International Shoes Sizes

A strange man approached me when I was nodding off in the foyer to the Louvre Museum's Decorative Arts Library. I thought it was a place exclusively frequented by gay men and the girls who carry their purses, but I was wrong.

I was too tired to ignore the semi-charming stranger, and he somehow obtained my cell phone number, but at least I gave him a fake name. After I skipped out on his invitation to see a boring exhibition at the museum, he called me a week later and confronted me for my lack of textual reciprocation. He claimed to be "a nice man" who only wanted "friendship" and "conversation." I was skeptical, as I consider myself somewhat skilled (and not naïve) in the 'men expert' milieu.

There was no fussy email writing, but we met up over a casual orange juice on a grand boulevard. Even though I told him that I was "in a relationship," he tried kissing me multiple times during the orange juice. And he kept exclaiming with enraptured delight: "You're a simple girl!" He meant it as a compliment, but somehow the translation fell flat on me.

Amtrak Routes

As an expatriate lurking in the snowy streets of Moscow and sporting ridiculous fur hats, my friend recently met an older Russian man who was selling his book of poems on the sidewalk. She apologized to the poet for not being able to buy his book, saying that she did not understand enough Russian. But he gave her some sage advice: "If you just keep on reading and reading you will someday understand!" She ended up buying the book.

The young American girl and the old school Russian poet hit it off, and soon they were exchanging email addresses. He exclaimed to her, "I hope you find a great man to love you very much!" She said, "I hope so too." He intuited that she played piano as a child and urged her to take up the instrument again because it would lead her to a great man who would love her. The elderly poet also told her that he loves his wife very much. A real prince in the Russian night, spreading love to warm the wayward American girl in the frigid Moscow air.

A Man of Convenience

The Children's Hour is an old-school Audrey Hepburn film with Shirley MacLaine, based on a classic Lillian Hellman play. I was naturally inclined to attend a midday screening of it, because the story takes place at an all-girls New England boarding school in the 1950s and takes the central theme of The Crucible (vicious gossip) to a lesbian level.

Hepburn and MacLaine play the headmistresses who develop an unhealthily, codepent, platonic love for each other. A naughty young pupil tells her grandmother that the teachers are engaging in (debaucherous) lesbian acts. The rumor spreads, the girls are removed from the school, and the two women become social pariahs trapped alone in their drafty farmhouse-boarding-school.

MacLaine realizes that she is actually a lesbian, and the film ends with her suicide. Meanwhile, the dashing local doctor pines away after Hepburn, and watches her from behind a tree as she visits her best friend's grave. The film's message is both progressive and 1950s in nature: homosexuals are shamed to seclusion by the ignorance of society; homosexuals die of shame, at the end of their ropes (to put it gauchely).

"Chicken Cooked In Coca-Cola"

In a surprise birthday party for a ravishing French-Italian woman, the sangria and champagne cocktails flowed, her husband presented her with some lovely diamond-sapphire jewels, and her two pretty pre-pubescent children looked on at the spectacle. For the Spanish-themed soirée I wore a bolero-inspired sweater and red tights, so it was a bit of Almodovar in Paris. We ate delicious tapas (sardines, octopus, peppers, meatballs, and manchego abounded), and then there was the requisite dancing portion of the night.

I put my red tights to the test and did a few jump splits. The more middle-aged women were aghast, and perhaps a bit put-off by my limber dancing habits. But when I exited the party, the hostess/birthday girl was delighted: she thanked me for "l'ambiance."

For a good social atmosphere, it is necessary that everyone let loose and open up a bit. I just hope that by the time I turn 30-something, my husband and kids will be there watching me eat meringue-filled raspberry-chocolate cake and observing as my friends do ridiculous things on the dance floor.

Getting Off Easy

In a dinner party of diplomats from Delhi, aristocrats from Paris, and me (a wayward semi-'student' lurking from Boston), a French expert in the global water system told me an apocalyptic statement: in 2043 there will be a melting of the glacier ice caps, and our world will be submerged in water.

I suddenly recalled the last time a Frenchman pretended to be sure of a disastrous event looming in the future: about two months before the economic crisis in The States began, a Parisian financial expert told me that the economy in America was about to collapse. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but now I am more wary when I hear ominous statements from the often-incompetent French.

Maybe we will all be swimming in 2043, and there will be a revolution in stilt-style architecture as a result. Or maybe we will all drown. Either way, I am going to try to drink more wine, meet more strangers, and take a few more crazy chances in 2010. Or perhaps later today.

"Promise me you'll never cut your hair."

My friend recently had an unfortunate evening in Moscow that involved "a charming cocktail of vodka beer rum wine baiileys rum and our old friend jager" (according to her latest email). And at that point she left her purse in the "cab" (which was actually a civilian car, since proper taxis don't really exist in Moscow). She returned back to her boyfriend's apartment with nothing but a few kopecks and a stick of gum. The lost purse was filled with vital items (like credit cards, and passports, and prescription meds, and reading glasses, and the visa permitting her to stay in said semi-sinister Eastern European country).

But instead of suffering through twelve years of standing in line to obtain her new passport and documents (not to mention the numerous mean Russian ladies who would yell at her in the process), it turns out that the bad-drinking-etiquette-silly-American-girl-traveling-in-cold-climates fairy was watching over her that night. The "cab" driver found her purse and handed her documents over to the Russian militia, after stealing her camera, cash, and iPod. She was so delighted to get her passport and papers back that she felt the "cab" driver deserved all the other stuff as a reward. Let's just call it karma.

Settle The Tab

In New York City there is a well-kept secret for young women in need of low-rent accommodations. At The Webster Apartments you can have a single room, two hot meals a day, and maid's service for a mere 250 dollars a week. The only catch: no males allowed.

