Just Buzz Me In

The morning we walked into the courtyard of our apartment building for the first time a compact little woman came walking towards me. She was shaped like R2D2 and was carrying a 50-pound suitcase from the curb – mine – in one hand and shaking my hand with the other. This was Madame Rosa, our concierge.

The last concierge I dealt with was a smarmy, oleaginous fellow working the front desk of a hotel in Los Angeles who helped me find a good Thai restaurant. Madame Rosa was part of a different tradition. Her job dates to the 19th century. Back then Napoleon started the whole thing by requiring that every apartment building in Paris have a caretaker, a concierge. (No one seems to knows where the word came from, but one school of thought says it was a corruption of le compte de cierge, literally the “keeper of the candle” and originally referred to a person in the Middle Ages whose job was to light the castle candles - cierges - at the end of day and take care of other housekeeping matters. Or maybe not.)

SNITCH IN RESIDENCE
Whatever the word's provenance, Napoleon wasn’t thinking of candles or the comfort of Parisians when he laid down his mandate. He wanted to keep his eye on his fellow Frenchmen. The guy was a world class paranoid.

Concierges in those days knew a lot - part of their job was to open the doors for their tenants and their guests - and were paid little. Consequently they also made ideal informers for government agents and anyone else willing to buy from them what they knew. Fairly or not, the concierges became typecast as a kind of latter-day Madame DeFarge, cold-hearted gossips and greedy harridans willing to turn in their tenants for the right price.

By the turn of the 21st century many of these gardiennes had been replaced by the security keypad with numbered buttons [see photo] you will see in the doorway of most Parisian apartment buildings. The concierge was becoming part of a quaint, fading tradition like the hurdy-gurdy man outside the Luxembourg Gardens or the guy in the Tuilleries who rents sailboats to children. In many buildings the little one or two-room concierge apartments by the front door were renovated and sold for a tidy pile of Euros, and their occupants were encouraged to return to Portugal where many, including Madame Rosa, are from.

NEW CACHET

The number of concierges in Paris have shrunk drastically. In the 1950s there were around 70,000 in Paris. By some estimates today there are around 20,000. Now that they are so rare, there is a newly discovered chicness to having a concierge in one's building. I found this out one day when Peter, an American I met in Paris, was stunned to hear me say that we had one. Or as he put it: “You have a concierge?” He was impressed.

I was impressed that he was impressed. He had lived in Paris off and on since the 70s and was continually bemused by the simple minded discoveries I was sharing with him. (“Peter, have you seen this huge pointy thing on the south bank of the Seine? Made by a guy named Eiffel?”)

Because of his approving reaction I looked at Madame Rosa in a new light. But she seemed oblivious to her status. She had the forlorn expression of someone constantly beset with worry about: the cleanliness of our courtyard, the efficiency – or lack of it – of mail delivery which the tenants complained about, the parade of workmen renovating the apartment upstairs in, the mess they made in her hallways, the theft of champagne from one of the caves in the basement during the renovation, the carelessness with which people sorted the trash. Notices were going up almost weekly to alert us to be on the lookout for thieves, to tell us that she was not withholding mail and delivering it when she felt like it, to tell us we should crush our cardboard cartons before dumping them in the trash, to tell us it wasn't her fault the workmen were making a mess.

Still, she had power and we were instructed to woo her. “She has a lot of time on her hands during the day for ironing," our landlord suggested. "You could give her some of your shirts.”

Crap, I thought. All the shirts I brought with me were made of some astonishing no-wrinkle superfabric. If you tied them in knots and drove a steam roller over them and staked them out in the dessert soaking wet, they would never, ever, ever show so much as a pucker. But I had to do something, so one day I grabbed a couple of wet shirts right out of the wash, smushed and twisted and knotted them and immediately ran to Madame Rosa's apartment to hand them off to her before they unwrinkled on me.

An hour later I heard was a buzz at the door. There she stood proudly holding out my shirts as though they were vestments. I don't know how she did it but somehow she had managed to iron new wrinkles into them. (A year later they are still there.) But they were folded neatly.

