The Magic Thread

I once walked on the beach at Playa del Rey with the poet, Jack Gilbert. He talked about the difference between poetry and prose. Poetry has an element of magic, he said.

The world is a magical place. You don’t need the Surrealists to tell you that, though we do love works of art like Andre Breton’s Nadja that dramatize this web of connections beneath the surface of reality.

This magical synchronicity seems to happen more with certain people than others. Listen to what happened when Willis and Sarah came to Paris a few months ago this summer:

 

For you to fully grok these coincidences, I have to first introduce you to the dramatis personae—six people, many, but not all, of whom already knew each other. They are:

Willis, poet and translator.

Sarah, Willis' wife, expert on, and author of, books on Chinese furniture, architecture and art.

John: food writer and cartoonist.

Varda: psychologist.

And Richard and I, poetic and mythical string surrealists.

Six people who have all spent varying amounts of time in Paris:

Willis first came to Paris in 1948 for a year at the Sorbonne. He knew The Father of Dada, Tristan Tzara. Willis wrote poems then, and writes poems now—some forty or so this Paris trip, during the couple of months he and Sarah spent in July and August.

Richard and I have been coming to Paris individually for years, and together since our honeymoon in 1997, and now live here.

John was in Paris for two months this summer, as he was last summer, when we introduced him to Varda, who’s lived here since the ‘90s.

(The thread goes back further, but more on that later.)

Richard and I were to meet Willis and Sarah for café at Les Deux Magots. When we arrived, there were no tables for four outside, so we settled in at two tables in the glassed-in section between the sidewalk café and the interior, with a view of the street.

We arranged the tables so that they would have the best view, which is what you do with friends. But until they arrived, we’d sit facing out, in order to spot them.

Who should we spy but John, who happened to stroll by and sit down at a table near the entrance. This spot has special resonance for us. It’s where we drew the picture in our Dream Book two years ago of our plan to move to Paris, back when it seemed a mirage.

Richard tapped John on the shoulder, and invited him to join us. John sat down with us (surprise! We’d never bumped into each other in Paris before.)

A few minutes later, Willis and Sarah arrived.

I’d last seen Willis at an Eco-poetry festival that Richard and I had produced at Ballona Wetlands, where Willis read his poems. Richard had seen him more recently in the Bay Area where they began their quest for abandoned shoes chronicled in an earlier post.

I hadn’t met his wife, Sarah, yet. She was shy and graceful, an Asian art historian in pearls.

Though in his 80s, Willis has the zest of a young boy. We introduced him and Sarah to John, who happens to live most of the time right near them in the Berkeley-Oakland hills.

We ordered drinks. John was only able to stay with us for fifteen minutes, he said; he was meeting our mutual friend, Varda, for dinner.

“Varda,” said Willis. “A girl named Varda broke my heart when I was 10 years old. I kissed her, and the next day she brought me an envelope, which I opened with excitement to find another envelope, and inside that was another one, like Russian nesting dolls, and finally in the center… nothing.” He mimicked being crushed. “So I knew my love was hopeless.”

We knew that Willis had lived in New York City as a child, which would have been more than seventy years ago.

“This Varda lived in NYC,” I said. I felt a thread pulling taut.

He mentioned her last name.

I had traveled in Vietnam with her, and had learned her maiden name. “It’s the same Varda!” I exclaimed.

All of our mouths fell open. What were the chances that John would walk by, stop at Les Deux Magots before dinner, join us and Willis and Sarah, mention within fifteen minutes the name of the friend with whom he was having dinner, and that she would be Willis’s first (though unrequited) love, whom he hadn’t seen in over 70 years? 70 years bridged in fifteen minutes.

John was flabbergasted.

But we were about to go out of town to a friend’s wedding. “Please, please wait for a few days to have the reunion—we’d love to be there!” we pleaded.

Later we learned that John was so excited to tell Varda the story that he turned it into a game of “This is Your Life” over dinner. At first she didn’t recognize Willis’s name, then suddenly the memory of a T-shirt that Billy wore broke through.

But in spite of John’s request, Varda couldn’t wait to have the reunion.

