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Tint City

Tracy Thompson works the runway in her tarpaulin creation earlier this month during the Blue Tarp Costume Fashion Show at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans. Below, Thompson, left, and Janine Hayes show off their designs. The event was a fundraiser for the Campaign to Save Costal Louisiana. Below right, Ricardo Pustanio and Jules Richard staple a tarp to a Mardis Gras float.
Tracy Thompson works the runway in her tarpaulin creation earlier this month during the Blue Tarp Costume Fashion Show at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans. Below, Thompson, left, and Janine Hayes show off their designs. The event was a fundraiser for the Campaign to Save Costal Louisiana. Below right, Ricardo Pustanio and Jules Richard staple a tarp to a Mardis Gras float. (Carolyn Kaster - AP)
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King: Chief, do we know?

Police Chief Roy W. Wasden: I couldn't comment on that, but I can tell you that the blue tarp is in our custody, police custody, being examined.

A blue tarp is in our custody, too, fresh from its wrapping, being examined.

Trish Righetti, the sales office manager at Schott International, an Akron, Ohio, import/export company, has taken our call. Schott sells PolyTuf-brand blue tarps. They make them in all colors (U-Haul sells its own, in orange) but, she says, blue is the biggest seller. "It's just the standard," she says, in terms of roofer culture. They like the no-nonsense blue. Of all the blues, it's a tricky one to love, because it was invented by machines. It isn't the color of sky, eyes, oceans, swimming pools. It's a work color: school notebooks or baseboards taped off and ready to be painted. You can find it in soft-sided luggage, and you used to be able buy Trimline phones in it; during the '80s and '90s women wore enormous V-neck sweaters in this hot shade of blue, over black stirrup pants, and imagined they were Debbie Gibson.

Schott has its blue tarps (and every other color) made in China. That seems right. It's an 8-by-8 polyethylene weave. There are these giant, custom-made automatic looms, Righetti says. Imagine millions and millions of yards of blue tarp, eight feet wide or 14 feet wide, coming off in a constant flow. Look close and you can see the individual threads in the weave. (No, look closer.)

You put up blue tarp to keep stuff out.

You also put up blue tarp to keep people from seeing what you got, to keep out the critters, to keep out the out. Home decorators talk a lot about "bringing some of the outdoors in." Blue tarps do the opposite, on the winter landscape, on the destroyed suburbs, on the back 40: They bring the indoors out.

You also put blue tarp up so that people will know you're not finished with your project yet. Blue tarp could signify the true art underneath.

Voila, you're finished.

But the blue tarp has none of the flourish of a white linen sheet or a velvet drape.

Voila, you're done anyhow.


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