Yellow My Orange

I saw the two bags of oranges resting on the table as class started and went on; we played a game with tennis balls, triggering our awareness and memorization and I thought to myself, actors just love their props. He clearly had an orange for everyone. Was this linked to a game or an exercise or was Drama 251 just a preschool of undergrads, comprised of games and snack time? During that speculation, they were just oranges in bags: they all looked the same, smelled the same, had stickers, had green stems, and were orange. Ask me to find #4012 and cover its sticker and I’d have to make a wild, likely incorrect 1-out-of-25 guess, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because it was just an orange. And I was hungry.

With twenty minutes left in that two-hour acting class, he handed them out. He had told us to find a comfortable spot on the floor, a good distance away from all the others. We were barefoot as a requirement of the exercise we had done just before. I liked the corner I chose. The ground there was nice and somehow attractive. My orange came to me in a requested cross-room chuck from classmate Joey who found himself close to the now ripped-open bags. The concept of throwing the orange made me nervous, but I caught it: #4012, orange sphere of chewy citrus.

“Don’t eat them yet.” The word yet was repeated by a few anxiously, eating the fruit was clearly on everyone’s mind. “You’re going to observe your orange with all five senses,” he said, holding a stopwatch, “and you’re going to do it for ten minutes.”

A slightly shocked, however somewhat expecting and speculative humph filled the room and escaped out the window as the two dozen of us sat cross-legged, speckled across the light brown wooden floor in room 211 of Hutchenson Hall, looking at, feeling, smelling, tasting, and, yes, listening to our oranges.

“Please do not peel them—that’ll just make a mess. I’m going to keep talking while you’re doing this,” and he did.

A small brown stain, the size of a pen cap, was the first thing I noticed. Positive it was caused by coffee, I tried to smudge and scrape it away but it wouldn’t budge. It had that look, though: a bizarre shape not even a Rorschach test could name the picture it formed, it was just a shape. Dark brown thin border and light brown inside. Part of it perfectly circled a pore of the fruit. Could it have been a blemish? If it was a stain, why didn’t it come off? These were just the first of my questions.

This texture that I felt on this orange, what was it made of? Small, circular pores covered the citrus sphere, going in and going out. There were concentrated points of outs that looked similar to bubbling hot tubs, mistakes in this orange’s growth, but beautiful and interesting in their imperfection. It occurred to me that while I couldn’t feel the individual ups and downs, I could sense the texture on every inch of the surface, its only smooth portion being the ring surrounding the navel.

The way the light interacted with this texture was like a sun drawn in one of the cartoons that went along with PBS’s Reading Rainbow: a circle of light in the middle and almost parenthese-like semi circles surrounding the main point of light, downsizing in density as they moved away and interacted with the rounded shape of the orange. Noticing this made the fruit seem almost majestic.

“Think about the smell. How would you describe that smell to someone who’s never smelled anything before?” It smelled like that feeling of right out of a great shower. It smelled like being ready for anything, feeling fresh and excited for what ever might come your way. It smelled like how the morning feels when you’re well rested and happy.

It smelled like clean, fresh happiness. That’s what it smelled like.

I licked it a few times, in confidence, trying hard not to be that girl but when you’re sitting in a room with a whole bunch of twenty year-olds all looking at, caressing, and smelling oranges, you kind of already are that girl…and so is everyone else. It didn’t really taste like anything. It tasted like the bottom of your sandwich that’s been resting in Tupperware or a plastic bag all day. It tasted like fourth grade lunchtime on a rainy day, kept inside, sitting on the floor… sometimes eating off of it. It tasted sterile, but not so just enough to make you feel uncomfortable admitting you actually licked the orange.

No, my orange did not talk to me. It did help me confide in it that it is known not only for—but as—a color it is not completely. My orange was mostly yellow and got to be more and more yellow as the ten minutes went on. This is what a chose to call it, in sympathy, in protest, and in observation. My ears did connect with the experience however as I listened to the silent room of twenty-five adults closely examining oranges for credit, as I dropped it in my hand from various distances (it made a “pat” noise, changing in intensity according it the duration gravity pulled it for), and I listened to the marble-like noise it made as I rolled it, almost out of my reach, across the floor.

The ten minutes were up before I even knew it. I had dots of citrus juice on my fingers and palms. I smelled like my orange. I knew its flaws and its number, what its sticker looked like and read (Naval #4012 Chile). The class compared experiences and agreed we could pick our orange, our specific orange, out of a bunch if they were to be recollected. I was no longer hungry. It wouldn’t have even mattered if I was, I had a connection with that piece of fruit: it had become a work of art, a gift from nature, a story, a complex mosaic of biology and history. Yellow my orange is known to me better than it knows itself (it does not have five senses like I!) and is known to me better than it is known to you, for sharing every detail would deface the experience and insult its sincerity. I have only scratched the surface. What fruit lie ahead?