We were disappointed, since we had an overwhelming desire to see this magical thread that extended from us to Willis to John to Varda and back 70 years in time to another continent--a Paris play!--reach its dramatic fruition.

But we heard about it from John.

Later, musing on the thread connecting us all, I thought about its further reach.

I remembered the night in Paris that Richard and I arrived at our apartment, anticipating that the renovation would be complete, and discovered that all the walls had been painted gray-green, which gave us the feeling of being a couple of peas in a bowl of pea soup.

We had to move into a temporary apartment on rue du Bac, while our apartment was being re-painted. Now our plans to begin furnishing the place were so delayed, we couldn’t possibly finish it in the time we had.

We sprawled on two couches in the rue de Bac apartment, feeling depressed. (Oh, you poor things, stranded in the 6^th arrondissement in Paris.)

Let’s call Connie, Richard suggested. And we did. We had never met her, but my friend, Carol, had been urging us to meet for several years.

Connie invited us to join her and several friends in one hour for a film and dinner. It was a Ronald Colman film, based on Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan.

More synchronicity! We happened to live in the beach shack Colman once owned in Playa del Rey. That night, we met Connie, Susan, Diane and Varda all for the first time.

Connie was the cousin of a good friend from my years in Santa Fe. I’d met Carol one night at a restaurant where I was reading a book of poems by Denise Levertov. She greeted me, and I soon joined her poetry workshop.

The thread that connected Carol and me was poetry.

The thread that connected Willis and Richard was poetry.

And the thread that connected Richard and me to John and Connie and Varda and back to Willis and Sarah was the poetry of the universe. 

 

Locking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Occasionally we'll notice a Paris phenomenon, like rubbing a statue for good luck, or for fertility, that has blossomed into a full-blown urban legend.

Just a few blocks from us, behind Notre Dame at Pont de L'Archevêché (The Archbishop's Bridge, one of the thirty-seven Paris bridges that span the Seine), another urban legend blooms, to the annoyance of city officials. Lovers who wish to lock in their commitment to undying love (that happens a lot in Paris) snap their initialed and ribbon-festooned bike or travel lock shut onto the bridge's wire mesh fence, and throw the key into the Seine.

Voila!, love forever, or at least until city employees arrive with lock snips, as they did last year at the footbridge near the Louvre called Pont des Arts, a few bridges west of Notre Dame. The Paris lock phenomenon started there early in this millenium, and Pont des Arts' reputation as a locus for lovers was apparently enhanced (for some Americans, anyway) in the final episode of the TV series Sex and the City, in February 2004. (Your Paris Play editors somehow missed all episodes of Sex and the City.)

(Incidentally, the love lock phenomenon is not confined to Paris; according to Wikipedia it is worldwide, with reports from cities like Rome, Florence, Cologne, Seoul, Vancouver, Montevideo, Moscow, and from the countries of Serbia--love lock Ground Zero--and Taiwan.)

What annoys city officials is that the lock fetish can get out of hand; witness the angle above, which shows only about half the length (say 34 meters) of the Archbishop's west side. A Paris city hall spokesperson told the British newspaper, The Independent, that the locks "raise problems for the preservation of our architectural heritage."

While it looks to us Aphrodite worshippers like a harmless and even charming tradition, Parisians take their architectural heritage seriously.

So what if the lovers were left alone, and simply ran out of lock room?

Funny you should ask. Here's the east side of Pont de L'Archevêché, where, as in a Hollywood horror movie, the sequel is taking shape, ever so slowly, lock by lock, by lock, by lock, by....

Conversation Entre Les Tourterelles

Madame Tourterelle: It was terrible.

Monsieur Tourterelle: Yes, you told me. I believe you.

Madame Tourterelle: But you weren’t there. You can’t imagine how sad it was. As if you were watching one of our children—but fifty times as heavy, with no wings—try to fly from the nest a few days after he was hatched.

Monsieur Tourterelle: That I can’t imagine. We guard them and feed them day and night until they’re strong enough to fly on their own.

Madame Tourterelle: Humans really don’t have wings.

Monsieur Tourterelle: That’s obvious.

Madame Tourterelle: But this is the first time I felt it viscerally.

