My New Favorite Color

Red used to be my favorite color. Now blue is my favorite color. Let's examine this.

The first song I can remember listening to was "Toreador Song" from Carmen; Goofy sang it on a little yellow 78 r.p.m. record. When my mother explained what a toreador was, I asked to see some pictures. The red cape he brandished in front of the bull was the first color I ever really noticed. I thought red must possess some awesome power to be able to lure such a massive creature to its doom. (I didn't know then, of course, that red was merely the traditional color and that the bull would have charged a purple doily.)

Superman also had a red cape that he wore in my DC comic books, where he flew through the air and punched out the bad guys. That was a kind of power, too. (Kryptonite was a greater power, but I didn't know what color it was. I still don't.) I asked my parents for red schoolclothes when it was time to start first grade. (They drew the line at red trousers.) The boys at school who had red hair looked incomplete to me, as though it would eventually grow into black or brown as they got older. However, I discovered that I was drawn to girls with red hair, even though I had no idea what "drawn to" meant. (I still am, even now that blue is my favorite color. Do you hear that, Julianne Moore?)

When I fell in the schoolyard, my scrapes were red. That wasn't such a good thing. If I fell hard enough, I saw that my blood was red, too. I began to have second thoughts about my favorite color.

During the course of my formative years, red became more and more confusing:

Red Skelton was good.
A face red with embarrassment was bad.
Red wagons were good.
A face red with anger was bad.
Red Buttons was good.
Acne was bad.

It seemed that red wasn't good for faces. When my teacher marked my tests in red, that definitely wasn't good. But there were other kinds of red my parents and teachers warned me against: Red menace. Red scare. Red China. "Better dead than Red." Yikes! Was I some sort of Commie for liking red? "Pinko" -- that was red, too!

I refused to back down. Red was beautiful to look at. I liked sunsets and roses and strawberry ice cream and fire engines. (I'm starting to sound like Julie Andrews.) My favorite crayon was brick red. So, for most of my life, red was my color of choice.

But then I discovered blue -- not visually, not right away, but rather in music that I liked: "Rhapsody in Blue," "Blue Velvet," "Blue Suede Shoes," "Blue Moon," "Love is Blue," "Red Roses for a Blue Lady" (blue won that contest), "St. Louis Blues" -- yes, the blues! A whole entire musical genre devoted to blue! Could red say that?

From music, I went on to realize a whole world of beautiful blues: Picasso's blue period, glaciers atop Mt. Baker, bluebirds, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the Boise State football field -- why, even the endless skies of the Midwest! My whole world was blue and I never knew it!

Sometimes I wonder whether yellow isn't my favorite color, too. Yellow is to the eye what a banjo is to the ear -- you just can't be depressed looking at yellow. There was a small restaurant in Long Beach, Washington, where I used to eat lunch during long weekend getaways. The building and interior were yellow. So were the tablecloths and menus. The theme of the place was sunflowers, and they were everywhere, in vases and painted on the walls. You just couldn't be gloomy eating a chicken salad sandwich there. Every meal was a happy meal.

But then after lunch, I'd pass under the arch proclaiming WORLD'S LONGEST BEACH and walk across the sand to the water's edge. Here was the bluest blue of all -- the ocean! I grew up beside the Atlantic and never really acknowledged the sheer blueness of it. Now here I was at the edge of the Pacific, and the brutal, glorious majesty of it brought tears to my eyes. (No, wait -- that was the salt air.) I knew then and there that blue was the color of my life and always would be.

P.S. Green is no slouch, either. Where would Dr. Seuss be without it?