Savor the moment, Della Hardman used to say. Well, here’s a story about savoring the moment for Della Hardman Day 2009, which happens to be tomorrow.

“My father, who had a series of strokes, woke up for a moment on inauguration day, to say ‘I have lived to see this day,’” said Patricia Williams, whose father, incidentally, has rallied strongly under President Obama.

And tomorrow in Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs, Ms. Williams, Columbia law professor, columnist (Diary of a Mad Law Professor, in the Nation) and sometime performance artist, will offer a jazz tribute to Barack Obama, and her father, for Della Hardman Day.

Now, one could write a whole story about Ms. Williams’s CV, which includes various academic distinctions, among them a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, legal distinctions as a consumer advocate and work on various public interest lawsuits and her writerly distinctions in various scholarly journals, newspapers and magazines and books.

Not to mention her documentaries, influence on feminism and her membership on various boards including the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Suffice it to say she has a broad range of interests.

But not until 1997, when she became involved in a Harvard University program called the Institute for the Arts and Civic Dialogue, along with about 100 other artists assembled by Anna Deavere Smith, did she perform. She was paired with saxophonist Oliver Blake and “told to do something,” she remembered.

“For me as a lawyer, being on stage doing something with a musician is definitely outside my comfort zone,” she added.

“I do not sing. It actually turned out to be a kind of back and forth. Oliver plays the saxophone and does poetry and I say something and sometimes he plays underneath me as I do.”

It worked, although it’s hard to explain exactly what “it” is, she said.

“It’s a more artistic presentation than you might expect from a law professor. What it definitely isn’t is a lecture, which is what people expect me to give,” she said.

“What I do is a kind of meditation, I suppose.

“This particular one will be about home and displacement and the yearning for a sense of place in a world of increasing diaspora.”

The personal element is her father’s move into a nursing home, the sale of the family home, and the consequences of that. But it is set against a “backdrop of larger displacement,” from Hurricane Katrina to home foreclosures and the financial crisis.

“It’s called a tribute to President Obama, but it won’t specifically be a piece about Obama,” she said.

She did not want to do anything too overtly political, she said, although “I will be making some fairly subtle allusions to this being a new day, a new world, a door opening.”

But where is the connection to Della Hardman, the Vineyard artist, educator, pillar of service and longtime Gazette columnist, who died in December 2005, and for whom the day was officially named?

Well, it happens that back in 1997, when Ms. Williams attended the Institute for the Arts and Civic Dialogue, the institute’s deputy director was Della’s daughter, Andrea Taylor.

She takes up the story:

“There were about 100 artists, brought together over a six-week period. I was the deputy director helping to pull this together.

“They did a piece of words and music and it attracted such a large audience we had an overflow. We had to quickly, in the moment, find another space and ask everyone to walk across the campus to it,” she recalled.

“But I kind of lost touch with both of them. I haven’t seen them perform since 1997, and I was trying to think of an appropriate celebration for the fifth Della Hardman Day. I thought it would be terrific if we could get the two of them together again, to do something uniquely for the Vineyard audience,” Ms. Taylor said.

A little history here. The first Della Hardman day was in 2005, when Della was 83.

“It started because a lot of her students wanted to honor her some way as she began to age. They wanted her to know what she had meant to them,” said Ms. Taylor.

“So they organized this event, and came from all over the country for a series of activities. Little knowing by the end of 2005 my mother would be dead. She died in December.

“It’s a good thing they didn’t wait another summer.”

That first celebration included a community dinner. And the celebration just continued every year since.

“I keep stressing that it’s not a memorial; it’s a celebration,” said Ms. Taylor.

“I don’t know that either Patricia or Oliver ever met my mother,” she said.

But the point was not that people have to have direct experience of Della Hardman.

“What we are celebrating is what she represented: in terms of the arts, the improvisational style, the way she lived her life, her own sense of inclusion, equity, diversity, all of that.

“What she short-handed into the phrase Savor the Moment,” concluded Ms. Taylor.