The Farmers Market Chair

They have supported the squirming 5-year-old at Bob’s Donuts and the scrawny screenwriter at Kokomo and the Paul Prudhomme-sized bon vivant at Gumbo Pot with egalitarian aplomb. At last count, there were 1,304 of the green metal-frame folding chairs with the plywood seats dotting the Farmers Market landscape. Each chair is painted with Pantone No. 345, which should be offered in hardware stores as “Farmers Market Green”--that sweet, smooth shade of pale grass that has been a reassuring staple of the Fairfax institution since the 1940s, when it succeeded the chocolate brown that had covered the chairs since the market’s birth in 1934. Manufactured in Illinois, the chairs cost $23 apiece, plus tax. A chair’s average life span is four years; the market strips, primes and repaints them two or three times, replacing their crutch tips--or little rubber feet--until they’re finally put out to pasture, injured by too much jostling, too many storms, too large a derriere.