I gushed, “So quick. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. How much do I owe you?”

“Pffffff,” she waved the matter off as though it were just a favor, neighbor to a neighbor. But it was like more a favor done by the Godfather. The burden of just and appropriate recompense was on me. And whatever it was I knew it had better be good.

Paranoid French fact: Napoleon had Baron (who was not a Baron) Haussmann widen some of the narrow streets into leafy boulevards not for their gentle ambiance, but to make it difficult for a revolting citizenry to blockade them and to serve as routes to dispatch masses of crowd controlling troops in case of an uprising.

Meet Mr. Alphabet

“Ooooh,” Mlle. Butterfly groaned and dropped her head onto the desk. “I'm exhausted.”

In the months we had been desk buddies this was the most demonstrative she had ever been. Usually class began with a nod, a perfunctory “Ça va?” and we’d open our notebooks in silence. She did not encourage questions. I did not ask any. Our relationship was like that of two polite strangers sitting next to each other in coach on a long, long flight, each doing their best not to invade the other’s armrest space and minimize personal interaction. For her to even share the small fact she was fatiguée was unprecedented.

“Why?” I asked.

“I spent all day Sunday at EuroDisney.”

“My god,” I gasped. “WHY?” I completely forgot that place existed.

“Visitors. With children,” she muttered into her folded arms.

It turned out that even exhausted, she loved every minute. She was a fan and often went to the Disney World in her hometown, Tokyo.

“Have you been?” she asked.

“To the one in the United States,” I said. “I saw Tokyo Disney on the way to the airport.”

“You’ve been to Japan?” She looked up.

“For a few weeks. On business. I know five Japanese words: Hai [yes], Arigato [thank you], Domo Arigato [thank you very much], Ohayo [Good morning] and Konichiwa [Good afternoon]. No, seven: sushi and saki. No nine: Toyota and Honda.”

No smile. “Did you go to Kyoto?”

I could not figure out a way to say in French, “I did want to go, but It was a working trip and I was scheduled from nine in the morning to late at night every day so I didn’t have any free time except for one Sunday, and by then I was so fatigué all I wanted to do was sleep in, even though Kyoto was only a three hour train ride away so I did, but I feel guilty about missing it.”

So I said, “No.”

“You should have gone.” She frowned.

“Yeah, well I should have done a lot of things.”

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING CLASS

“Coucou! Coucou!” Mlle. G. our teacher was calling out, trying to get everyone to quiet down. Our band of French grammar explorers was shrinking by the week.

The very sad Japanese woman I noticed the first class abruptly disappeared after just a couple of sessions. A few weeks later it was the young woman from Cuba. I missed her droll sense of humor. (When I told her I knew some people who had gone kayaking in Cuba and asked if she ever tried it, she shook her head. “My family is descended from slaves. We don’t get into boats.”)

Then the Hungarian costume designer who had an amazing wardrobe of silk scarves disappeared. Perhaps he ran out of class scarves. And then there was Maria, the animated Italian with the beautiful smile and delightfully accented French. She followed her husband back to Rome.

But Mlle. Butterfly remained, doggedly coming to every class. She had been a bit of a mystery, not so much aloof as wistful. Gradually I learned that she had come to Paris ten years ago, stayed to marry a Frenchman, stayed on after the divorce. She was in her 40s. She used to work for an insurance company. But now she worked in a shop on the Champ d'Elysees as a vendeuse, a saleswoman, handling expensive handbags. She told me the name of the boutique and was horrified I did not recognize the brand.

“I'm not a handbag shopper,” I apologized.

“But the bags are famous,” she said.

“No doubt,” I said in broken French, “but the World of the Handbag is not the World of Doug.”

In spite of my ignorance of bags, we had become a team. She was able to explain things to me in baby French. In return, I had a talent I had underestimated. I knew the alphabet.

