Description:

My hair smells like an orange creamsicle.

Transcript:

My friend Selena suggested the color orange.

There’s a song that my mother used to listen to when I was a kid… a Leonard Cohen song called Suzanne, though she only ever listened to the covers recorded by Joan Baez and Judy Collins. I never cared much for the song – it’s kind of monotonous and makes me feel like maybe you can only really appreciate it if you’re kind of stoned – but there’s a line in it, “and she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China” that has always captivated me.

To this day the color orange is tied to both the fruit and the tea for me, and I really like the combination of both together.

I’ve always been really nocturnal, and when I was in high school, I loved to be the last one awake at night. I would wait until everyone else was asleep and then creep down to the kitchen and brew a pot of tea – nothing special – just whatever was around. Sometimes plain old Lipton and sometimes something else. (Nowadays I’m as picky about tea as I am about coffee, but then, I took what I could get.)

I would take the tea to the table with a cup and milk and sugar, because I did that then, and a few oranges, and I would sip tea and read books late into the night, or, if I wasn’t in the mood to read, I would fill notebooks with stories.

No, I don’t still own the notebooks. I have no idea what happened to them all.

I love the way even the blackest of black teas, once brewed, is a deep orange-amber-brown color. I love the way tangerines are almost fizzy when you bite into them and their juice bursts onto your tongue.

Oranges are my go-to fruit in winter. I use navel oranges for most things, but we also buy those easy-peel clementines – the ones that are marketed for children – even though we don’t have kids, and we eat them like candy.

I could talk more about orange… I could talk about the Golden Gate bridge and the perfect sunset and how it’s a punch of color when you include it in a bouquet or a vase of flowers, but I think I’ll stick with the fruit.

Oh, except that I’ll mention that my new hair stylist has me hooked on Kevin Murphy’s haircare lines, so now my hair smells like an orange creamsicle all the time, which makes me grin.

Links & References:

• Dog Days of Podcasting

Credits:

• The Bathtub Mermaid: Tales from the Tub is written and produced by Melissa A. Bartell, and is recorded and produced using the BossJock iPad app and Audacity.
• Bathtub Mermaid album art was created by Rebecca Moran of Moran Media
• Music used for the opening and closing is David Popper’s “Village Song” as performed by Cello Journey. This music came from the podsafe music archive at Mevio’s Music Alley, which site is now defunct.

Contact Me:

• Email: missmelysse@gmail.com
• Instagram: Melysse
• Twitter: Melysse

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:05 — 3.5MB)