,” he began, looking up. “In order for there to be some authenticity, I don't take photos of staged lost gloves.”

I told him that I was thinking of dropping the glove on the ground before he arrived, but I had balked out of fear that someone would scoop it up. I had chosen instead to place the glove in front of Hanks. I had chosen (wrongly) to stage the photo.

“Now, if you had just left it there, I would have done it," he said. “Ya blew it, kid—what can I tell ya? I never touch the gloves, I don't pose them, I don't change their position.”

I took mental notes, so as not to make the same glove-art mistake in the future, as Hanks continued: “I see them exactly as they are; otherwise, I've lost the power of the vernacular.”

Wilson chimed in, reminding her husband that his artwork goes beyond gloves.

“There’s the occasional flip-flop,” she added, as I stored this in the recesses of my mind for future attempts at having my accessories become the subject of Hanks’s art.

Hanks nodded, as he concluded our lesson for the evening: “Anything that’s lost has a story behind it.”