Monsieur Tourterelle: Was he fully fledged?

Madame T: Oh yes. You knew him. The one who put out morsels for us on his windowsill.

Monsieur T.: He never had any others of his kind visiting him.

Madame T.: This is what I don’t understand. In Asia, humans are rarely alone. Or that’s what my great-great grandmother told me.

Monsieur T.: I heard the same thing from my great-grandfather, who lived in Key West. He said humans knocked on the doors of new neighbors, and welcomed them, invited them over.

Madame T.: The woman who lived below him was a world traveler, a wise, warm-hearted soul. I heard her say the other day—

Monsieur T.: —Oh dovey, don’t tell me you’re learning human speech now!?

Madame T.: What else do I have to do all night, sitting on those eggs? She leaves her windows open. Friends visit. I heard her telling one of them about the fall. She said she’d wanted to welcome him to the building when he moved in. But you don’t do that in France. She’d heard from his landlord that he was French, but not from Paris, an engineer in his 30s, shy. That was all she knew.

Monsieur T.: Did she see him fall?

Madame T.: Are you asking me a sensationalistic question?

Monsieur T.: Non, ma chère, I’m just wondering if he got confused and thought he could fly.

Madame T.: He jumped! The woman was so shaken, thinking if only this custom of reserve between neighbors wasn’t so strong here, she would have welcomed him, been a friend.

Monsieur T.: Because he was lonely.

Madame T.: Of course he was. It’s easy for us tourterelles. We pair up, have two kids every few months, help each other feed and raise them, and stay together for life.

Monsieur T.: Life seems to be more complicated for humans.

Madame T.: Coo COO coo. That’s the truth. Did you find us another home?

Monsieur T.: I did. It’s in the fifth arrondissement, quite beautiful, among some pink geraniums.

Madame T.: You’re wonderful. Is it safe?

Monsieur T.: These particular humans never open their windows.

Madame T.: Is it soft?

Monsieur T.: A bit too twiggy for my taste.

Madame T.: I’ll fluff it up with some feathers.

Monsieur T: There IS one thing… A human on the next floor up seems like a spy or something. He has this thing set up that looks like a miniature Eiffel Tower holding a big round eye that’s watching the nest. Sometimes two of them take turns looking through that eye.

Madame T.: They’re probably studying us for hints on how to live. How to be calm, productive and peaceful. Content with whatever life brings your way.

Monsieur T.: As long as it’s not a hawk.

Madame T.: Oui, mon amour, anything but that. Shall we help them out?

Monsieur T.: Coo COO coo!

Big Girls Do Cry

How in the name of Godot are we going to get fluent in French?

Richard’s about to return for his fall session at L’Alliance Francaise, and is not at all pleased with his progress to date. He's still in what he describes as the first-person pointing and grunting stage, although his pointing and grunting accent is superb.

I’m trying a different approach. Either an hour (minimum) a day of conversation in French, or an hour (minimum) of French film or TV show. You think getting into a French conversation is so easy? All the natives want to practice their English on me—English that is already fluent—but I bat them down, pretend not to understand English, or tell them they can practice their English on Americans who don’t want to learn French.

I’ve taken French classes, in high school. Madame Martineau was good for the grammar, good for the accent.

I’ve tried learning French online. Forget it. E-mail and Facebook, not to mention writing, are plenty on the small screen.

A film or TV drama—that’s my favorite way. Because nothing is better than a story. Some things are as good, but nothing is better.

Next is news. If you watch for an hour, the same news repeats, and you can scoop up new words when the same stories loop around again.

And sometimes an educational program gives you intensive familiarity with the vocabulary of one realm, food, for instance. The other night I watched a French journalist go from one location to another in Switzerland, interviewing food producers. She began on a farm high in the Alps, then swooped down to a chocolate factory in Zurich.

She was a perfect interviewer/hostess, friendly and subtly attuned to each person she interviewed, not so beautiful that she intimidated her interviewees, but a comely companion for bopping all over from valley to mountain and city to lake.