There is a night watchwoman who patrols the corridors, making the social scene at The Webster reminiscent of a woman's ward in a mental institute circa 1960. But in all seriousness, I have applied and been accepted to The Webster on two separate occasions in my life. But my rent-free maid's quarters (storage space) on Park Avenue proved a better deal.

But The Webster is populated by more than 20-something unpaid interns and aspiring actresses. A recent article described a middle-aged resident who was living at The Webster after a messy divorce. She went from suburban splendor to urban nunnery. But hopefully she will revenge her wanker-husband and stow away a fetching young guy in her closet to conceal him from The Webster's boy-patrol.

A Bulldog Shot

One of the most endearing ways to pass a Sunday afternoon is at the guignol theatre in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Parisian children become entranced by tranny-looking marionettes beating each other on the heads with sticks, brooms, feather dusters, and other phallic objects.

On this particular Sunday there was a brawl between a woman and the portly owner of the theatre. He wanted her to move to a back row to make more room in front for the children. During the dispute a mysterious mustached man stood up and called the room to order.

The curtain finally rose to reveal a magical land where Prince Charming underwent various metamorphoses, the Pretty Princess fainted frequently, and the Evil Witch tried to spoil everyone else's chance at happiness. Maybe she had a traumatic childhood. Or maybe she was just born that way.

"Is that real snakeskin?"

I recently went to the cinema at noon, because it is cheap at that time of day, and because Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience was only showing once a week in one movie theatre in all of Paris. Sasha Grey, an award-winning 21-year-old porn star, plays Chelsea, a high-class Manhattan call girl who manages to keep a boyfriend while seeing her various clients.

The film has a pseudo-documentary style, outlining stories of Chelsea's life: the brands of her high heels, the types of alcohol her clients offer her, the astrological numbers of her week. And then there are scenes of some rich New York City republican wankers jetting off to Las Vegas for a boys' weekend. They gripe about the economic crisis and the 2008 presidential election, and then one of them proclaims that all women are evil, blood-sucking psychopaths.

The Girlfriend Experience is sort of like a dark, soporific, new millennium version of Pretty Woman, with a porn star instead of Julia Roberts, and an infinite Manhattan bleakness instead of a happy ending.

Perfect Empathy

Through an anonymous exchange of phone numbers at a classic Parisian club, I recently met a minor French TV celebrity. That is to say, he intrigued me, so I scribbled my cell phone number onto a slip of paper and 'dropped' it into his hand while leaving the lounge. This sort of behavior is typically labeled as "forward" or "desperate" or "gauche," but sometimes you meet someone and you don't want to risk never seeing them again.

I struggled through a prolonged series of textual exchanges with Le Papillon du Soir ('The Butterfly of the Night," aka. the mystery man's nickname from the French press). While he seemed like a nice, well-educated, charming little French man from a vaguely Catholic and vaguely aristocratic family, it turns out that all he wanted was one thing from me ...

When I asked him why he was so fixated on playing out a sexual scenario involving masks at midnight and a minimal exchange of words, he replied with the following Wanker of the Week text messages:

1. "Cause I love sex and friendship not more darling!"

2. "Why? I just like sex but I want to stay alone darling..."

Moral of the story: 'Butterflies of the night' are similar to vampires, so be careful where you 'drop' your phone number.

"For the wig, it's as you like."

In the 1920s when the economy was sizzling and rich people could afford to splurge on small cottages by the sea, and a Rembrandt or two, A Spanish baron started buying some paintings. His son inherited them and then bought even more paintings. And then in the 1980s the son married a former Miss Spain and the dynamic couple founded one of Madrid's top art destinations, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Carmen Cervera, the beauty-queen-turned-art-aficionado demanded that the walls of the museum be painted salmon-pink and that her portrait be painted so that she would look like a woodland fairy wearing a pantsuit, in true Palm-Beach Princess style.

Of all the things to invest in, paintings are a sure bet. At least if you lose all your money you can sleep soundly, knowing that you helped the careers of some starving artists, or some well-fed Sotheby's auctioneers.

"he buys me dinner."

With visions of meeting lovely strangers in the subway dancing in my head, I endured one of the more jam-packed metro rides of my life. It was the sort of occasion when you are not sure whose body parts are touching you, and so you try your hardest to assume that everyone around you has showered recently (though in Paris that is a relative impossibility).

All of a sudden I felt a hand brushing up against me in exactly the private 'spot' where one hopes not to feel a stranger's hand while riding the Paris metro (or any underground transit system the world over). In classic creeper form the man next to me was violating my 'personal space,' as they call it in kindergarten. He assumed that the crowded train car would prevent his unsavory plot from jarring my consciousness. Little did he know, I have seen the '80s French film, Subway, and I know the dangers lurking below the streets.

Fancy Pants!

Apparently in France Halloween has been canceled. A principal at a grade school in Provence was put off by the concept of children sporting "fancy dress in the classroom," especially "when inspired by some ridiculous foreign novelty."

Luckily for me I spent Halloween at a soirée in Normandy in a picturesque town famous for its namesake cheese. In the courtly confines of a spooky Tudor mansion, I gallivanted with a group of Frenchies who were quite cozy with the prospect of getting decked out and disguised; there was a robed man in a Venetian mask dressed as a character from Eyes Wide Shut, Jack the Ripper, the inevitable sexpot sorcière, and a 'Mother Christmas' who drank a bit too much champagne and was less than merry the following morning.

No matter what the snobby traditional French school mistresses say, Halloween translates easily to foreign cultures: masks + cocktails + wigs = garden of earthly delights.