Duties

Creepers abounded at the Saint-Tropez club, Les Caves du Roy, where dancing on my own proved to be a challenging experience.

Gauche Things for a [random] guy to do [to a girl] in a club:

1. Offering her Red Bull + something else, as she dances alone on an elevated platform.

2. Jumping up onto the elevated platform and attempting to dance with her.

3. Bumping butts with her as though you are playing laser tag at a 3rd grade birthday party.

4. Falling off the stage and breaking multiple wine glasses.

5. Following her to the bar.

6. Asking her: "Do you have cigars?"

7. Showing her your wedding ring, and introducing her to your friend, who is also wearing a wedding ring.

Lapis Lazuli

The famous film director Roman Polanski was recently arrested in Zurich for a rape case that he has been fleeing since 1977, when he lured a 13-year-old girl into Jack Nicholson's house under the guise of a photo shoot, serving her champagne and Quaaludes.

The topics of pedophilia, celebrity, film, and sexual assault, stir up a great deal of fervor and consternation in the United States and in France; while the French tend to support Polanski's release, "America's puritanical morals want him to be lynched," in the words of my Parisian friend.

The story of Polanski's life is a nightmarish epic: internment in a concentration camp where he witnessed the death of his mother, the brutal murder of his pregnant wife by the Manson Family, and the eruption of his own senseless cruelty and resulting fugitive lifestyle. Polanski is equipped with the ultimate survival skills and continues to create, in spite of the horrors of his own reality.

"with dyspeptic impatience"

Walking home through the semi-deserted streets of Montmartre, past the tourist trap of Sacré Coeur, I was aggressed by a drunk man. He left his posse of equally inebriated midnight creepers, came up very close to me and said repeatedly: "Comme tu es belle, comme tu es belle." I refused to make eye contact or utter a word to him, as I knew that he second he notice I had an accent, he would pin me as an American girl and the situation would inevitably deteriorate from there. American girls in Paris may seem to be glamorous princesses in flight from their own country, but in most cases, they are prime prey for wankers of the week who reek of body odor and bad whisky.

After I walked efficiently down the cobblestone street away from the creeper, his dialogue turned from "You are so beautiful" to "Comme tu es moche, comme tu es moche." Translation: "You are so ugly." I guess he wanted to test out a variety of pick-up lines that night.

Swimming Trunks

David Lynch designed the new windows at the famous French department store, Galeries Lafayette. "Machines, Abstraction and Women" is the theme of his 'artistic' installation, but it resembled a circus-inspired fun house targeted to mock the pretentious adult viewers who think that railroad tracks running through a model of a woman's body make for a controversial commentary on the state of heteronormative gender dynamics.

A throng of people gathered to ogle the marvelous David Lynch custom-designed vitrines. A too-tan Parisian woman in Christian Louboutin stilettos took pictures of the toy trains entering into the mouth of Lynch's screaming papier mâché woman.

When we crossed the street corner away from Galeries Lafayette, my friend and I noticed a man painting an enormous clown head on the sidewalk. That will probably be David Lynch's next big publicity gig/joke for the fashion world.

For Sure

During a weekend in Saint-Tropez I learned a new pejorative/womanizing term: the French word for 'gold-digger': les effeuilleuses ("feuille" referring to paper, as in money). The stereotypical "effeuilleuse" is a tall Russian 'model' sporting a diamanté-encrusted Blackberry and/or iPod with a monthly calling plan that is paid for by a man named Asadel (Arabic for 'most prosperous one') and/or Athamas (Greek for 'rich harvest').

'Les effeuilleuses' proliferate in the gleaming hotspots and nude beaches of the Côte d'Azur. A worldly French man of advanced years scorned each effeuilleuse that entered the bar. And soon after he made the following offhand comment: "In France there is a code—if a woman goes to dinner with a man, then it is expected that ... " It was not difficult to discern the rest of this old French aristocrat's sentence. But I felt like replying to him, "No—that's a common code in the head of wankers the world over ... it has nothing to do with France."

Sur La Terrasse

Just as I was thinking all about tiny Smart Cars in France and large SUVs in the states, I met a couple of typically American men at an Italian restaurant in Paris. They were admiring a Smart Car in the street and proclaiming vague statements of delight like, "The more I stay here, the more I come to love this place," as though Paris were a quaint summer camp on the coast of Maine.

When I talked to these ambiguously Texan gentlemen, I discovered that they were truly men of the world. They were airplane pilots. When I asked them where they lived, one responded, "I'm living in Guam actually." And when I asked him what that's like, he responded, "It's hot." They were delighted by "how healthy everyone is in Paris, and how everyone walks everywhere." More deep thoughts from our neighborhood airline pilots. Talk about mimbo material.

They hesitantly accepted to try the spacious driver's seat of my friend's Smart Car, but I have a feeling they will be happy to return to their Jeep Grand Cherokees.

Hole-in-the-wall

Moving can be a terrifying thing. But when you are young enough, and have yet to accumulate an obscene amount of knickknacks, furnishings, and miscellaneous kitchen appliances, moving can be exciting. My friend has a little country house just a stone's throw outside of Paris, and, like so many people with country houses, he only goes there 3 days out of every year. So, in spite of the babbling brook, lovely vines creeping up the façade, and exemplary local boucherie, he is selling his pretty house in the countryside.

We made a trip there to salvage whatever useful cooking and bedding items we could from the semi-abandoned overgrown ruin. We returned to Paris, packed into a tiny Smart car brimming with old pillows, crystal champagne flutes, kitchen knives, candlesticks, nutcrackers, and a Persian rug. The French tend to be fonder of acquiring ancient objects at auction—whereas Americans are more inclined toward accumulating shiny new Bentleys ... to each his own form of pimp.

The Slits

There was a girl at a discotheque in Paris who looked like a combination of a young Nicole Kidman and Evan Rachel Wood in the gritty-girly-teen-angst film, Thirteen. She was wearing a violet skintight bandeau dress and dancing provocatively, semi-suspended from the system of netting above the dance floor. This 17-year-old (though she could have passed for 27) Parisian girl had a certain extroverted-unabashed American aura about her. Unfortunately, when I attempted to lure her toward my side of the dance floor, my friend intercepted and said, "Yes, she's very pretty, but we say in French, 'un peu vulgaire.'"

And that was that. So it turns out that even when you are in a venue with netting hanging from the ceiling, dry ice floating through the air, and gay men draped in fur stoles ... a vibrant, fully-clothed girl on a dance floor can still manage to be "ordinary/coarse/indelicate/without distinction." Talk about gauche.

"She seems quite fancy..."

In French the word for friend, "un ami (m.)/une amie (f.)" is used to refer to the people in your life with whom you genuinely want to spend time. But there is another word for friend—"un copain (m.)/une copine (f.)"—used to describe that slew of acquaintances with whom you are 'friendly.' Maybe you'll kiss cheeks with your "copines" at a cocktail party, you'll probably attend the shower for their first baby, and "a copain" will definitely call on you when they are in need of real estate advice (if you are in real estate), or legal advice (if you are a lawyer). Most of us have between 13 and 1,500 "copains" and between 3 and 12 "vrais amis."

A French woman living in New York City was bereft when she realized that there was no English translation for the terms for real and superficial friends. She kept searching for a word to describe the gaggle of New Yorkers with whom she was 'friendly.' The French are experts in the act of being gauche and passing it off as exceedingly decorous (e.g. eating the end of the baguette while walking home from the boulangerie; rarely showering; openly informing each other if they are getting fat or if they have gained weight; rarely arriving on time; accepting obscene sexuality as art; etc.). New Yorkers are less pretentious about their own gaucheness.