Susie Wilburn

August 7, 2009

Mr. Pinkwater,

My husband is an elementary school librarian and has read you book “The Big Orange Splot” to his children at his school for many years.

This summer we need desperately to paint our 100 year old house and picked our palette from the daylillies in our yard. Needless to say, the colors are quite a stir in our neighborhood and when the color “laughing orange” went onto the house he kept quoting your book. Of course, I hadn’t read it and when we were finished with the house he bought 5 copies, 4 to give as gifts and one for us to have on hand as an explanation of our color scheme. I wanted to send you a photo of the house but your site doesn’t have that capability so I thought I would share the story with you. “My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams,” Mr. Plumbean said.

Thanks for a wonderful book! And for giving us permission to be different in our very conservative neighborhood.

Susie Wilburn

Some time after the publication of The Big Orange Splot Jill and I decided to paint the house we then lived in, a nice cheap Dutch colonial on a little street in a suburban village. We thought a deep barn-red would look right. We hired a good painter, and he properly first painted the house with an undercoat which was white--but for some reason related to the craft of housepainting he added a bit of the final color to the undercoat paint, resulting in a pink house. Then the painter went away for a while to do other things. The neighbors were concerned, and one in particular was more than concerned. He was wild. Then someone gave him a copy of the book, and he became more than wild. We could hear him moaning and talking to God three houses away. I'm sure you are aware that Victorian houses were frequently painted in riotous colors, also Greek temples. Perfectly conservative those Victorians and ancient Greeks. Thanks for liking the book.