Author: Sarah Barker

The Foreign Service Exam, that portal into the exciting world of international diplomacy, is given once a year, in the spring, on the same day in thousands of locations across the country. Results of the test arrive in the mailboxes of test-takers in the fall. For some, these are not pretty.

There are four parts: multiple-choice General Knowledge, short-answer Biographical Information, an essay on a Controversial Topic, and an English Usage section. All sound benign and easy. Which is part of the plan.

Nationally, about ten thousand people take the exam. After the exam and a rigorous oral assessment, 150 to 200 people are actually chosen to be foreign service officers. The average age of an incoming foreign service officer is 28.5 years; seventy-five percent have a master’s degree. An entry-level officer can expect to earn between $29,000 and $49,000 per year—or about as much as a full-time bagger at Kowalski’s.

The exam lasts six hours, with twenty minutes reserved for lunch/self-doubt, though the emotional scarring can require up to six months of cocktail therapy. Allowed items include: two number-two pencils, a black ink pen, and a photo ID. Restricted items include: calculators, reference guides of any sort, artillery, egg salad sandwiches, and dignity. Because I compulsively put myself in awkward places, I chose to take the exam. Locally, it was administered in a lecture hall on the East Bank of the University of Minnesota, which contained 116 other candidates. Seats at the tiered tables were spaced to discourage viewing your neighbor’s answer sheet, and numbered. I was at number forty-nine, which was in the back row of the room, allowing me to observe everyone else feverishly filling up their answer sheet with general knowledge and international smarts.

Needless to say, I went down in flames. My failure of this exam set a new standard for lack of mastery, and I felt pretty bad about it. It’s true, I did not purchase the study guide. I don’t like people who buy study guides, so naturally I could not toss out my code of ethics in an instance of this importance. Instead I relied on my decades-long history of involvement in life and good standing with the public library to get me through.

General Knowledge implies the sort of pragmatic stuff that keeps a person from needing a bib—black is slimming, don’t ask if she’s had the baby yet, bloodstains come out with cold water, and blotting, blotting, blotting. I saw Hotel Rwanda.

I was shaken when it became clear I had no general knowledge. But honestly, in service in Libya, how relevant will it be to know whether it requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate or a simple majority of the House to fill the vice president’s position should he or she die in office? Anyone with more than a thimbleful of brain cells would see this section as hazing, the U.S. government way. The insidious, condescending tenor and creepy colonial overtones were carried doggedly through more than one hundred questions. At first I was troubled by being so knowledge-free, but this gave way to a ghastly parting of the veil: If this is what passes for knowledge, it’s no wonder “Death to Americans” is the national anthem of so many nations.

I was a bit fragile at the outset of Biographical Information, but how hard could it be? There were no wrong answers, but I never imagined there would be so many wrong questions. Example: “How many times in the past year have you volunteered for an unpleasant task such as cleaning up after an office party? Please describe the occasions and your tasks in the following two-inch by two-inch space.” Choices ranged from “never” to “four or more times.” Of course, “never” comes closest to the truth (if it’s truly unpleasant, I.T. does it), but how shirksome does that sound? Also, it’s general knowledge that anyone in the Foreign Service who volunteers for more than four unpleasant tasks per year is gathering more than used cups—and selling it to North Korea. First, the question practically demands a lie, and then asks you to document the perjury in detail. On and on, the same questions with minute variations. How many times in the past five years? How many times outside of work? How many times with a goat, on a train … These festering wounds were interspersed with “Did you do it?”

My will to live drained out through the number-two pencil. By the time I got to the one question I could ace—“List the names of books you’ve read in the past year dealing with other cultures”—I could not name the book I’d put down only hours earlier. In fact, I couldn’t remember any title. I searched the barren smoking plains of my mind and found zero entries under the concept “book.” And I didn’t care.

Effectively lobotomized halfway through, I was glad I’d gridded my name by darkening the appropriate ovals before the procedure. Assuming all of our foreign service officers have passed this exam, as well as the oral assessment and a spanking machine, it’s perfectly understandable that you will rot in Turkish prison over a traffic ticket.

I don’t get out much, ergo my love for vicarious road trips. As an armchair traveler, it’s important to choose your writer as carefully as you would a travel companion. This has become a more difficult undertaking in recent years, however. The booming “adventure travel” sector of the industry has spawned both a motor coach full of adventurers who have explored the farthest reaches of the Machu Picchu gift shop—and, concurrently, writers who bill themselves as adventurers because they didn’t bathe for a while and got a rash.

