You may have seen her stalking the streets of Seattle, under the cover of her large rainbow umbrella. Maybe you’ve seen her dancing in the grass at Bumbershoot in her rainbow muumuus or cruising around the city in her rainbow-painted car. She’s Dee Dee Rainbow, better known as the Rainbow Lady — Seattle’s own colorful icon and the city’s unofficial ambassador of charm and good cheer, keeping the Seattle streets and festivals interesting with her fanciful sense of style and animated demeanor. A long time fan of jazz, a former art teacher of thirty years, and an artist herself, Dee Dee never shies when it comes to expressing herself, mostly through her appearance, which has earned her a popular reputation in Seattle.

Walking up to her Madrona abode, you’d be surprised to see that it isn’t painted with rainbows or overflowing with other eclectic memorabilia. The Rainbow Lady lives with her daughter, her husband and their two kids. She’s lived in the same house for forty-nine years, but currently the house doesn’t represent her vibrant style. “My daughter recently redid the house, and she’s much more conservative than I am,” Dee Dee said. “I think it’s quite boring, in my honest opinion.” There are however, corners of the house devoted to her, where the plain white walls are adorned with pictures of old friends, like Garfield’s Mr. Acox; numerous postcards, newspaper articles about herself and friends, and rainbow decorations. At her desk in her large black-and-white tiled kitchen, the Rainbow Lady shows me her “favorite thing” – a handheld latte maker that spins her coffee and creates what she likes to call “fur” (or foam to most) which she licks off the spinning contraption. She giddily laughs and offers me some of her creation.

If you’re one of the few Seattleites that have never seen the Rainbow Lady in all of her rainbow glory, well, you can’t miss her. Her presence is defined by a colorful appearance, which earns her a lot of attention. Dee Dee’s hair is not noticeably graying, unlike that of most women her age, because it is dyed at least three different colors to match the rest of her vibrant wardrobe. She does wear a minimal amount of makeup, but she generously spreads turquoise, pink, yellow, and blue “decorations” over her face. Her personal mantra for makeup is “If you’ve got it, decorate it.” The only technical makeup she wears is a lip gloss that she dabs on her moles for emphasis. For the rest of her decorations, she uses micas from the earth, in neon colors that she finds at her favorite store, Costume and Display. She paints random designs in pink or blue body glitter on her forehead and cheeks and under her eyes, “So you can see the glitter, and not the bags.” She then methodically squirts a copious amount of gold glitter on her hands and rubs them together as if she were washing them with soap, for additional sparkle.

Dee Dee flashes me a lovely smile and I can’t help but notice a few of her teeth in the back are a distinctly different color than the rest. She explains to me that years ago, she got nine of her teeth covered with porcelain caps, hand-painted with tiny rainbows on each one. Another permanent rainbow reminder is her 25-year-old tattoo, which she calls Nirena. The dragon underneath a rainbow was done by the famous tattoo artist Madame Lazonga in Boise, Idaho.

But where did this fascination with rainbows come from? “I’ve always dressed differently, and I’ve always loved rainbows,” Dee Dee says. The name Dee Dee is a nickname for her real name, Deloris, that she got when she was a young babysitter. When Dee Dee married, two weeks after her High School graduation, she changed her maiden name to Raible and as an art teacher at Meany Middle School, “a lot of the kids didn’t read too well,” and they began saying Rainbow instead of Raible, which seemed to stick. Dee Dee grew up all over Seattle; she’s lived in Alki, Hawthorne Heights, and Laurelhurst. After she got married, she and her husband moved to California where she worked with United Airlines. Nowadays, Dee Dee frequently finds herself staying up until about three in the morning, and waking up around mid-afternoon. During the night, she does “what everyone else does during the day,” but on her own schedule. She pays bills, listens to the radio, and goes to jazz shows, just like every other grandma I know.

Dee Dee picks up a wooden rod with a buffalo shape on its end. She uses the rod in her ceremonies to cleanse houses of negative spirits (she later used it on my head to grant me good luck for my SATs for the next day.) She continues around her room, and shows me her deck, overlooking Lake Washington, where she meditates each night.

Her closet is the greatest indicator of her rainbow obsession. Innumerable colorful robes hang beneath a large pile of decorative wands and crowns. She shows me one of her favorite robes, a replica of the one from The Last Emperor that she got when in China. A blue Bumbershoot robe, which is decorated in umbrellas. A robe given to her by her late daughter, Robyn, which Dee Dee got decorated with dragons, her favorite next to rainbows. Some of her robes have been given to her by complete strangers. Like the Thai silk robe that she was handed in the street. “This woman came up to me and said that she had gotten the robe in Thailand, but she said that she would never wear it and asked if she could give it to me. I was like, Are you kidding me?” She then pulls out a cowboy hat from her pile. She calls it her Indiana Jones hat, and she claims it’s the hat she wears when she goes river rafting.

Besides dressing like a rainbow queen, one of Dee Dee’s favorite pasttimes is dancing, “For my 75th birthday, I danced for six hours straight. I dance free, but I can follow the beat, I’ll tell ya.” One place where Dee Dee is often seen dancing is at Bumbershoot, which always falls during her birthday. “The city throws me a birthday party every year,” she says. “I get to listen to my all my friends play, dance and have fun.” Grooving in the crowds of Bumbershoot in her rainbow getups, Dee Dee is often mistaken for a performer, but the attention never bothers her. It inspires her to continue being herself, because all the people she meets — and most importantly, her friends — appreciate her uniqueness, which she will continue expressing through her vibrant appearance.