MR. ALPHABET TO THE RESCUE

Early on, I noticed that she took notes in Japanese script. She had an electronic French-Japanese dictionary which showed on its screen French words in Japanese script. One week after I missed a class and asked to copy down the homework assignment. She showed me her notebook, pages of Japanese writing. That was when I realized why those impromptu essays we had to write were so difficult for her. She hadn’t mastered the Western alphabet. She struggled to craft one sentence, while I would crank out paragraphs of bad French on the most absurd topics.

One typical assignment: What does a baby dream? I was thinking of an old Jack Handey Deep Thought: “A boy wants to grow up to be a fireman, but a man wants to grow up to be a giant, monster fireman.”

So I wrote: “I will be a fireman or perhaps a soldier, but not the president because I hate politics. I will live in the country and would like to have two or three chickens, and some cows. I will stay in a little house in the Perigord.” This, from a grown man. (Don’t laugh. I got a “Tres bien.”)

Whenever someone from the two-student teams had to go the blackboard for an exercise, Mlle. Butterfly commanded, “You go. That’s not my métier.” So I would stand there meekly as she called out grammatical corrections for me to make or sometimes send me back to the board to fix an error. It's fair to say that if I made a list of 10,000 possible scenarios of my life in Paris, standing at a blackboard being ordered around at by an ex-pat Japanese vendeuse would not be on the list.

That night as we were leaving class, I overheard someone say to Mlle. Butterfly, "Are you not feeling well?"

"I'm just tired. I was at Euro Disney all day yesterday."

"My god," I heard. "WHY?"

"I'm with stupid"

One gift to global culture for which Americans owe the world a big apology is that bastard spawn of the bumper sticker: the clever T-shirt. For years, the French had the good taste not to wear those things. Nowhere in Paris would you ever see anything like: "J'accompagne l'idiot" across someone's chest with a cartoon hand pointing to their companion. Sadly, this is no longer true. "I'm with Stupid" has come to town. Some examples seen on the boulevards:

"PORNOGRAPHIC STAR"

(Worn by a 13-year-old boy.)

"You will go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking"
(Radiohead fan.)

"FIGHT 4 SURVIVE"
(Above a picture of an endangered species, I think. A bison. Or a cow. It was hard to tell.)

"DON'T TOUCH WHAT YOU CANNOT AFFORD"
(Across the chubby chest of a chubby woman.)

"ROCKET SHIP ROBOT FUTURE IS HERE"
(I have no idea either.)

"KISS AND MAKE UP"
(Copied from a candy heart.)

"WHERE AM I?"
(Good question.)

"I WANT TO BE YOUR COWBOY"
(Seen on a funky smelling guy with no shoes and mocha-colored teeth.)

"QUI ES TU?"
(Another good question.)

"UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA"
(What is that - a branch of United States College?)

"I'M NOT IN THE MOOD"
(Worn by a 10-year-old boy.)

"FBI: FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR"
(Worn by an idiot.)

In the King's stables

I hate circuses. I’m afraid of horses. And I never felt the least urge to visit Versailles, which I perennially dismissed as a McMansion on steroids. So how to explain the fact that I was spending a balmy evening this spring indoors, sitting on a lightly padded wooden bench at the edge of what suspiciously resembled the ring of a one-ring circus, waiting for a troupe of performing horses to appear – at Versailles?

The short answer is that I was there with my daughter, an avid rider, who had wanted to see something called the Academie du Spectacle Equestre during her visit to Paris. The even shorter answer is that, against my inclination, I was intrigued.

THE KING AND THE GYPSY

A few years ago the French Ministry of Culture realized they had a diamond in the rough at Versailles. It is a building just outside the gates of the Sun King’s palace called the Great Stables, where Louis XIV, housed a small army of pages and grooms and his 600 magnificent horses. He favored a Portuguese breed called Lusitano, known for their gracefulness, mellow dispositions and striking appearance – cream colored coat and startling pale blue eyes.

In its glory days during the late 1600s, the Great Stables was a place of dazzling opulence. It was designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the same architect who did the famous Hall of Mirrors in the King’s residence. From the stone frieze of three stallions leaping out just above the doorway, to long rows of burnished wood stalls illuminated by lamps hanging from armatures of hand-wrought cast iron beneath arched stone ceiling it was Valhalla for the prestigious royal cavalry.