For example, Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor (yes, the actors) were only briefly at risk of being taken seriously in Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World, their account of a four-month, twenty-thousand-mile motorcycle trip. They seemed unaware that forsaking personal hygiene is also part of the universal lexicon, like a smile but not as welcome. Nomad: Journeys From Samburu was going along swimmingly until the author, Mary Anne Fitzgerald, talked to Gandhi on the phone, in 1992: Reception was good, credibility suffered. In another travelogue, two legendary mountain men got tired and thirsty pulling a cart across Mongolia for some two-hundred-odd pages. Who knew? In a collection of women’s travel stories, a goddess celebrated her womanness in the Amazonian jungle, but my impression was that almost any environment would have done the trick. Note that I can’t recall the titles of those last two volumes, so avid was my disgust when I abandoned them.

Even they couldn’t match Kira Salak’s The Cruelest Journey, however. While the book-jacket wallow put her firmly in the Robert Pelton, danger-is-my-middle-name category (“Adventurer, explorer, a real-life Lara Croft … ”—isn’t it enough to slander huge swaths of real explorers and adventurers, but Angelina Jolie, too?), in reality, Salak managed to talk the National Geographic Society into backing her six-hundred-mile “solo” kayak on the Niger River to Timbuktu, so she was intercepted every few days by a photographer and a fully stocked party barge, and couldn’t ever have been really short of cash. Recounting her adventures in The Cruelest Journey, Salak complains about the Sahara being hot, about being tired, about the bugs being bugs, about the river being choppy, about the people being curious and poor and continually asking for money (after she spreads around gold coins like candy), and, the last straw, about getting dysentery once. Perhaps this was uncharted territory for Salak, but most eight-year-olds would not be surprised by these facts of African life. I hope she never drives across Kansas and writes about it.

About fifty pages into this cruel literary journey, I was forced to review the author’s credits. “Wisconsin state mile record holder” caught my eye. Of all the states to choose for such a claim. The American record holder for the mile, Suzie Favor Hamilton, resides in Wisconsin and set many amazing records at UW-Madison. The Wisconsin state mile record assertion could not be confirmed, and neither could Salak’s grasp on reality.

Sure, adventure is subjective, but I feel cheated when I find out that Indiana Jones counted eating medium-rare hamburger as a risk. The reader ends up carrying all the exaggeration, self-absorption, and delusions of toughness that don’t fit in the backpack. On the other hand, the innocent who can’t be trusted to make it home with jam and bread, the hopeless bumbler, the quintessential foreigner squinting at his AAA map of the Sahara—this is the person with whom you want to travel to the ends of the earth, literally or literarily. From the moment he is duped into buying the travel espresso maker until he finds it crushed at the bottom of his rolling duffel upon his unheralded return, he is a first-rate companion. Luckily, my armchair travels have hooked me up with a number of writers who were not vexed to find that mountains were high and rivers wet.

A London couturier (he liked to say he was in ladies’ knickers), Eric Newby gamely responded to his diplomat friend’s cable: CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE? The result is a wry account of their appallingly flawed assault, in 1956, on Mir Samir, a 19,880-foot peak in northeastern Afghanistan that was then, and is now, one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Newby’s experiences make A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush as fascinating from a historical perspective as it is an engaging travel tale. There’s no presumption of adventure or exploration, but neither is there complaining; frostbite, dehydration, and encounters with well-armed tribesmen are treated as minor annoyances. In fact, instead of their exploits being lionized, the badly nicked-up duo are dressed down upon their return by the old-school British adventurer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who labels them “a bunch of pansies” before striding off in his crisp khakis. Ouch.

Of course, Brits have the natural advantage over Americans when it comes to travel writing. They are funnier than Americans. They travel more and whine less. And that’s probably why native Iowan Bill Bryson lived in England for twenty-two years. He got funny and traveled more after that. Perhaps you know Bryson from his very popular A Walk in the Woods, but I feel he was at his best in Notes From a Small Island (1999). In Notes, he tramps around England, describing the green countryside and capturing the repressed silliness that seems to be the hallmark of English character. (Admittedly, I also like Bryson because something about his expression in the book jacket photo strongly suggests my Westie, Rascal.)

