A Somnambulist

I recently attended an AIDS fashion couture gala in the Bois de Boulogne, a scenic area of Paris currently famous for its prostitutes and formerly famous for the opening scene of Gigi with Maurice Chevalier.

At this particular champagne-soaked evening there was a striptease spectacle involving men in hot pink Lycra and transvestites dressed as geishas. I have always had a penchant for beautiful drag queens, so I felt in my element, sporting a mink stole and gold leggings, which would be considered gauche in any other venue.

Surrounded by fashion designers, dapper gay men, and their fancy ladies in waiting, I decided that my favorite character of the night was a sixty-year-old man from the Great American South. He became a modern dancer and directed fashion shows in 1970s Paris. Now he leads a gospel choir and writes operas. When he returns from a nightclub or party, he makes a wistful comment about how 'things are not like they used to be, at Studio 54.'

An Uncanny Resemblance

The best thing about being a tourist is ogling other tourists and deducing their nationalities. In a bar with a distant view of the Taj Mahal, I found myself culturally confused: the American girl, in India, with a French man, at a British-colonialist-style resort, observing two Italian women sipping cocktails (or perhaps they were Spanish, or Greek ... it was hard to discern at first).

They were both well-dressed, well coiffed, dripping in designers, young, brunette, and pretty. One of them wore a threateningly large emerald ring, had a haughty look on her face, and sipped a mimosa. The other girl wore a headband embellished with a satin bow and had a sweet smile. She opted out of her friend's prissy champagne cocktail and ordered various ingredients from the bartender to create an odd concoction of tomato juice, beer, Tabasco sauce, celery salt, and Worcestershire sauce. Talk about gauche. We finally asked her about her custom drink and discovered that they are from Mexico. And when I saw the Worcestershire sauce, I was about to guess Great Britain.

But how much can you really tell about a person from what they drink? In Chile, Argentina, and India, I noticed ads for Johnnie Walker everywhere. I guess globalization turns international people watching into true detective work.

Marzipan Mustache

When five French bachelors cohabit in a grand Parisian apartment, New Year's Eve is bound to be a debaucherous affair. I spent my first hours of 2010 in the company of a crowd of horny, sweaty, semi-elegant young Parisians (and a smattering of confused Americans who were passing through town). The dance floor was throbbing, the champagne was flowing, the silly string was spraying, and the handsome French boys were ogling each Parisian girl wearing a little black cocktail dress that entered their line of sight.

New Year's Eve intensifies the creeper-quality in everyone because of the societal pressure to ring in the New Year with your perfect love match (or else your next 365 days will be cursed with lonely nights of watching sitcoms stored on your TV, or learning how to cook for one).

In the hazy inaugural moments of 2010 a particularly convincing creeper caught my eye, and he doled out a series of pick-up lines, each one weaker than the last -- though my personal favorite was his mention of taking me shopping for bridal gowns in the coming weeks. He topped if off when he declared, "If you don't sleep with me tonight, then tomorrow you will regret it!" I was convinced that the contrary was true. It's funny how men and women can have such different impressions of the urgency of a one-night stand.

"goaty look"

When New Yorkers come to Paris, two worlds collide, but the Manhattan dynamic always seems to overpower the effeminate Frenchie ways. I recently went for a night out at Le Montana, an iconic 1960s club in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The New Yorkers in the crowd insisted on taking vodka and tequila shots, which was a very un-French choice. Expensive champagne would have been more contextually appropriate, but once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker, I guess.

The evening devolved into a chaotic game, and before I knew it I put my men expert skills to the test and decided to vacate the premises. Dancing on tabletops and doing jump splits is one thing in the "dirty sexy money" atmosphere of New York City, but it is quite another thing in the semi-pretentious pseudo-refined city of Paris.

