Sarah Borruso

1977 / Marin County FleaMarket

Dust everywhere. That’s how I remember the Marin County Flea Market. Pale brown dust flying in great whorls up into your eyes, covering your bare feet sticking out of sandals, landing in your hair, thick and dry. It was a massive dirt parking lot essentially, with stalls of odds and ends — handmade things, old books, records, clothes, everything and anything you might imagine — and all of it arrived in this one lot on Sundays, where we would pull up early in our mustard yellow Toyota Corolla station wagon.

My aunt made masks one time out of Plaster of Paris, paint, glitter, and feathers – the kind that just cover your eyes, held up with a long thin stick on one side, that you might wear at a Jane Eyre masquerade party. She sold them at one of the stalls and we went to see her along with everything, I mean everything else.

The aisles of stalls meandered loosely like mile-long snakes to my seven-year old eyes, and each path looked essentially the same after awhile, dusted over as they were with the communal dirt in the air. My brother searched for marbles – blue, green, brown glass ones – the kind with the swirl in the middle prized most of all -- and I followed along, trying to keep up with every twist and turn, as he ducked around corners delving deeper into vendor boxes, disappearing for moments at a time and reappearing through the haze again, on and off. But one time, that split second of his disappearance, extended into many seconds, minutes in fact – who knows how long – and I couldn’t find him again. The child panic that set in must have sent me searching in every possible direction, making my tracks even more difficult to trace, when finally a strange adult voice asked if I was lost. Yes, I was.

Up in the control tower, looking down – for the first time ever at a bird’s eye view of the sprawling market – the loudspeaker rang out, as the frightening moments of being truly separated from my family were literally and metaphorically elevated into the sky – I can still hear the words calling out from the man on the mic to the tiny people below to please come reclaim me. A giant white and grey megaphone attached to the tower, visible from behind the glass where we stood was our all-powerful tool, my salvation – the instrument that brought me back to my mother at last.

 What is the color of being lost? Is it putrid yellow? Is it multi-colored? Is it white with blue and green spots – a symbol for obliteration with specks of hope and re-connection mixed in? I can’t help but associate it — this mystery color and the feeling of being lost — somehow with all the strange objects offered for sale at the market: cast-off belongings from past lives, dragged out into the light, looking to find new homes, to be revitalized and loved again. I see in my mind’s eye: brown ceramic jugs with peacock feathers blowing in the wind; a tattered Persian hallway runner spread out on the muddy ground, an old poncho on a wire hanger — and all of these luminous or formerly luminous colors now covered, communally, with a fine film of dust. A flea market is, after all, a place for the lost and found. This hodgepodge mix of dusty belongings, suspended in time and space, lost, looking for an afterlife, is the source material for this color palette.

1978 / Buchanan Street, San Francisco

What comes before us, leaves its mark — an impression that very likely influences our direction forward. Some things left behind by the previous owners of the Victorian house on Buchanan Street where I grew up, became ours, and the imagined lives, perceived through their cast-off objects and images, exuded a certain eccentricity that continues to live among us.

A series of long glass shelves lined the dining room walls and sporadic pieces of white fur were placed on top — cushions for curios, perhaps, to rest on clear slick surfaces. Tiny cardboard boxes, on shelves or hidden in drawers — held exotic seashells with thin strips of paper, like fortunes, identifying their Latin names, inside. One shell fit perfectly in my child-sized hand: pink, purple, brown and white stripes decorated its porcelain-like surface. And when you held it to your ear, the transportation began: an audio trip directly to the shore, any shore, every shore, with waves folding upon themselves, endlessly.

In the hallway, approaching the stairs, one was struck by a parade of realistic, life-sized zoo animals painted along the wall of the staircase ascending upward. The tiger — deep orange with black and white stripes — led the way, starting at the bottom. Were these family portraits, by and of, those that lived here before us? The animals lived with us now and they didn’t seem to mind.