A pasty academic, Nigel Barley (that’s right, English), “does anthropology” on the Dowayo people of northern Cameroon and proves out the European reputation for being peevish when his front teeth are removed with pliers. (He had complained of jaw soreness after the “road” ended in a fifty-foot embankment and his face met forcefully with the steering wheel, so the procedure was clearly indicated.) The Innocent Anthropologist (1985) is a benchmark of scientific erudition and should not be avoided due to lack of interest in anthropology or Cameroon. The intrepid Barley returned to the Dowayo, with a slight speech impediment, to document crazy rites of passage in Ceremony: An Anthropologist’s Misadventures in the African Bush.

Rif Haffar is not English. He’s not an anthropologist, he does not suffer if he can help it, and he makes no bones about enjoying the material comforts that a salary from a California dot-com job offers when traveling around the world. What could be a recipe for boorishness, however, turns out to be Away From My Desk (2002), a refreshing, funny, and unapologetically American look at various faraway points. Haffar revels in the plush towels and complimentary bathrobe at a five-star resort in Dubai. He calls Bombay “dirty” rather than “colorful,” not because he’s complaining—it’s just a statement from a guy who likes his sewage on the side rather than over easy. Odd as it may be, these assertions are extremely rare in travel writing. Almost as rare as a traveler who’s comfortable in his rich American skin.

Another Brit who could easily get away with a moniker like “adventurer” or “explorer” is Redmond O’Hanlon. The Oxford-trained naturalist enlisted his nightclub-owning friend to accompany him on an outing into the deepest Amazon, before the whole place was made into salad forks; he called his account of their travels In Trouble Again (1988). O’Hanlon describes with unrestrained glee the effect, on his own body, of a host of tropical insects, fungi, bacteria, poisonous spiders, and tiny fish that set up shop in one’s private parts using retractable barbs. Again furthering scientific exploration at his own expense, O’Hanlon shares a hallucinogenic herb with some of the local Yanomamo to vivid affect. The reader learns, among other things, that even the most mysterious depths of the Amazon seem familiar turf compared to O’Hanlon’s gray matter.

If great female travel writers are few and far between, then those who are not on some sort of awful pilgrimage of the soul are even scarcer. The plainly stated My Journey to Lhasa (1927) is one of the most recent non-transcendent narratives. Alexandra David-Neel, dressed as a Tibetan peasant, not only penetrated the forbidden (to outsiders and infidels) city of Lhasa, but also, en route, contributed substantially to what little was known about the culture and fantastic topography of Tibet. Her writing is not funny and she is given to colonial paradigms, but cut the woman some slack—traveling with only a few local porters, she managed to conduct Himalayan surveying (in a good wool skirt and proper leather boots) that was not attempted again for some fifty years because it was too difficult.

Either through some sadistic flaw in my character, or perhaps a disbelief that The Cruelest Journey could maintain the level of ignorance and self-absorption manifested in its early pages, I stuck with it to the crying end. And was punished. Salak reaches Timbuktu after what seems like an eternity (to readers and undoubtedly the locals), but was actually less time than some kids spend at summer camp. In a crowning moment, she reveals a heretofore unspoken but deeply held desire to free some slaves in this ancient desert city. Never mind that her understanding of the culture was slightly muddier even than her acquaintance with its climate—Salak again throws around enough of National Geographic’s coin to buy freedom for a couple of souls, if not quite enough to change a centuries-old society. The newly freed slaves’ gratitude was tempered by the fact that they were separated from their families, homeless, and unemployed, but not wanting to dwell on these details, the book ends abruptly with Salak reflecting on her accomplishments over an in-flight cocktail. Eeeuuuwww. That made me so uncomfortable. Like I had sweated and not showered for two days and was covered with sticky sunscreen and sand fleas. And millipedes.

Reality TV is, of course, an oxymoron. There’s reality—pimples and disappointments and paper jams. And there’s TV—Jennifer Aniston. These two concepts were meant to inhabit parallel planes and never intersect. That’s the natural order of the universe, like hot air rising and white pants attracting food. Tampering with this law of nature is an abomination.

Like all natural disasters, reality TV engenders chaos—the sort of localized apocalypse where middle managers are extraordinarily nice to others with no real power. Other symptoms of reality TV in humans include a tendency to stand in long lines, a willingness to share the sort of extremely personal information the government has spent millions of dollars trying to secure, and the most outrageous optimism regarding the interest others might have in those personal details.