But time had not been kind to the building. The once elegant structure was variously used over the centuries as an army barracks, an assembly building for gun carriages, offices for bureaucrats and most recently as a musty warehouse for old government files. By the turn of the 21st century it was a derelict building, in the word of one architect, a “soulless space.”

In 2002 the government’s Ministry of Culture decided to rehabilitate the structure and searched for a head of the stables. One obvious choice was the aristocratic Michel Henriquet, revered teacher and master of French dressage, a formal series of movements by horse and rider which evolved from cavalry warfare. Instead the Ministry opted for a wildcard: a French impresario named Clément Marty, who prefers to be known as Bartabas.

A former street performer, bullfighter and steeplechase jockey, Bartabas is self-taught horsemen who founded a troupe of performing horses which is called Zingaro – Italian for Gypsy. It is a kind of equestrian Cirque de Soleil which is so quirky he has been invited to avant garde art venues around the world, from the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Tokyo Arts Festival.

He agreed to take on the challenge of restoring the Great Stables at least partly to their old glory and donated 30 Lusitano horses. Today, after a 300-year absence, the ghostly white animals again occupy the stalls.

He also established an Academy of Equestrian Performance which invites experienced young riders from all over the world to learn the higher skills of horsemanship in a two-year program. The students are given modest stipends and living quarters and participate in a curriculum which is unique. They are instructed in fencing, dance and even singing, as well as the finer points of riding. They help keep the Great Stables financially solvent by putting on performances for tourists who come to Versailles.

DESIGNER SPACE

The government has invested heavily in the stables and it shows. Riders have saddles made by Hermes. The 15 chandeliers in the performing ring are crafted from Murano glass and the performers wear elegantly brocaded jackets created by high fashion designer Dries van Noten. And the show did not disappoint. It was a combination of displays of traditional demonstrations of horsemanship and demonstrations of the animals intelligence, which were magical. Visitors can either pay to watch dressage practice or the full-blown show, performed to classical music by riders. In neither case should one miss a visit to the awe inspiring stables and a close-up look at the magnificent animals.

It ain't got that swing

My father had his own jazz orchestra [“Doug Colligan and the Night Hawks”] in the 30's. I grew up listening to Benny Goodman, Teddy Wilson and Earl “Fatha” Hines. I still own my original vinyls of Dave Brubeck’s classic “Take Five,” Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd’s groundbreaking “Jazz Samba” and Archie Shepp’s slyly subversive “Sea of Faces.” I have shaken Sonny Rollins hand. I once shared an elevator with Stéphane Grappelli in awestruck silence for 10 seconds. I have seen County Basie and Joe Williams perform in Lincoln Center to a packed house. I’ve seen Joe Pizzarelli play practically to no one in a bar on the upper West Side of New York. I’ve heard Roy Eldridge in Eddie Condon’s jazz club, in the waning days of 52nd Street. And I own a signed first edition of Eubie Blake’s autobiography. So when I read that the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris was mounting a show called the "Jazz Century" I was very, very excited.

Paris is an aloof, snobby city paradoxically known for its goofy affection for jazz musicians, the wackier, the better. Just one example: in the 1930s, musical genius and hot-tempered alto saxophonist Sydney Bechet accidentally shot a woman bystander during a street duel in Paris. He was aiming at a producer who told Bechet he played a wrong note. Bechet was arrested, spent time in prison and later was deported. This should have been a hint, but he came back in the 1950s and the French not only let him in, they welcomed him so warmly he stayed there the rest of his life. It was because he played so well, and didn't shoot any more Parisians.

Naturally I had great expectations for the show after I read, “close to 1,000 works have been brought together for this exposition.” So I began my journey along the serpentine “street” that was the labyrinthine layout for the show, a stroll through ten rooms of exhibits representing 100 years of jazz history. It was a layout so convoluted you needed a map, which the museum thoughtfully provided. [See above]. Hours later I was back on the street outside the museum. Five words popped into my head: “What the hell was that?”

