The Parable of the Woman and the Paints

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, who is so desperate for attention that they will wear blackface and call it humor?  Who is so desperate to be angry that they care?”

Josh spoke thus:

A woman came across an artist’s paints.  The woman grabbed a brush and chose a color at random.  The woman painted the bridge of her nose.  She looked in the mirror.

“That’s a better nose,” the woman said to the mirror.

The woman chose another color and painted the left side of her nose.  She then chose a third color and painted the right side of her nose.

“Never have I seen a finer nose,” the woman said to the mirror.

It took a long while for the woman to find two colors for her cheeks.  Some colors were too cheerful.  Others were too complimentary.  One color was perfect for the right, but there was no matching color for the left--or rather too many colors matched. At last the left and the right combined for just the right balance between congruous and incongruous, and in the mirror the woman saw cheeks at once fattened and piqued.

The woman turned her head to measure the effect of angles.  Her dimensions increased and decreased in the reflection.  Her profile pivoted like a seesaw.  The prism of the glass refracted and reconstructed.  The woman winked into the the glass, and the glass winked back.

The woman had long considered her ears out of proportion with her brow and soon reworked her composition with a lightening and a darkening.  A rage of bright pigment slashed across a prominent background, and the woman wondered at her beauty.

“What color for the neck?” the woman asked the palette.  The palette answered with a coy blend of metallic and matt.  The woman craned and twisted to ensure the brushstrokes contoured correctly, then broke the collar of her artwork with a humorous dash of contrast.

The woman settled against the wall and watched a gathering crowd, come to see the artist paint.

“I don’t like that painting,” a child said of the woman.

“It’s tribal,” the child’s mother said.

“I want to paint it white,” the child said, “I want to paint it black.”

“We’re not white, and we’re not black,” the mother said to the child.

“I am white,” said the woman who was a painting.

The child screamed.