All of these symptoms presented at the open casting calls for The Apprentice the other day at the Carlson School of Management and the Arrow Pontiac GMC dealership in Inver Grove Heights. To cope with the stresses placed on the innocents who were unaccustomed to the debasements of the casting call, every one of the four hundred real-people hopefuls repeated such soothing mantras as, “It’s just for fun,” “Those aren’t real,” and “It’s only ketchup.” Very much the same language parents use to assuage the overexposed child. But it didn’t work. They could not find their footing in the hall of mirrors that is reality TV.

“Of course,” the Kendra wannabes snorted, “everyone knows the entire show is scripted and they’re just looking for a ditzy blond or a tattooed dude to draw in viewers. It’s all about ratings.” This was a savvy crowd. They were pretty sure they had reality TV’s number. But a quick poll of the candidates’ qualifications for filling the role of a real fake person revealed they had wandered back to familiar turf, listing such water-cooler victories as successfully managing birthday card routing and selection as I.T. Hero of the Week, achievements that lose ten pounds on TV. Some said they were “just there for the fun of it,” a brand of entertainment that involved arriving at the Arrow Pontiac dealership by 4 a.m. and standing in ninety-degree heat for seven hours or so.

A delivery driver spent the time waiting for her three-minute interview trying to mine some quirk of her everyday life so that she could spin it into something more made-for-TV—the bitch, the driven career woman, the nice girl, the hippy. There was cavalier talk among candidates of being the hunted and the hunter, the participant and the observer, the dabbler and the desperate simultaneously, but for the non-psychotic it just wasn’t working.

This casting call was working, though, for Chandra Holt, of the tight white suit and stiletto heels. She told me the key to being chosen for The Apprentice was confidence. She surveyed the room and declared she was the prettiest one there (she may have had a point, but still). She went on to say she was a merchandising manager at Target, earning her MBA at the Carlson school at night. She managed “a lot of people.” She managed a big budget. She was also, by her own admission, the smartest person in the room. When I noted her busy schedule, she quickly let me know that was only the tip of the iceberg—she predicted a top-ten place at the upcoming Lifetime Fitness Triathlon. There is confidence, and then there is megalomania. When I mentioned the proclivity of reality TV actors to backstab, Chandra lit up like a klieg. “I love when they do those little asides, little digs like that. I’m really sharp, really good at one-liners.” She snapped her fingers, click, click, click.

I had hoped to chat with the two casting agents—Cara and Toby, California girls with their sunglasses on their heads—as a regular person rather than a candidate. Unfortunately, the girls were pure business and spoke only with application-bearing candidates, so I filled out the one-page application, complete with marital status and most embarrassing moment, and got in line. When my turn came up, Cara and Toby perkily called me in and quickly noted my occupation—writer. I confessed, and indicated I was, in fact, performing my occupation even as we spoke. Apparently they missed the exit from TV world, in which people audition to be actors, to the real world, where writers interview people for a story. The disconnect continued. While I asked about the validity of the marital-status and most-embarrassing-moment questions, and how they felt after a ten-hour stint of interviewing real people, Cara and Toby shared that it was possible that I would be selected for a spot on The Apprentice—but not likely, because of my lack of business background. Cara looked at Toby and said, “All of the Apprentices have had business experience, haven’t they? I don’t think there have been any writers.” Toby agreed, “No, we’re looking for really sharp people who can get the job done.”

Despite the close call, Cara, Toby, and I were never in the same conversation. Reality and TV marched on in different directions, and order remained in the universe.—Sarah Barker

Neal Viemeister, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, can’t pinpoint exactly what prompted him to hire the Greek undergrad as a research assistant back in the 1970s. He searched his memory—“Well, John knocked at my door looking for research experience, which impressed me, that an undergraduate would be that motivated and courageous. He was a real nice guy and very bright. He somehow learned to program this ancient IBM 160 computer that was the size of a desk. He was intense, worked very hard. Yeah, he had a nice smile and the long hair, but so did everyone back then. About halfway through the year, he decided to go by his Greek name, Yanni, instead of John.”

