Attending a Deliberative Body: A Dress Code for Fruits Who Have No Excuse
The deliberative body does not care about you. This is, in fact, the entire point of the deliberative body. It convenes, it weighs, it renders. Your role is to appear before it without causing the assembled members to question their own eyesight. This should not be difficult. It has, nonetheless, proven difficult.
Let us begin with the exterior. A fruit attending any council, panel, quorum, or working group of consequence must present a surface that communicates: I have considered this. Waxy? Good. Matte? Acceptable, if deliberate. Whatever Fig presented at the last three sittings? We are still in recovery. The exterior is not decorative. The exterior is a statement of intent. If your statement of intent reads as I ripened in a drawer, you have already failed the body before the body has begun.
Colour. We must discuss colour. Deliberative settings call for depth. They call for the sort of hue that suggests you have opinions that predate the current administration. Pale yellow — and I am looking at a very specific cohort at the rival rag when I say this, beginning alphabetically with Lemon and not stopping until I reach Tangelo — communicates, at best, provisional existence. Bring some gravity. Bring some burgundy. Bring something that reads as having wintered somewhere cold and come back wiser.
On the matter of presentation generally: seeds are interior. Flesh is interior. If either are visible upon entry, you have already resigned, you simply have not been informed of it yet. Pokeberry disagrees with this position. Pokeberry is wrong about this position and several others, but that is a separate column.
The so-called workers at factjuice.com, I understand, have been attending deliberative functions in no particular state of preparation whatsoever — arriving unmarked, unfinished, in some cases mid-ferment. This is not a political statement. It is a grooming failure. There is a difference. Quince has always known the difference. Quince is, in this as in all things, the benchmark from which deviation should be measured and mourned.