"of no education"

The Fellini exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris gave me a glimpse into the sexy film sirens who ignited the Italian director's alleged womanizing personality. But in reality Fellini remained devoted to his wife, distinguishing him from many of the wankers I encounter in everyday life. Fellini even considered his classic "Casanova" character to be incapable of truly loving women, since Casanova was obsessed by a fantasy idea of the female sex. Fellini was a bit of a "men expert," obsessed by the pretty things in the world: the circus, breasts, asses, movie stars, parties, Dionysian Ecstasy, excessively large hats, etc.

In Fellini's 1965 film, Juliet of the Spirits, the pimp of cinema puts his feminist ways to the test by illustrating the complicated dreams and psychic energy surrounding a frustrated Italian housewife, Juliet. She lives a terribly traditional New England existence devoted to her philandering husband, and enters into the surreal world of her hypersexual champagne-drinking prostitute neighbor. Juliet finds herself climbing into orgy-laced tree houses and being propositioned by a young Adonis. She struggles through a chaotic game of understanding dreams and being haunted by emotionally unavailable men.

But once her husband elopes with a perky young model, Juliet realizes that her life will be better off without him and that she is finally liberated. Juliet of the Spirits is like a revolutionary lush decadent surreal version of Under the Tuscan Sun.

"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.

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.

"Are you German?"

When a Boston Brahmin moved to Paris for a four-year sojourn, due to her husband's business, she soon became intimately acquainted with a notable family in the French aristocracy, which is, I can assure you, an expansive entity — France has doled out titles of nobility in an excessively liberal manner, and every fifth person you meet in Paris seems to have a "de la" in front of their last name.

Years after settling back into humdrum puritanical life in Beacon Hill, the Bostonian lady returned to France to attend the wedding of a descendent of the aforementioned French aristocratic family. It had been a very long engagement, because the bride had been reluctant to commit to a British boy who, like most British boys of a certain breeding, "Didn't cuddle enough and played too much polo." The wedding took place at the modest château of the bride's family, and the groom's family wanted to contribute, so they paid for the champagne, and the 'tent,' which was more of a temporary 500,000-dollar orangerie. In short, it was a very un-New-Englandy affair indeed.

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.

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.

Lunar Man

While attempting to recover from jet-lag, I went out dancing in one of those little Parisian "boîtes" where scruffy-looking "art" and film people drink strawberry champagne cocktails in red glasses. I met a typical French boy who was 27 and still living at home with his parents. It seems he is making a career out of getting drunk. When asked what he "does for work," he replied, "I play golf, but I'm injured right now." He was definitely mimbo material.

I told him about the differences between mimbos, wankers, and pimps, and he asked me what I thought of him. I replied, "You are too young to be a pimp. Since you are French, you are automatically part-mimbo." He was determined to become a pimp, but it turns out that after I left the club, he scoffed to his friends about my dance moves and friendly personality: "She is so American."

So in the end he is my first French Wanker of the Week. And I reported to my friend, "If I had been in Manhattan and met a 27-year-old golf-playing gimp who lives with his Mummy, I would have crossed the room immediately to go dance alone "like an American," whatever that means.

Rolling Pastry Cutters

The classic Hollywood theme of the magical makeover is ever present in Sydney Pollack's oh-so-'90s version of Sabrina. A sojourn in Paris transforms Sabrina from an awkward "ugly duckling" wallflower to a radiant vision of femininity. Her lifetime crush (played by Greg Kinnear) is a shallow trust fund baby and a quintessential mimbo: blondish, boyish, and easily distracted from the task at hand. In true mimbo form, he sits down and cuts his ass on a pair of champagne flutes that he had intended to use in seducing Sabrina (aka not his fiancée)—talk about quick karmic disaster.

The older brother (played by Harrison Ford) is an endearingly geeky pimp who does all the billion dollar deals for the family company. In the end, I have decided that Harrison Ford circa the early-90s is my ideal dreamboat. His preppy-pimp-boy-scout virility in Working Girl and Sabrina could make end Princess in Flight stop running.

Disengagement

I hosted a reunion fête for my oldest friends in the world—the ones who used to accompany me as a twelve-year-old girl dressed in drag parading around the local video store on Friday nights banging on tambourines to attract awkward attention. Our nostalgic slumber party was upgraded from our middle school days of Toll House cookies and prank phone calls, by prosecco and a trip to a typically Boston, typically preppy bar.