Yanni, that mono-monikered musician/composer superstar whose multi-platinum recordings and videos (Live at the Acropolis is the second best-selling video of all time, you know) spell success in any language, is also the biggest enigma since Ed Sullivan. Can you hum a Yanni song? Can you name a Yanni song? Nope. You can’t even categorize his music, which seems like it should be some kind of standard for success (which award show to attend?). The half of the human race that isn’t out feverishly buying his CDs and wall calendars are collectively scratching their heads about how this guy got so darn popular. Yanni was here in Minnesota from 1972 until the mid 1980s at a budding stage of his life and, what, no one noticed early glimmerings of greatness? Wasn’t he turning heads and knocking people back with his star quality? Wouldn’t you think the other dishwashers at the Campus Club would have noticed Yanni Chryssomallis’s exquisite hair? That’s because he didn’t have that certain something yet. He acquired it in Psych 1001.

Now that he has wrapped up his winter tour, I feel prepared to offer my theory: Yanni, a naturally gifted musician, uses his undergraduate psychology degree to get into the vast prairies of the Minnesota collective mind. He memorizes the bucolic, nonoffensive terrain, and translates that metaphysical state into music. He synthesizes Minnesota, minus the slush, and makes millions.

First off, why go into psychology rather than music? Yes, Yanni is self-taught and never took formal lessons because that might have crushed his unique gift. Whatever. Psychology seems like a pretty good tool for getting at the Minnesota psyche. Of course, Auto Tech III is likely, too, but it doesn’t look as good on your résumé. Let’s review what his former teachers remember about Yanni: nice, nice, real nice, nice smile, and hardworking. Notice, not hot or charismatic or artistic or fantastically top-shelf talented or flamboyant. No. Nice.

Tom Paske, Yanni’s business manager from way back in the eighties hair-band days, says he is probably Yanni’s best friend. I wondered aloud why Yanni has struck pay dirt with electronic music when others haven’t. Many of his bandmates from Chameleon, a second-tier Twin Cities bar band, are still playing, some even in the new-age genre. They haven’t played the Taj Mahal or the Forbidden City. They haven’t been the official composer of the last two Olympic Games. How to account for this divergence of fortunes?

“No one does what Yanni does, that’s why,” said Paske. “No one creates the sound he does. No one puts world, classical, and rock elements together. He’s very very smart, very creative and absolutely unique.”

A couple weeks ago, the Xcel Center was packed for Yanni’s adoptive-hometown concert. The fans, averaging white and about forty-five years old, were orderly but rapt. A starship captain at the bridge, Yanni pushed buttons with much feeling. He flipped his mane, conducting the first-class crew as they took the audience on a breathless flight of classical violin, a rocking harp blast (you heard me), and a funky digideroo trip down under, to name just a few of his musical wanderings. These fans would not be found at the Minnesota Orchestra or the 400 Bar or the Blue Nile, but they’ve been lining up for Yanni for fifteen years. Like the Minnesota State Fair, there’s something for everyone at a Yanni concert.

Unscientifically, I fished for support for my Yanni-Minnesota theory, but evidence was circumstantial at best. Everyone was having a good time, but that occasionally happens outside Minnesota, too. No one vomited on me, but again maybe this is normal outside of Cheap Trick concerts. A moment of self-assessment revealed that I was enjoying myself and, like discovering a taste for Cheez Whiz, that worried me. I cast around for reasons for this “enjoyment.” A series of small strokes can never be discounted, but I was looking for something more sinister, more insidious. I turned to ask my friend, Barb, if she thought the haunting vocals and tribal rhythms reminded her at all of tater-tot casserole, but her eyes were all glazed over and she was smiling rosy-cheeked and clapping along. She appeared to be brainwashed. That’s all the proof I needed. That Yanni, he’s pretty darn good.—Sarah Barker

Last year, my kumquat and I deemed mid-February a good time to soak it up in South Beach. Sunshine, not booze. At 8 A.M., he was off golfing, while I was setting up my kit on the pure white shingle (had I been naked I would have been perfectly camouflaged), lapped by azure waves. By 8:15, I was painfully aware of two things: sunburn and my one-piece suit. Never mind that this was a sexy one-piece suit, cut in, cut out, cut up—I might as well have been wearing a burqa. Casting my eyes up and down that long, long strip of sand, I took in equally vast proportions of exposed flesh. Regardless of shape, age (including a fair number of people I could call old), gender, or sexual orientation, there was not one single sun worshipper wearing even half the amount of fabric I was. Triangles the size of Doritos held together by string was the uniform in this school. Not just bikinis, itty bitty bikinis. Bikinettes. I felt like a jigging nun. I was waiting outside a cheap beach shop at the opening bell, where I charged in, grabbed some shreds of fabric off the rack, and headed for the checkout without trying them on. I knew how I would look. I would look like everyone else. I spent a surprisingly comfortable week as a hedonist, considering I’m suspicious of hedonism, not to mention public nudity. And my ass was hanging out.