At the top of the stairs, a wide hallway, often flowing with imaginary hot lava, held the most mysterious portal in the house: The Secret Room. After my father discovered its existence, a bamboo curtain was hung over its entryway – but a quick peek revealed the building’s former ceiling height and its ornate, detailed woodwork that was later concealed, perhaps, for minimalism’s sake. At the other end of the hall was a tiny room, marked above its doorway with an oversized Eye of Horace painted in turquoise, gold, navy and black; perhaps this was the true portal in the house.

It was the 70s and what a strange mix of eras and moods were in our midst: fortunetellers, Victorian ghosts and architects, flora and fauna fans, artists in pursuit of realism and fantasy. This alternate universe, a crazy-quilt of past decades and mixed-up lives, is the backdrop for this color palette.

1982 / The New Government, Noe Street, SF

Who knows how we found this place. I believe it was on Noe Street near Market, a glass-windowed storefront with a subtle sign that hung over the door that read: The New Government. With my mind’s eye, I travel back into that dark space — walls painted a slate grey.  In every shadowy corner, on every shelf something awe-inspiring emerged and on closer inspection, you couldn’t believe how it got there. Mod, avocado green and pastel pink leather shoes with kitten heels from the early 60s, dead-stock peg-legged Levi’s in grey-green cotton corduroy with a cross-hatch texture I’d never seen before, shiny black vinyl records from England (the mysterious place, vortex of cool, that loomed so large in our teenage minds), and black and white independent magazines – were they called zines yet? – on racks near the cash register.

What did all of these objects — collected together under one conceptually persuasive title: “The New Government” — have to say? What was the message they were attempting to convey – that this was another way, a different way than the other ways? That there were, of course, alternatives? I’m fairly certain, without my realizing it at the time, that this was my first introduction to the idea — the notion of sub-culture and alternative lifestyles. It represented this rarified niche way of living and thinking and being and doing -- and that if you just threw in the word “new” in front of “government” you could design your own way. The power of suggestion is all encompassing. The power of language is total. Freedom is what you make of it —that’s what the name of this place said to me.

The colors of the interior and objects inside The New Government store are the source materials for this color palette. These reflect the early days of New Wave, new thinking, hope for alternatives and making one’s own way.

1986 / No Exit in Santa Clara

I woke up this morning with a singular image in my mind: I could see the nearly spherical shape of the round, smoky-grey, glass 49ers tumblers that we drank water out of at my grandmother’s house in Santa Clara, California. There was a whole set of these —each emblazoned with a tiny white football helmet — and I imagined they must have come somehow from TV.

Everything at my grandmother’s apartment in Santa Clara was different than all my other relative’s places. We arrived there on Sunday afternoons after traveling from Berkeley, to Marin, through San Francisco and finally into the carport of the apartment complex off El Camino Real. Passing the pool house (and I mean billiards) by the communal laundry room in the courtyard, we arrived at the ground floor apartment — the front of which was primarily sliding glass doors.

The alien universe inside this two-bedroom unit is the source for this color palette. Just a few miles south of what I understood as reality, this space unfolded with a mix of vinyl coated textures, wooly upholstery and poly-fiber carpeting. There were the tall, narrow-backed, acid green vinyl dining room chairs, with bright white, powder coated steel legs, that sat like creatures in the dinette around a shiny white oval table. In the background, a wild, splotchy abstract wallpaper of deep orange, red, white, and black, wrapped around the walls like a mod inferno, stretching from floor to (low) ceiling. Grayish-blue heavy drapes covered the sliding glass doors to the patio and small pressed glass candy dishes — one bottle green, the other deep turquoise — sat on side tables by the sofa and La-Z-Boy chair. 

The 49ers glasses weren’t the only things that were smoky here. The water from the faucet was filled with so many tiny bubbles that it looked like it was literally filled with fog; cigarette smokers blew rings in the air for fun; and the stagnant, stifled conversation of relatives, who only knew each other on Sunday afternoons, was dense and opaque, impossible to understand, like clouds of smog trapped in a tightly lidded jar. There was no exit in Santa Clara.