Then two more words: "Science Fair." The whole show had that earnest nerdy feel of an exhibit put on by the talented and gifted. The only thing missing was a booth on photosynthesis.

JAZZ FOR THE DEAF
Background for those unfamiliar with it: Jazz is an aural art form. For that reason I expected – there is no other way to put it -- music. Rythmic and/or interesting sounds. Yes, the show had music, sheet music, acres of it, untouchable, displayed behind glass like religious artifacts. That was OK up to a point, but unless you knew the song by heart, seeing the cover sheet of a ditty like “Grand Pere n’aime pas Le Swing” had limited impact and wasn’t going to get the old toe tapping.

Besides sheet music, the show also had books, magazine articles, record sleeves and more magazine articles and more books and many, many, many more record sleeves dangling by nylon threads from the ceiling. At one point the monotony was broken by an instructional video showing how an actual record of a Duke Ellington recording was made. It looked like someone jamming a black dog turd onto a potter's wheel and squishing with something like a round waffle iron. That video was followed by more sheet music and more books and more magazine articles and more record sleeves, a few posters. And then some more sheet music.

Some of the displays were entertaining in unexpected ways. There was a 1943 Life magazine showing the photo of something known among "hip" musicians as a "jam session." On the facing page was an ad for Lee work clothes. The vaguely homoerotic art shows bunch of big, beefy guys in rugged Lee work clothes hoisting an American G.I high in the air. Hands supporting his taut butt. Big smiles all around. The ad copy is reassuring the GI that someday the war will be over and he'll be able to wear these terrific Lee work clothes that the grinning, muscular guys holding him are wearing: “You’ll wake up some morning with the last belligerent Jap gone the way of his ignoble ancestors . . .”

After I got poked in the head with yet another dangling record sleeve I decided I had been educated enough about the world of le jazz hot and it was time to go. Then I heard a faint, faraway rhythmic something, as though I were sitting next to someone who had his iPod cranked up to full volume. That’s when I noticed that every few meters along the display cases there was a three-inch circle of holes drilled into the plexiglass dividers. Out of these holes was leaking actual music. It was like coming to an oasis which appeared to be bone dry but which yielded a little dribble of water if you were willing to claw your fingers to bloody stumps to get it.

Even though it was nearly inaudible, I did manage to detect the faint honeyed notes of Sidney Bechet’s soulful “Petite Fleur” timidly seeping into the public space. And halfway farther along the walk was a cramped little viewing room where was shown a selection of video clips of famous cinematic moments in jazz, including a scene from that jazz icon of films, the Jerry Lewis flick, “Ladies Man.” (No, I didn't see it either.)

AMERIKA
Although I did not hear a lot of music I did learn things. Like America was very, very racist. There were photos of atrocities, like an infamous picture of a charred corpse, part of a horrible story about an innocent African American man who was shot, lynched and burned in Nebraska in 1919, complete with the requisite crowd of grinning white dimwits gathered around the grotesquely mangled body.

Later on there was a news photo of an elegantly dressed Miles Davis in a blood-drenched sports jacket. The article told how in 1959 he was on the sidewalk taking a break between sets outside a nightclub on 52nd Street in Manhattan when a pea-brained New York cop told Davis to “move along.” When he did not, the cop beat one of the greatest jazz trumpet players of all times over the head. (Nice work, officer.) Perhaps after that he walked uptown to Carnegie Hall and pistol whipped Leonard Bernstein.

But I also learned other things. Like according to one movie poster Steve Allen and Donna Reed starred in “The Benny Goodman Story.” (There were no photos of Mr. Goodman himself, by the way, or mention of his historical Carnegie Hall concert or his breaking the color barrier.) And that one of the movers and shakers of jazz in America was Jackie Gleason. That’s right, “The Honeymooners” Gleason. He churned out a series of treacly, easy listening albums in the 50s and 60s which were distinctive for their forgettability and lack of originality. Except for his hiring Salvador Dali to do the album art for one record jacket, the one on exhibit, there was nothing worth noting about them. So where was Barry Manilow? I wondered, as I walked towards the 80s.

THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

A little background. The Musée de Quai Branly is famous for its ethnographic collection of artifacts of all kinds, including drums and other musical instrument, from Africa, Asia, Oceana, and the Americas. (They have over 8700 according to the museum's web site.) This collection was just a floor above where I was learning all about Jackie Gleason's impact on jazz. Logically I was hoping since they had instruments upstairs, they would have them downstairs.

But I should have read the papers. Before the show opened, curator Daniel Soutif warned a reporter, "You won't see Louis Armstrong's trumpet or Django Rheinhardt's guitar," as though it were an absurd expectation. And by god he was right. Except for a tatty Claes Oldenberg-type sculpture of a huge clarinet, there were no musical instruments. That was too bad. I would have settled for just one of Djano Rheinhardt's guitar strings.

Clearly I didn’t get it. Hobbled by a profound lack of sophistication and ignorance about the music created in my country of birth, I came into the place expecting to see something interesting. Instead I found a C+ doctoral dissertation under glass and lots of redundant and marginally relevant jazzabilia.

Again, I should have read the papers. Museum director Stephane Martin cautioned would-be visitors, "It is not an exhibition about music, it is an exhibition about civilization." Of course. I should have figured it out from the title of the exhibit. The operative word was not "jazz" but "century," as in 100 ways to make an inherently interesting subject boring.

Watching French museum goers earnestly studying a technician turning a black turd into a record, or quizzically watching an old film of a minstrel show, I wondered what was going on in their Gallic brains. And I couldn’t help think of something Miles Davis said: “I never thought that the music called ‘jazz’ was ever meant to become a museum thing locked under glass like all other dead things that were once considered artistic.” After a day at the Musée, I bet a lot of people would agree.

The Fish of April

When we arrived in the classroom where we had our French lessons I always felt the presence of the children who were there before us. Apparently part of their school day was for music. There was a small drum set pushed into a corner and in the back of the room some music books. Some time between their departure and our arrival I suspect the teacher tried to erase all traces of the children - no papers, no doodles. The board was wiped clean. Even so, there would be little clues what their day was like.

On the evening of April 1 I noticed a small pile of paper fish cutouts the kids had made. They were on a table in the corner. Some were marked "Poisson d'Avril." I discovered that in France it is a tradition to pin or tape a small paper fish, like a "Kick Me" sign, on the back of someone else as an April Fool's joke. In general if you've pranked someone and they fall for it on April 1 you can yell "Poisson d'Avril!" literally Fish of April. As they say here: bizarre. What is this all about, I wondered.


"HAPPY NEW YE . . " HANG ON
My research turned up a lot of confusing explanations as to how this all came to be. The most common one was something I found on a French website which lays the whole thing at the feet of King Charles IX. The story goes that the calendar year used to begin on April 1 but in 1564 Charles switched it to January 1. In those days it was a tradition to exchange gifts at the beginning of the year. When the calendar changed, some jokers thought it would be funny to also exchange gifts in April as well. Wacky gifts.

YEAH, BUT WE'RE STICKING PAPER FLOUNDERS ON PEOPLE'S BACKS BECAUSE . . .
Why a fish? It depends on whom you ask. One site said that April comes at the end of Lent when traditionally no one ate meat, only fish. Because of that, people used to give fishes to each other. (Hey, don't judge. They didn't have cable in those days.) Another source claimed it was because the moon in early April was in the zodiac position of Pisces. Yet another explained that the icthyological gesture was inspired by the fact that in early April it is forbidden to fish because they are breeding and are too vulnerable and dumb (when were fish smart?) and easy to catch.

Yet another - and in my opinion, the most lame ass - explanation offered by a British author who said the fish was because the baffled face of the victim of a joke has the bug-eyed look of a hooked carp.