The kicker to this story comes later that year, when warm weather finally made it up to Minnesota. I donned my snack-sized suit and decamped to my favorite beach on the St. Croix. Exposed? You have never seen the like. Mothers were shielding their children and even beach-blanket high-school chicks were like, “ho.” That suit now lives in exile, in the bottom of my lingerie drawer.

When I vacation, I like to sponge up the local culture, go native, do as the Romans do. It takes only about twenty-six hours before I’ve acquired some local color: an accent, crawfish étouffé, a tattoo, chaps. This is not whimsy; it’s pragmatism. Through exhaustive and often painful trial and error, I’ve learned that most regionally specific fashion statements don’t travel well. “You can’t take it with you” is not about death; it’s about lavender bustiers. To wit: In South Beach, if your naughty bits are covered, you are dressed for any occasion up to and including the opera. But what passes for body-conscious Italian swank in South Beach is full-on skank in Minnesota. Allow me to once again raise the curtain of decency for the sake of enlightenment.

New York City is a dressed-up kind of place, so I thought I’d debut at a fashion magazine event in an elegant, Oval Roomish wool skirt, sling-back pumps, foundations, the whole nine yards. Imagine my pique when one Vassar graduate after another swanned into the reception in jeans, hipbones, Chanel jackets (knockoffs, I like to think), and the kind of shoes that would be comfortable if you had really, really, really pointy feet. I was off by a dowdiness factor of two, at least, and spent a fair amount of the afternoon behind a potted palm nursing some bitterness and a cocktail. Big Apple Do’s and Don’ts gleaned from the incident include: Do strive for a certain severity via rigorous accessory editing or thin lips, whichever comes easiest. Do go for a narrow silhouette but nothing that would ever suggest that you have actual body parts such as elbows or back fat (how gauche). Do develop an interest in East Asian art or Sanskrit, or at the very least wear rectangular glasses. Don’t smile. It smacks of effort.

The following day in New York turned out to be twenty degrees below cold, to my surprise, so I emptied my suitcase and wore it all at once—skirts, pants, my I (HEART) NY T-shirt, sweaters, three or four pairs of underpants, topped off with this grotty argyle vest my daughters call “Mr. Rogers” and a table runner I’d bought, worn as a scarf. I was virtually indistinguishable from everyone else in the Village and felt very good and warm. Thrilled by my accidental discovery of a look I will generously call “bohemian,” I reprised the ensemble in the MinneApple and earned fifty cents from a woman in the restroom of the Dain Bosworth building, who took me for an attendant. She was wearing jeans, a Chanel knockoff, thin lips and really, really, really pointy shoes.

Now, let’s consider the Southwest. It has an oddly narrow definition of style––all cowboy, all the time. Bostonians don’t go around in Pilgrim duds; Chicagoans are not pinstriped and armed (at least not visibly); nuns don’t even wear habits anymore. Why can’t Southwesterners embrace anything that doesn’t go with spurs? I think they’re xenophobic, that’s why. And in a petty gesture that undoubtedly has the boots-and-bonnets industry in a snit, I have banished cowboy boots from my sartorial vernacular. This gambit has nothing to do with an incident involving a pair of aggressively authentic Western boots purchased in Arizona and brought across state lines, a lone particle of ice, my pride, and an appreciative audience of at least three hundred and fifty hurrying, rubber-soled commuters.

Because this time of year so many Twin Citians leave the I-494/694 circle of love for floating holidays, bounding up and down the gangplank from ship to shore and buffet line to buffet line, it’s appropriate to say a word about cruisewear. Cruisewear designers, inspired by the vivid painted facades of old Kingston town and all that tropical fruit, outdo themselves with remarkably evocative results: The victim looks as big as a house, tilted, and about twelve hours from spoilage. As a corollary to my sordid swimsuit tale, bear in mind that anything louder than taupe in your hometown is likely to be run up a flagpole.