But in the end, we still stayed up until 5 am, watching a VHS tape of our 8th grade musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (quite possibly the tranniest musical of all time). I guess the only difference was that this time we did not pee in our pants from laughing too much. And this time we had a lot more to say about our various experiences with mimbos and wankers. When my mother asked, "Do any of you girls have someone special in your life?" my friend responded, "Well, I have a boyfriend, but he's not that special."

Money: Get vs. Make

The opening of the Francis Bacon exhibit at the Met was full of semi-elderly men in well-cut suits and well-preserved women wearing furs, in spite of the balmy weather. Art openings are my all-time favorite venues for ogling people, as they provide a compelling mixture of stuffy socialites, wealthy wannabes, preening pimps, and on occasion, actual artists.

People rarely look at the art, and I don't blame them, since the canapés are usually delicious and the 70-year-old women in glass platform heels are mesmeric. I fall prey to exceedingly gauche behavior that involves as many glasses of champagne as possible and staring at the old woman dressed in a black python tutu that has been stretched almost as many times as her face has been lifted.

I became a serious creeper and felt increasingly like a cougar as the night progressed. There were two tall dreamy boys who looked to be fresh out of St. Paul's. They had been impeccably dressed by their matriarchal Upper East Side mother, who hovered over them the whole evening. She hampered my advances toward her floppy haired, Gucci-loafered older son, but in the end, I bonded with some Italian men who were, in theory, more mature.

Champagne Socialists

Sometimes it's nice to steal things even when it's not necessary. In fact, rich people are often the most dangerous ones prowling through luxury department stores. I'm sure that Winona Ryder had something other than pinching pennies on her mind when she scooped up 5,000 dollars worth of Marc Jacobs and Gucci items at her corner Saks Fifth Avenue. The phenomenon of kleptomania is like many destructive addictions, such as alcoholism, or watching reality TV: it seems like a good idea at the time, but after you've passed out in the shower, buried in floral print blouses, having watched 48 hours of Jessica Simpson prancing around her McMansion wearing velour, you realize that your favorite pastime is a destructive one.

I had a firsthand experience with thievery in the notoriously "ghetto" New Haven. Anticipating the closing of the campus dining halls, I became anxious about my access to food while squatting in my dorm room during the coming weeks. My friend and I decided to "get even" with our exorbitantly priced meal plans. In the space of 72 hours we went on an ultra-gauche shopping spree and stealthily pilfered the following items: 1 carton vanilla soy milk, 4 boxes Kashi Heart to Heart cereal, 2 boxes Cinnamon Life/Cracklin' Oat Bran/All-Bran/granola, 4 c. Quaker Oatmeal, 1/2 c. cashew nuts, 3 c. chocolate sprinkles, 8 slices luncheon meats, 1 c. hummus, 2 c. grape tomatoes, 2 c. yogurt, 36 Anjou pears, 5 bananas, 49 apples, 12 oranges, 1 loaf potato bread. It sounds like a recipe for disaster. And in the end we have decided to book it to Manhattan and leave all our precious rationings behind.

In a Lab Coat

The Dostoevsky novella Notes from Underground was adapted into a play that I watched last night at The Yale Rep. It was quite romantic to sit by myself in a packed theatre, mesmerized by the bits of falling snow on the sparse-and-skanky set of the Underground Man's apartment, with its stacks of filing boxes and makeshift chairs made from parcel delivery containers. Though it was 120 minutes of an older man at his wit's end and on a rant, I couldn't take my eyes off the performance. I never even thought to glance at my Blackberry or my watch.

The production used video camera footage projected onto the wall, so that the audience could simultaneously watch the Underground Man's body on stage and his hyper-mediated face blown up while he documented himself. The white walls of his cell-like lodgings were transformed by enormous moving images: Bauhaus apartments flashing by in black and white, neon lights and highway stripes, and even male party guests wearing tuxedos and sipping champagne like bobbleheads. The distorted movements—from the bulbous and sweaty Underground Man, to his gamine twenty-year-old prostitute—made for exquisite unease. During the final rape scene the audience was breathless.