THEREFORE . . .
But it all seems to circle back to Charles IX. Many citations say it sprung from his decision to adopt the Gregorian Calendar, which puts the beginning of the year at January. Except there is a little problem with that. The Gregorian Calendar was formally launched in 1582, not 1565 and by then Charles IX was dead. (He died in 1574, eight years before the Vatican rollout.) The only thing that might save this explanation, say Charles theorists, is that the idea of a January-first calendar had been around since the Council of Trent in 1545.Maybe the king decided to adopt it early, to show up the rest of Europe. It would not have been the first time the French launched a global trend.

Why is there blood all over my homework?

Two nights a week we would trudge over to rue l‘Arbre Sec, which I came to think of Hangman’s Alley, for class. Every session would begin the same way. Mlle. G., our dynamic teacher, would start on the dot of 6:30 and immediately plunge into the grammatical thickets of the Futur Simple, the Futur Proche and the Passé Composé.

That’s what I think was going on. For the first 20 minutes or so, until my French ears kicked in, what I heard was: “Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur. Voila. Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur. Voila. Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur Murmur. Ce n’est pas grave (which sounded like one word – Cepasgrave ) . . .” I could deduce what she was talking about mostly by what she wrote on the blackboard.

Around the 40-minute mark a hazy comprehension began to seep through. I was thinking about what a friend who had lived in Paris for years once told me, “If you didn’t grow up speaking French, it’s like listening through cheesecloth.”

PARIAH
I had cheesecloth issues. The biggest was the Pariah Effect. Each desk accommodated two students. Every class I sat in the same spot – second row, front, left of center. Every class one of my fellow Francophiles would sit next to me - once. In one it was the girl from Cuba. In the following class it was the costume designer from Hungary. After that it was the young Australian woman working in TV, followed by the self-possessed Spanish architectural student who was replaced the following week by the intense tri-lingual young Chinese businesswoman, to be eclipsed by the male nurse from Sri Lanka.

It didn’t take long for me to see the pattern. After one session of sitting with me and trying to comprehend my frightening French, they picked a seat as far away as possible in the next class. After a few weeks the back of the room was packed, and the front, especially near where I was, looked like a tiny neutron bomb had gone off.

MLLE BUTTERFLY

Somewhere around the eighth session I got a permanent deskmate. She was a Japanese woman in her 40s. I thought of her as Mlle. Butterfly because she was not married and always seemed lost in a sad memory. I realize now what I thought of as tristesse was merely bafflement at my odd pronunciation. Why she stayed, I don’t know. Weariness is my guess. She came to the evening class after work and I supposed that after a long day on the job she was simply too tired to walk to the back of the room and join the others, even after she realized her mistake.

I thought of her and the very depressed seeming Japanese woman of the first class after I read about something called the Paris Syndrome. This afflicts Japanese tourists and ex-pats, especially women. According to a Japanese psychiatrist who lives in Paris, the syndrome is a paralyzing state of ennui that overwhelms his fellow countrymen and women who come to Paris expecting a cinematically romantic experience and instead are traumatized by the brusqueness and emotional outbursts of Parisians. It can get so bad that some have had to be flown back to Japan accompanied by a nurse . He estimated some 12 Japanese a year succumb. How it justifies a full-blown syndrome is beyond me, but Japan is not a large country so maybe 12 people is a big deal.

At any rate there were days when I wondered if Mlle. Butterfly was a victim, or at least a carrier. But after a while I decided she was more likely afflicted with something more mundane: Job Fatigue.

THE BLOODIED PAPER

One of our assignments was to interview our deskmates and write up a short report on what they told us about themselves. We were not allowed to use our dictionaries, which I thought was not fair given my French vocabulary is about 12 words, but I gave it a shot.

The following week I got the paper back. Mlle. Butterfly glanced over and her eyes literally bugged out with horror. The paper was covered in blood-red inky corrections [see above]. Even so, I got a feeble "Bien!" for my effort. I was impressed by the thoroughness and professional brutality of the teacher’s work, and depressed that I didn’t even know enough French, say, to write a ransom note to a moron. [“I have dog. You give money or dog die.”] Mlle. Butterfly offered some sympathy, I think. Or maybe she suggested I join a Special Ed class. I couldn't really understand. The cheesecloth effect.