She spoke to a cheese maker and his family high on a mountain farm, to a bonneted chocolate maker, to a fisherman on Lac Leman, to a cherry grower (the dark are the best), to a German-speaking sausage maker who included the cherry grower’s cherries in his sausages, to the head of a finishing school where women from around the world learned to set a table à la Francaise and à l’Anglais. (To do it à la Francaise you put the wine glass smack in the center above the head of the plate-- metaphor for the reign of the grape in France?) The women were taught how to measure equidistant between the plates and line them up precisely the same distance from the edge of the table. The kind of thing you don’t learn as a young maenad in Berkeley.

Then there was the Frenchman who looked like a much taller Roman Polanski. He took the journalist on a river cruise, and talked eloquently about the smells of plants along the river in that sensual French way (she seemed smitten), then they disembarked, hopped on his Harley and roared up to his hillside restaurant where he cooked up something tasty for her. I know it was tasty from the sounds she was making, though I’m not sure what it was—I was distracted by the chemistry between the two of them. The moral of the story? You can look like a rat but if you’re humming that sensual tune, who cares, there’s magic in the air. 

Then there was the two-hour history of feminism in France, from the ‘60s ‘til today. You think that women really haven’t come very far? Think again. This was an eye-opener. From the early image of a Frenchman opening a girlie magazine in the mid-‘60s (“Oh la vache! Oh, la pute!) to the ‘70s, which seems to have been the wake up call for Frenchwomen, when it seemed that every prominent Frenchwoman in the country signed a document insisting that women, and only women, should have a say in whether they have the right to choose an abortion. 

 

Every Frenchwoman whose name you’ve ever heard from that era was interviewed in period footage, and spoke out with great dignity and conviction—and charm! Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Greco, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more.

Bardot by Jef Aerosol

Men were interviewed on the streets as well. The humorless, straight-jacketed types all said women should stay at home, they don’t belong in the workplace. The men you’d want to know, the ones with juice in them said, Why not, if they want to work?

(To control or not to control, that is the question. Which brings to mind that late medieval English story, Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell, about what women really want.

Those Celtic storytellers knew the answer to Freud’s question centuries before he posed it.) 

Slowly, women are shown entering government. Slowly, women are hired as news anchors. A few here and there, including a smart, sassy, dimpled, smiling young Anne Sinclair, now Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s wife. (You know, the one who gave the NYC hotel maid such a gracious thank-you tip?)

And then, a woman anchoring nearly every TV news hour, and then… two evening anchors, both women.

**

And lastly, to get my daily French language dose, I’ve descended to watching an occasional reality show, a level to which I was never tempted in the U.S. Okay, maybe this is a concept that has already been embraced in the U.S., too, but I doubt it. I watched a show called “Belle Toute Nue.”

Here’s the basic theme: a woman with a zaftig figure comes on the show ready for transformation. To lose weight? you ask.

Mais non!

To become “bien dans sa peau,” to fully embrace herself as she is.

Her transformative wizard is a delightful, stylish, warmhearted guy named William. If he isn’t gay, he’s a terrific actor. And if he weren’t gay, I doubt that a single woman would allow him to take the liberties he takes with them.

There is a formula here. I know because I’ve watched the show twice. A woman arrives at William’s dressing room studio. He has a heart-to-heart with her about her body image. She cries.

One was a 19-year-old blonde who’d gained 30 pounds in three months because of an illness, and kept gaining. Another is a woman in her early 40s who won’t let her husband get physically close to her.

The stages:

Stage one: Confession.

William gently, lovingly asks the woman about her body image. She weeps. He asks her questions. She answers. He asks her to strip down to panties and bra and stand in front of a big three-way mirror. She is to go down her body, feature by feature, describing how she feels about each part.

Here. And here. She points to her thighs, her stomach. Again, she weeps.

But one of the women has to concede that she likes her eyes.

And the other likes her calves, sort of.

Stage Two: Lineup/Cattle Call

William leads the blindfolded woman into a room where five buxom abundant-bodied women in fetching lingerie (lined up according to size) are dancing to festive music. When they stop, the woman is asked to “take her place” according to size. Is she bigger than this one? Smaller than that one? She has no idea. She chooses a spot, slides in between two women.

No, says William. That is not your place. Try again.

