Pink, rose, rosa, pienk, vaaleanpunainen, pinc.   America’s pink is for girls and golden age non-existent princesses, the pink flush and blush at your first school dance, pink for breast cancer awareness, pink as a marketing ploy by clothing companies, written across the seat of sweat pants in frosted coral letterman jacket font, pink as the opposite of manliness, pinko commies are the anti-Americans, the haters of freedom, pink walls in a jail cell to calm the nerves of those wrongfully imprisoned, dull pink cotton socks washed with a new red sweater, Elvis’s pink Caddy, the symbol of all that is right and wrong with American culture, memorialized in Springsteen’s song ‘Pink Cadillac’.  Bruce’s double entendre was lost on FM radio culture and Mary Kay, who had her car painted ‘Mountain Laurel Blush’ to match a color of makeup she had in her purse.  Top Mary Kay sales personnel still channel the Boss and the King to this day, driving a cultural burden with the aplomb of a color blind man sporting red and green socks.

French Rosé is for pink macaroons, which, let’s face it, are just crispy whoopie pies with a beret, French rosé clay for spa facials and skin restoration, the mildest of all the clays, debutante pink, also know as La France pink, is a moderate rosé that “is yellower and darker than arbutus pink and bluer and deeper than hydrangea pink.”  But what of course, is hydrangea pink?  

And the most prog  of Pinks, that of Floyd, the pink in Pink Floyd coming from Pink Anderson, who in turn hailed from South Carolina, where the roads are lined with Eastern Rosebud trees, rubicund pedals dancing in the flames of the southern sun.  Pink’s guitar pacing echoing the sanguine musical sunset that wraps your ears in Pink Floyd’s San Tropez.  

Let us not forget the Pink Panther, a series of slapstick detective movies featuring (and only watchable because of his presence) Peter Sellers, in a roll he came to despise so completely that his last movies as Inspector Clouseau are memorable more for his unrestrained loathing than any semblance of plot line.  In the psychedelic opening of the series, the seemingly flawless diamond has a tiny imperfection at its core: a tiny leaping pink panther.

This was 1964, so the tiny panther needed be animated and have a top hat and a Henry Mancini song to dance to.  Spanish rosado, Italian rosato, regional names for a style of wine popularized in the late 70’s, a time of growing taste for wine redolent of Hi-C.  Fittingly the wine is often created through Saignée, French for ‘bleeding’, where the pink juice is left over from the creation of real red wine.  The name ‘Blush’ was coined, and became synonymous with cut rate California table wine.

Rosa is the pink of Italians.  Parma’s Baptistery, an strangely proportioned octagonal Medieval folly, constructed in the sunset of Romanesque architecture, is clad in Verona pink marble and houses a beautiful series of fraudulent frescoes, which modern science has been forced to restore using state of the art technology.  Historians armed with syringes and spatulas add to the culture of God, graft and craft that created the building.  Parma Ham, aka prosciutto crudo, thin sliced translucent meat, quinacridone pink, is cured on huge curved hooks.  Parma hosted the Giro d’Italia in 2011.  The regions other famous food caustically commemorated by BikesnobNYC: “…one rider became three, and three became eight, and soon a breakaway was thrumming along like an eight-cylinder engine—until it sort of threw a rod in the form of a Katusha rider, who touched wheels with the rider in front of him, careened out of the break, and did his best Parmesan cheese imitation on the abrasive road surface.”  The raw salmon color of the La Galletia Della Sport newspaper gives the pink hue to the winner’s jersey of the Giro.  The winner has worn the pink Maglia Rosa since 1931, a tradition as venerated as the yellow jersey of the Tour de France.

The 1946 bid for the Maglia Rosa: interrupted by pinko communists throwing sticks and stones and eventually bullets. Idealists and Allied forces dragging a finished conflict into a dim post-war spot light; the broken flesh of riders and spectators,  the violent pink of azaleas in the spring, the wounds of a war that have left Italy in a state of perpetual confusion and conflict.

Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali, suffering and cycling, the spring air pregnant with sudor, oil and dirt. The woolen jersey saturated in salt, the pink hermosa of the fabric wrapped in webs of brine and strada. Riots in the port of Trieste at the news of the gunfire and violence. Unstable times, the pink carnation of the winner’s shirt an unwavering beacon, the rally point of a quivering nation.  Gino won, the last time the pink wool would grace his shoulders.

The Indian city of Jaipur, the ‘Pink City’, with its wide boulevards and stately grid, was painted a rich perylene crimson. The planned city’s liquified terracotta finish honored the 1876 visit of Prince Albert, who is know mainly remembered for having a beard that did not meet his mustache, but rather hovered under his chin like a shade loving azalea.  The Teej Festival of Jaipur is a women’s fasting festival, resplendent in poppy and pink hermosa dresses decorated with gold filigree.

Japanese cherry trees, blossoming in the aftermath of winter, pink flowers symbolizing the fallen warriors of the homeland.  A culture converse to the Euro-centric view that pink is feminine, the Japanese associate it, rightly so, with muscles, heroism, and valiant death in defense of valiant ideals. A different spectrum of light is shed on the gift of the cherry trees on the National Mall.

Think local, come home. The spring farm fields burgeoning with tiny vermilion shoots and thick terra cotta, applied with the heavy hand of Clyfford Still, rolling bands of earthen corduroy, plowed ridges fringed in follicles of pink, the dry brushed ground in nature’s painting.    100 liters of ox blood skimmed to 30 liters of serum after a week standing in a cold barn, add clove oil to prevent spoiling, slaked lime and iron oxide.  Linseed oil for the medium.  Paint applied 100 years ago to oak boards faded to the color of raspberry sherbet, the barn sagging under the weight of a lichen laced slate roof, the protector becoming the oppressor, slate slowly returning to the earth as its adiposity bends the barn wood earthward.

An alizarin sun sets behind the Taconic mountains, back-lit and Prussian blue against the sky, fields full and darkly silent, the air ripe with the low yowling of farm machinery. The sky spreads wide, a welcoming cloak of coming dusk, the sky thickens: Robbins egg blue melts into a burnt rose hue, clouds hovering like lost airships. Tail lights flick on in the ride group, raspberry eyes floating in the coming void of night. Tires whisk along the pavement, the earlier chatter giving way to contemplation and internal conversation. Dying rays pierce a water bottle, the last drops of liquid the color of a pink seashell at a tawdry tourist shop on a sandy road in some forgotten ocean town, swallowed by time like Hollywood Cerise swallows Scottish Heather.

A climber attacks a hill, with the whole body, a salmon swimming upstream for the last time, its pink underbelly flashing against the sun like a beacon of suffering and commitment. The mask of pain, the twisted lips of the climber, pale mauve with corners drawn into tight points of puce, veins on the forehead like a roiling post-flood brook, blood pounding beneath quivering dermis, lifelines the chroma of winter blackberry.  The climber snakes into the woods, the top hidden by thick foliage dotted with momo-iro.