She does! She really does! An integral part of the community, Rose Matters more than you might imagine. After all, where would we be without rose-colored glasses, rose hips tea, rose water or some child’s irresistible rosy cheeks in Buffalo New York in the dead of winter? Rose DOES Matter, however, sometimes she “matters” in ways she could not have anticipated. For example, she is single-handedly responsible for the phenomenon that is known as rosacea where countless folks suddenly find themselves with impossibly rosy, itchy, blistery skin, especially among middle aged women with fair complexions.

In the Orson Welles’s movie Citizen Kane, “Rosebud” is the cheap little sled on which Kane was playing the day he was unceremoniously taken away from his home and mother. This association has haunted Rose Matters for decades, causing her tremendous personal turmoil as she strongly identified with little Rosebud, the wayward sled left behind in the snow.

Often people confuse poor Rose Matters with “other” less desirable rose-like afflictions, which she of course has nothing to do with—Necrose, for example, or Pleurisy, as in Tennessee Williams famed Glass Menagerie where Laura Wingfield suffers from a lung disease that sounds a lot like “blue roses.”

Rose Matters is often confused with Rose Madder, the Stephen King novel about a woman married to an abusive belligerent man from whom she flees to start a new life in a neighboring town and then rescues a child from inside a painting’s mysterious labyrinth. It’s a cautionary tale about treachery, abuse, redemption and BAD ART, and Rose Matters takes offense at being misrepresented as a shape-shifting sinister oil painting whose central color is, you guessed it – Rose! Oscar Wilde would surely be turning in his grave!

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  Lee Krasner, "Pink Stone," 1969.

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  Paul Gauguin, "Tahitian Women on the Beach," 1891.

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  Helen Frankenthaler, "Dream Decision," 1976.