Year 5, Piece Forty-Eight: 9. Orange Orange

Redheads and sisters.

I still remember my earliest artistic breakthrough: picking up the orange marker instead of the red marker to color a picture of my hair. People always told me my hair was red, so I had always used red, unquestioningly. But somewhere around age 4 or 5, I observed that orange would be a more accurate match. From then on, every time I chose orange to draw my hair, I felt a certain authority in the world of color.

I come from a family of redheads. All four of my siblings are redheads, as is our mom. Even though our dad is not a redhead, both of his parents were. Our hair varies in shades and years have certainly faded its vibrance. But we still turn heads when we are all together, so many redheads in one space being a bit of a spectacle. 

While something closer to orange is the true color of our hair, redheads are discouraged from wearing it. Type “redhead colors” into Google and the first search term to autocomplete is “redhead colors to avoid.” Orange almost always appears on this list. Like any societal rules about appearance, this guidance is—of course—bullshit. Yet I have internalized these messages about which colors are “flattering” (which has way more to do with skin tone than hair color, truly) and to this day have mostly stayed away from wearing orange. 

This is not true for my sister though, who strongly identifies with and proudly wears the color Orange. And I unintentionally set that in motion for her.

It is no secret that I love color. So it is also probably no surprise that color would feature in the first wedding ceremony I wrote, which was my own. 

The Seven Blessings, or Sheva Brachot, are the cornerstone of a traditional Jewish wedding ceremony. They are seven distinct blessings that range from blessing of the wine onto blessing the couple to a community blessing. We wanted to honor this structure, but in creating an interfaith wedding we didn’t particularly resonate with the text of the blessings themselves. We wrote seven new blessings to be read aloud by everyone in attendance, each one corresponding to a value we wanted to bring into our relationship as well as corresponding to a color:

Red: Life
Orange: Gratitude
Yellow: Yes
Green: Family
Blue: Communication
Indigo: Awareness
Purple: Interconnectedness

These blessings were each led by two different people in our lives who, as weddings go, also wore that color. My sister Hannah’s color was Orange.

These color correspondences are the precursor to the meanings I use for the Rainbow Squared system. I ultimately removed Indigo and added in Black and White together at the end. It was important to me to have seven color slots in this system even if it required some engineering, just as it was important for Isaac Newton when he designated the seven colors in the visible spectrum. Newton added Indigo and by some accounts even Orange to get to that holy number. 

And in Rainbow Squared, Orange is still a bit of an outlier. We flip-flopped for a while on whether Orange would be Compassion or Gratitude, finally deciding that Gratitude needed its own distinct reference more than Compassion. I’m not sure if Gratitude or Compassion stuck with my sister either way, but the color Orange certainly did. 

Our wedding hit Hannah at a pretty formative time. I was twenty-nine years old, which meant she was fourteen. Her life was already pretty different from mine at her age. When I was fourteen she hadn’t even been born yet. Whereas I grew up surrounded by brothers in an intact (if conflict-ridden) household, my sister was living alone with our freshly-divorced mother. The wedding also caught her in the throes of puberty.  So maybe orange hit her just as she was coming into her own and became her color ever since.

I don’t know if there is a typical sibling relationship, but mine and Hannah’s probably isn’t it. With a fifteen-year age gap, she has always been as much my sister as my niece or something. A source of conflict between us now is actually that I treat her as older than she is, expecting more adult behavior from her than is necessarily fair. Yet I joke that she is my original baby, because somewhere in my subconscious she is definitely filed as a child. When I am around Hannah, I am constantly calling her by my daughter D’s name and vice versa. 

Time sort of rhymes with us. Since Hannah was also fifteen when D was born, their age gap is the same as ours. Which means that looking at Hannah and D together is like a strange snapshot of the past, where she is me and D is her.

When Hannah looks at me, she sees some kind of future self. When I look at her, I see some kind of past self. I try to give her advice, impress upon her things I’d wished I’d known when I was her age. But as she points out to me, that never works in movies, and that’s not how it works in real life either. You just have to live through it.

Hannah is my teacher as much as I might try to be hers. She helps navigate family communication challenges, navigate the Gen Z internet, and even navigate the world of cosmetics, her learning more make-up tricks from YouTube than neither my mom or I ever figured out both growing up with brothers (the make-up in the photo above when Hannah is fourteen? She did it herself). She was my teacher even as a kid, showing me how to embody my own playful creative spirit, being present the way that only children truly are.

Fifteen years ago, when I was the age she is now, Hannah came with my mom to visit me at art school. It was right after I had discovered a dumpster full of (clean) styrofoam unpacked from a computer lab’s worth of new printers. My little section of the sculpture studio was covered in styrofoam bricks and packing peanuts. All of five years old, she walked right up to my desk, hoisted herself up onto the stool, and started playing with these found materials. She seemed a tiny avatar of myself, in a flow state that I could only ever aspire to. I picked up my digital camera and recorded it.

I’ve never forgotten that moment, filing it away in my memory as “The Artist in Her Studio.” But I didn’t actually label the file with that name, and lost track of the actual video long ago. This week I searched through boxes and hard drives, and finally found it among all my other photos from 2006. The resolution is a ghastly 320x240 pixels, but I suppose that’s just fine for a gif.

And here we are, Hannah is twenty and my own child is the age that she was in that video. I’m still an artist, and Hannah is too. Now we can collaborate in a totally different way.

Hannah is her own creative force. She’s studying musical theater as a triple threat: acting, dancing, and singing to boot. As a digital native and social media user, she also knows how to perform online. She has perfected the art of the selfie, taking it to new creative heights by digitally doodling on her images.

So when I found myself in Michigan over New Year’s working on Orange Orange, I knew that she was it. She was Orange Orange. I was so happy when she agreed to work with me. My initial vision was to shoot a stop-motion animation of her hair billowing as if by magic laying amongst her orange things. I didn’t have a tripod with me though. I improvised pretty well using a bench, a lampshade, a box of tissue, and some tape. Still it wasn’t quite stable enough for me to use my hands to move the objects around.

There is always a creative solution though. What if instead I took one still image and animated a drawing on top of it? And what if she made the drawing? Then we went wild. 

It was so deeply fun staying up way too late the night before I left town, Hannah drawing on my mom’s iPad in Procreate, me pulling it into her own old laptop in Photoshop. 

Apparently that experience inspired her. She said it even made her get over her ex-boyfriend! We’ll see if it sticks.

I guess Orange to me isn’t really Gratitude or Compassion, though those elements do pop up sometimes. Orange is Creativity, Passion, Fire. Something that my sister and I both share as performers and makers, a trait we inherited in different ways from both of our parents. A trait that we’ve also inherited as redheaded Leos (her sun is in Leo, mine is right on the cusp but I am also Leo rising). 

Orange is making. Orange makes you keep going, makes you forget to remember what time it is. Orange is flow, and in flow Orange is fun.