Bonny Rill sits on the floor of her still-unfinished livingroom and stares at the walls, trying to choose a color to paint them. She tries to look beyond the fiberglass "tape" and the "mud" that cover the borders where slabs of sheetrock meet and pushes her imagination, trying to see the room as it WILL be - full of light and plants and furniture. She imagines curtains fluttering in the windows and framed pictures on the walls. And then, with her mind's eye, she looks even more closely at the walls - trying to capture their exact color. She can almost see it. It is a shade of ... of... Well, it's more of a...
The vision evaporates.
"Aargh!"
This is the frustrating part for Rill. This has happened a dozen times or more. She imagines this room in such detail that she can almost reach out and touch the furniture and then suddenly loses the mental image, just before she can nail down the specifics. Her new house is almost complete and she has to hurry if her painters are going to be able to finish it up before moving day. But this new house is HERS and she wants it to be perfect. She wants the walls to be just the right color - something that expresses who SHE is.
The pressure is too much for the moment and she puts off making a decision for the time being. There are a thousand other, easier decisions that need to be made. She'll come back to this tomorrow.
A week later, Rill still hasn't made up her mind. "I don't know," she complains to her cousin Darlene as they sit in her kitchen. "I think I want some sort of yellow, but there are about a million shades of yellow. You're an artist - what do you think? It has to be something warm - something comfortable,,,"
Darlene gets up and walks to the refrigerator. She opens the door and disapears inside for a moment, reappearing with a cube of butter.
"Something like this?" she asks.
*******
"I have a weird request for you."
Roger Perham's stomach sinks as soon as he hears those words. Most businessmen can laugh off a comment like that from a customer, saying something like, "Don't worry - you have no idea HOW weird some of the stuff we get in here is." Unfortunately, in the many years that Perham has spent selling paint, he has come to the realization that when a customer says that they have a weird request, they generally really mean it. Today is a case in point.
The lady on the other side of the counter explains that she has been looking for just the right color to paint her new house and that she has finally found it. All she needs Perham to do is to match it for her. Perham nods and smiles, hoping that this lady's definition of "weird" is more conservative than his.
Rill (for that's who this is, of course) blushes slightly, then digs into her shopping bag, rummages around for a moment, then presents Perham with a half cube of butter. "Good luck," she says with a nervous laugh, then quickly makes her escape.
The process of matching Rill's exact shade of butter yellow takes Perham several days. Unlike many paint stores, Sherwin Williams' Keene store, where Perham is an Assistant Manager does not have an optical scanner that can analyze and match paint samples on its own - all paint is matched "by eye". "We love a challenge," Perham says with an ironic laugh.
Perham's first step is to go through a stack of paint cards, trying to find a pre-existing color that matches Rill's butter. He knows from long and bitter experience that the odds of finding an exact match is extremely unlikely, but he hopes to find a CLOSE match that he can use as a starting point - preferably a shade or two lighter than the color he ultimately hopes to end up with. After flipping through card after card, Perham finally finds a shade of off-white that is fairly "butterish".
The next step is to figure out what to add to the formula for this particular shade of off-white in order to match Rill's sample. Almost all paint starts out white. Paint Store Guys like Perham (there really should be a more impressive title, like "Color Chromography Technician") blend a mixture of colored pigments into a white base to get a final color. Perham has a basic pallette of black, green, red, blue, maroon, violet, yellow, gold, umber and (surprisingly)white to work with. Consulting a formula book, Perham discovers that the basic off-white color on his card requires gold, yellow and red additives. He decides to add an extra fraction of an ounce of red to the formula.
After adding the pigment to a gallon of paint and mixing it in an industrial shaker, he tests the color by spreading it onto a wooden stirring stick with his finger. "This can be a fun job," he says with a smile. "Where else can you play with finger paints all day and get away with it?" Because paint changes color as it dries, he dries the sample with a paint-spattered hairdryer that the store keeps under the counter.
As expected, the color is not an exact match. It normally takes several tries to get a color exactly right, as a Paint Store Guy adds a little of this color and a little of that one, slowly tweaking the color to the exact shade he wants. It can take four or even five tries sometimes.
This time, it takes 12.
The problem, Perham realizes eventually, is that butter doesn't stay the same color all the time. It changes hue as it warms up or chills down, so that by the time Perham has gotten exactly the right formula, it no longer matches the butter in front of him. This prompts a telephone call to Rill to find out what TEMPERATURE butter-yellow she wants (cold). Then several more attempts at matching follow.
Perham has had to match any number of unusual color samples before - leaves, tomatoes, barnboards - even nail polish, but this butter presents a particular challenge. "This is tricky," he says. "Butter has a certain luminous quality to it - it seems to glow a little. That's NOT the same as being shiny, though. That makes it tough to match."
Perham has to take the sample outside to see how it looks in the sun, then back indoors under flourescent lights before he is finally satisfied with his shade of butter-yellow. He calls Rill to tell her the good news.
An ecstatic Bonnie Rill is at the store within 10 minutes to collect her paint and try it on the walls of her new house. There is a delay of another two days while she waits for the paint to dry and while she looks at it under a variety of different lighting conditions. Then she returns to the paint store.
"I think it needs to be a few degrees 'colder'," she tells Perham, who nods and goes to the store's refrigerator to retrieve his butter sample, only to find that someone has eaten it.
*****
There is a happy ending to all of this. Perham matches the paint. Rill paints her walls in time to meet her moving deadline. The color is right.
"I know it all seems a bit silly," she says as she looks at her newly-painted livingroom wall with satisfaction, "but I'm glad I went with the butter. There's an 'aliveness' to it. It has that feeling of warmth and comfort I was looking for. It's a GOOD feeling."
Another good feeling comes from the knowledge that the exact formula for "Rill Butter" has been programmed into Shirwin Williams' computer. If she ever needs another gallon of this particular paint, it can be made automatically in a few minutes. If Rill needs more butter on her walls, it won't be a be a problem.
Rill takes one last, satisfied look at her wall, then goes into her new kitchen for a celebratory piece of toast.
