Remarks on Color: Bashful Blue
December's Hue

by Eve Wood | Dec 3, 2020

Jenny Holzer, Kind of Blue, 2012

Bashful Blue is a dreamer of impossible dreams that more often than not involve the First Lady of either political party, having once written a love letter to Hilary Clinton, begging to be the paint on her walls, the silky blue sheets on her bed, the dusky scarf round her neck. She does have her favorites though, and being blue, leans mostly Democratic in her affections.

Jackie Kennedy wore a Bashful Blue dress the night Marilyn sang Happy Birthday in breathy adulation, and Rosalyn Carter always wore blue gardening gloves when planting peanuts back in Georgia. Awed by Michelle Obama’s supreme wit and grace, Bashful Blue was more bashful than usual, but it was the Nurse Ratched like appeal of Nancy Reagan that crept up on her like a sickening dread. She imagined the wind storms raging behind Nancy’s frozen eyes, seething with the quiet desperation of librarians (divinely misunderstood and quietly passionate as they are), stealing glances with the White House dog walker who regularly wore a blue ascot when leaning down to pick up the turds from the rolling green White House lawns.

It was the wide, honest mouth of Eleanor Roosevelt that rapt her for days in a kind of intellectual fervor, a passion not from the groin, but of the heart, as Eleanor wore Blue Jeans every Friday when bicycling through Washington Square. But it was Mamie Eisenhower’s famous eyes that finally lured Bashful Blue, stumbling out of the closet – the kind of blue that burns your brain when you are sleeping and makes you weep when you’re awake. Mamie’s eyes launched fleets of ships and sent the cosmos spinning – a blazing blue to rival all the oceans of the world, the heavens and the even more pedestrian sky, Bashful finally realized the magical powers of being blue – not Dodger Blue, not Billie Holiday blue, singing the silent slippage of her life, and not the blue of an icy stare or a cold, frost-bitten hand, but electric blue, the heart of the flame that sets the world on fire.