While we’re on the subject of looks that don’t translate north of Juarez, let me address cornrowed hair. Every spring finds me wedged into an economy-class seat on a no-frills airline, murmuring a fervent prayer that goes something like, “Please, God, move in mysterious ways so that the approaching toasted coed in the Senior Frog T-shirt that’s three sizes too small, who is quietly hiccupping, who emits a strong scent of Red Bull and tequila when the plane’s ventilation shuts off, whose gray-white scalp is showing between her cornrows in a way that makes me think of a post-nuclear disaster or lutefisk, whose beads at the end of those Methuselah braids rattle like a witch doctor every time she turns around to snort at her friend and tell her to shut up—please let her not take the seat next to me.” Later, when the freshly raked head has lolled over onto my shoulder and the naked scalp is so close I can see the dark roots emerging from each individual follicle, I intone, “Thank you, Jesus, for showing me that there are others who need this souvenir sombrero more than I do.”

Local paint companies will tell you that business has been booming for a couple years now. Crazy times bring out the nesting instinct in people, and when that happens, they notice how badly the walls could use a fresh coat. When they reach for a gallon of flat interior latex, they typically don’t reach for “blue.” They reach for “Mountain Mist” or “Riviera.”

I too recently found myself wandering the netherland between a paint color and its name, the little chapbook of samples fanned out against my walls. I am both seduced and vexed by “Zuni Gold” and “Montana Agate.” As I stare at my white walls (“Washed Sand”?), eyeballing little swatches of increasingly deeper shades with the most achingly beautiful names, my imagination begins to fatigue from overuse. Is it “Warm Sienna” I like, or the image the words conjure of me hanging out in some sun-drenched Tuscan villa? I’m not sure how I feel about “Fresh Clay.” “Passion Blue?” Not in my experience. And why am I drawn so powerfully to “Cherry Wine”?

To soothe my overwrought gray matter (“Dove”?) I approached Tami Ridgway, a pragmatic “Cool Hand Blue” kind of person. Ridgway is a stylist at Valspar Corporation. She and a crew of other marketing folk write the poetry of paint names. “We receive colors in a palette, from 30 to 250 colors to a palette,” she explained. “We’re influenced by social, fashion, and lifestyle trends. We hope to evoke a positive response from the name, and at the same time prompt a mental image that will help the consumer remember the color. This isn’t usually a planned strategy. Of course some of the palettes have themes—historic, natural, or global—so that gives us a direction.” Sounds easy, until you fetch up against 137 variations of white that all need a catchy handle.

What do the bards of Valspar do when they hit that inevitable patch of writer’s block? Ridgway said, “Whatever it takes. Books, magazines, maps. Sometimes one of us has just returned from vacation (‘Rice Field Green’). Sometimes names come from our different backgrounds.” She said their diverse interests—there’s a musician, an engineer, and a diver on the crew—all contribute to the process.

Bonnie Rohow, a color consultant with Abbott Paint and Carpet in St. Paul, informed me that there are 10 million colors (registered, with a specific recipe) and thus 10 million distinct color names. I imagine this massive opus locked away in a vault. “Color names are never repeated. They are sometimes changed, though,” she said, hinting that changing times sometimes require it. “‘Indian Red’ and ‘Tobacco Brown’ both became variations of chestnut.”

While there have been a few like these that have fallen from grace, color names in general are a huge boon to the consumer paint industry. Rohow remembered that Benjamin Moore paints used to be identified by numbers. Sales increased dramatically when they started using evocative, descriptive names. (I tested Rohow’s expertise by asking her to guess what color “Crazy For You” might be. She thought for a moment, and speculated “a sugary pink,” which was dead right.)

The tried-and-true approach is to look to food for inspiration. Ridgway said this is often the easiest way, because of the powerful sensory associations people have, courtesy of their taste buds. “That, or we were hungry that day,” she said. “I’m actually tired of food-related names.” A quick survey of the major paint stores in the area showed there is still a heaping helping of food-inspired names. In fact, Benjamin Moore’s 2003 calendar serves up paint in various table settings—fried eggs with yolks made of “Sunny Side Up” yellow, a south-of-the-border spread with a bowl of “Guacamole” green, and a tall “Milk Shake,” an off-white dribble tracing down the side of the fluted glass.

I tried a few color names out on Tami Ridgway—names inspired by my own recent experiences: “Crashing Computer Screen Blue,” “Boxed Wine,” and “Serious Frostbite.” These met with a tepid (“Dishwater”?) response from Ridgway. “We try to be positive,” she said with a smile. —Sarah Barker