It reminded me of the endurance of any period of over-consciousness or self-reflection in one's life: painful, even torturous, but always cinematic.

Repair Black Watch/Wallflower

I was fortunate enough to partake in the festivities of Passover with a good old non-denominational New Haven Seder that devolved very quickly into flourless chocolate cake. I love this wheat-less and unleavened thing...

Gauche Things to do while Wine-Shopping:

1. Upon entering the store, dashing straight over to the impromptu wine tasting event without hesitation.

2. Asking the person attending you, "Does this Chambord come in a family size?"

3. Buying those mini champagne bottles and then asking the cashier, "Do you sell extra-long straws?"

4. Exclaiming things like: "This bottle looks smaller than this one," or, "This one just doesn't have a high enough alcohol content for my taste."

5. Ogling vodka bottles based on the decorative aesthetic of their labels. Then choosing the one that has a picture of a lemon on it, because it reminds you of the Serge Gainsbourg song. (This is not so much gauche as just plain deranged.)

6. When asked to present your ID, handing the cashier your Pennsylvania driver's license and then saying, "OH wait, that's the wrong one... here you go." And then pulling out your other ID (the one from Mississippi).

7. Buying Baileys.

The Diamond Fell Out

Tonight I attended Theatre of Desire, a Yale undergraduate drama debauchery that takes place sporadically, in a ballroom, with donuts, coffee, and Deb Margolin, the famous feminist performance artist and playwright. I usually shudder at the sight of the overly enthusiastic theatre kid, but tonight I was feeling particularly low and needed a collaborative distraction involving cold readings of unfinished plays and outbursts of emotion that would rival my own current state of existential distress.

I witnessed a scene from a play about a girl, her lucid dreams, her therapist, and her best friend's imaginary boyfriend. The lead, Mia, pleads with her friend, Flora, to break up with the imaginary boyfriend, Clark, saying, "Flora, you have to find something real!"

But is Mia right? Do we have to find something real? What is so abominable about an imaginary boyfriend? I suppose it is considered "settling" to date someone who only exists in your fantasy life, but absurdism can go a long way in making reality more bearable. The above picture of champagne glasses also signifies something that can go a long way in making reality more bearable.

Good on Paper

My Valentine is incredibly handsome, tall, masculine, devilishly intelligent, with a touch of sardonic wit about him. Thanks to his decidedly pimp status, he manages to wear brown suede slippers at all hours of the day, in all seasons, and still look impeccable.

Late tonight I am taking him to dinner at my favorite restaurant, and then on to the Anchor Bar, a New Haven classic (with a gold neon anchor-shaped sign and a changing window display that incorporates various plastic dolls—in short, very David Lynch).

My Valentine and I share just about everything, or at least all the important stuff: a love of Paris, a fondness for brief trips to Cambodia, a taste for queer theory and the "problematic male gaze," and a fascination with older men with big art collections.

Jealous?

Fair Face of Flanders

Today's New York Times blog article on weeding out excessive Facebook friends is just the thing to cure yourself in the new February month of Valentines and ice-slicked streets: better to be close to the ones you truly love than to be bogged down by a host of peripheral acquaintances.

The other night I attended a lecture at the Yale University Art Gallery by two world-renowned experts on Picasso. One of the speakers was a close friend of Picasso's. They talked more about long wine-soaked lunches and torrid affairs than anything else. Apparently, the original love of Picasso's life, Olga, a beautiful Russian ballerina, was wounded and forced to walk around with a cane soon after their marriage. From then on, she became a monstrous figure in Picasso's eyes. He was never faithful to her.

I would be interested to discover some famous male artists who weren't womanizers. Maybe Edward Gorey or Joseph Cornell. At the reception for the lecture, they served Picasso's favorite cocktail, a Kir Royal, which seems a bit flighty for Picasso.