Preface to yellow: what's the difference between gangrene & jaundice?

Quick! Think of twenty yellow things!

Pie crust. Cheese. Number 2 pencils. Post-it notes. The W on Wonder Woman's bodice. The outermost light of something on fire. Sickly apples. Highlighters. That long line down the coward's back in old cartoons. Betty Cooper's hair. My voter registration card. Sickly sweet soda pop. Nancy Drew book spines. Day-old pus. The light that's supposed to mean "slow" but really means "speed up." Corn (boring). Corns (you mean, like on your feet? better). Sickly people. Middle-aged, middle-of-the-road stars like our sun. &, er, Yellow No. 5.

The color yellow is, of course, the next-stinkiest color on the spectrum, after brown, & not including black, which is not a color but the absence of color (duh). When asked why white, which is all colors to all people (including color-blind people), is not as stinky as two of the stinky colors that make it up, white has been known to respond by pointing out that red, blue & purple are very sweet smelling colors & cancel the stinkiness of brown & yellow. Red & blue, as well, are colors that grow to enormous sizes, while yellow in particular can be a strangely runty color. It takes billions of yellow to make sunlight, for example, while a comparatively small amount of blue can make an entire sky. & the entire amount of blood in any animal's body (once exsanguinated, of course) is usually only one or two red.

Yellow was most probably invented shortly after an organ that did something somewhat different was conscripted by natural selection into being an eye. Even if that eye originally didn't see colors, yellow was pretty much in the bag & would only suffer a real crisis in its long existence when forced to deal with the Fauvists in the late 19th century. It took a mean-spirited old bruiser the likes of Piet Mondrian to restore yellow's good name just in time for it to be used for warning signs & fruity alcohol beverages designed to get sorority girls drunk.

I myself first met the color yellow when, in the early 1970s, I visited a schoolmate's house & saw my first color TV. I don't remember what was on, but I did take with me a sense of the grayness of my seven-year-old life & the need to pay a little more attention to the outside world. A group of angry sunflowers assaulted me on the way home, but their bellicose petulance did little to move me, since it wasn't long before I retreated into my own head again & yellow became just another word, like bellow, hello, mellow, cello, & Ernest & Julio Gallo (an early experiment in near rhyme) which I could use to help finish my first epic poem, "This Gary person is a really fine fellow." (It's still unpublished, although it may be ironic to note that the manuscript has yellowed with age.)

Yellow, being yellow, can't be said to have "yellowed," since that would be like saying "black has blackened" or "blue has the blues" (er, something like that), & I must admit, it's doing very well for its age. While a little disconcerted about what it calls "the upstarts" (especially infrared light, which really ticks yellow off), it's glad it has a place in everyone's life, every if it's mainly in advertisements & the aforementioned warning signs. (Yellow admits to being very fond of the signs that indicate an upcoming road crosses a railroad track. "That blows my mind!" says yellow.)

Yellow warns us, as Self Help Radio plans a "yellow show" this Friday, to not dwell on the negative - yellow as cowardice, yellow as urine, yellow as synonym for sensational journalism - but to concentrate on the good stuff - yellow in lemonade (which will cause copious urination), yellow in sunlight (which can cause skin cancer, lack of ozone layer permitting), yellow in good-for-you fruits & vegetables (now genetically altered so the yellow gleams like the hood of a car).

So Self Help Radio shall not. Because, despite some qualms about the color yellow - mainly its stinkiness - Self Help Radio is celebrating yellow this Friday.

& tomorrow I'll tell you why.