She studies the women, fascinated. Again, she picks the wrong spot between two even larger women.

At last William shows her that, actually, she is the smallest of these women. And they’re all beauties. So perhaps (she thinks) she’s not all that big, that bad.

Stage three:

This is the part I can’t imagine seeing on an American “reality” TV show. But maybe I’m wrong. Readers, you tell me.

One day, as the woman walks through Paris, wearing camouflage clothes well chosen to hide her body, she bumps—serendipitously!—into William. To the young woman who works in a farmers’ market, he says, I was just on my way to shop for veggies—maybe you’d come along and give me some shopping tips?

They chat among the vegetables, and suddenly her hand flies up to her mouth. She has spotted the photo card among the eggplants—a photo of her wearing nothing but panties and a bra! Oh my God! she exclaims. And then—another photo! And another! In every vegetable bin, there is a big photo of her nearly naked body. And at the end of the market: Oh no! A giant poster of her, the same image.

William stops passersby to point at the poster and ask what they think of this woman.

Jolie. Sympa. Belle poitrine. Etc.

She listens while young and old, male and female appraise her, and mostly praise her.

Hairspray

Stage four:

A clothes shopping trip, of course. William is the personal shopper of most women’s dreams. In ten minutes flat, he’s discovered her favorite colors, and whipped off the racks dresses, a trench coat, blouses, jeans, beautiful shoes, belts. And lingerie. French lingerie. A fitter comes to get that bra just right.

Do clothes make the man? I don’t know, but they THRILL the woman. Dessert is a many-petalled long red silk strapless dress (it looks like a Valentino) that is smashing, and she looks smashing in it.

Stage five:

Hair and makeup, Parisian stylists and makeup artist. One woman goes from a hairdo that looks like a limp brown mouse died on her head to electric white-blonde Sharon Stone short. Transformed!

Another from nondescript blondie to blonde China doll, straight bangs, long bob. Dazzling.

Stage six:

The show. The climax. The reveal.

Knowing that the 19-year-old is mesmerized by the Folies Bergère dancers, William takes her to the Folies Bergère, where she is trained by their choreographer and taken on stage looking like a Seventeen magazine cover girl movie star showgirl, and—husband and friends in the theater audience—does a strip tease fan dance with the Folies Bergère dancers cavorting around her.

The married 40-something-year-old poses nude (tastefully) with her Sharon Stone hair and new violet glasses for a photo session, and stage show for her husband and family and friends on a revolving stage with other zaftig women flanking her.

The show succeeds in giving these women the feeling of being “bien dans sa peau,” which is the very thing that is so striking about Parisian women. It’s really a question of attitude, isn’t it? Just watch her walk down the street.

It also succeeded in teaching me some essential new French phrases like: 

Il veut aider les femmes se débarrasser des complexes. (He wants to help women get rid of complexes.)

Vous ne sauriez croire combien un bon saucisson se marie avec quelques cerises. (You wouldn’t believe how good sausage and cherries are together.)

**

 P.S. I can’t believe we missed this event right at the end of our street.

Welcome, New Tenants

The apartment across the courtyard--the twig-lined fixer-upper in the windowbox--is occupied once again, as of yesterday.  An industrious young couple has moved in, and looks to be setting up housekeeping among the geraniums.

Paris Play readers will recall that the apartment's builders and first occupants, another pair of Eurasian Collared Doves, successfully fledged two young, and the whole family departed just last month. That saga began here, continued here, and ended here.  Those posts included a lot of background on this bird species, which you can read there, so we won't be redundant.

The new couple did some serious renovating, including passing straw beak-to-beak in very close quarters:

The new couple is definitely not the old couple (you'll recall mom had a scissor beak), but we will entertain speculation that it might be the kids (let's say they were brother and sister) come back to raise a new generation. We know enough about Pharaonic royalty, if not about birds, to entertain that notion. Or maybe it's just one of the old kids, with a mate, met on the romantic summer streets of Paris.

And here's a Paris Play first:  VIDEO of one half of the new couple doing some serious circle-dance renovating. The Paris Play Nikons have HD video capture technology, which we've been saving for the right occasion, so here's our one-minute video debut: