Thierry Sagnier's Blog, page 29
November 14, 2015
Paris 11/13/15
After a while I couldn’t watch anymore, but is seemed wrong not to. Aching with powerlessness, glued to the screen like everyone else, information coming in tiny morsels, watching as the banner at the bottom of the broadcast changed to show an increasing number of dead.
I called my sister; her voice was funereal. Her family was okay, huddled in their apartment like most others in Paris. I wondered at the staggering cowardice involved in such acts, and how anyone, anyone at all, could be so morally backwards as to perpetuate and condone the murders. My only satisfaction was thinking, “Alright, you despicable sewer rats. You’ve just started a war. It’s on you.”
Now, the morning after, I’m no less furious. Yes, hurray for liberté, égalité, fraternité, but let’s remember as well the really chilling part of the Marseillaise, where the anthem speaks of enemy blood watering the country’s furrows.
Here is my fear: That the vengeance will be long and bloody, that far more innocent and law-abiding Muslims will suffer than anyone else, which is, of course, what the cowards want. Every alienated youth is a potential terrorist. And faced with such a dire reality, I’m afraid the French can be, and have been, quite uncivilized now and then, and this may be one of those times.
I believe it is up to the Muslim communities in Europe and elsewhere to police themselves. It is inconceivable that such coordinated acts of violence could have occurred without—at worst—the tacit approval of many and, at best, a decision by some who could have prevented the carnage to stay silent.
Whether ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda or the St. Germain Sewing Club is responsible is not the issue, and I don’t know whether these pathetic criminals were French citizens or not. I do believe them to be deluded, taken in by the small amount of power they wield to disrupt the daily lives of innocence. I also believe it is time, as a friend once said, for the civilized world to grow a pair and do what is needed to eliminate those who threaten peace and make war on innocents.
One thought: Make it such that any European or Western volunteer who takes up arms against the rest of us becomes nationless. Let his or her passport immediately be revoked. Let it be known they will never go home again. Ever. We may be too enlightened to behead, crucify, stone, burn or flay, but we can make it so that those who do kill and torture with impunity will never live in peace. And your 72 virgins? May they all have the pox.
I called my sister; her voice was funereal. Her family was okay, huddled in their apartment like most others in Paris. I wondered at the staggering cowardice involved in such acts, and how anyone, anyone at all, could be so morally backwards as to perpetuate and condone the murders. My only satisfaction was thinking, “Alright, you despicable sewer rats. You’ve just started a war. It’s on you.”
Now, the morning after, I’m no less furious. Yes, hurray for liberté, égalité, fraternité, but let’s remember as well the really chilling part of the Marseillaise, where the anthem speaks of enemy blood watering the country’s furrows.
Here is my fear: That the vengeance will be long and bloody, that far more innocent and law-abiding Muslims will suffer than anyone else, which is, of course, what the cowards want. Every alienated youth is a potential terrorist. And faced with such a dire reality, I’m afraid the French can be, and have been, quite uncivilized now and then, and this may be one of those times.
I believe it is up to the Muslim communities in Europe and elsewhere to police themselves. It is inconceivable that such coordinated acts of violence could have occurred without—at worst—the tacit approval of many and, at best, a decision by some who could have prevented the carnage to stay silent.
Whether ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda or the St. Germain Sewing Club is responsible is not the issue, and I don’t know whether these pathetic criminals were French citizens or not. I do believe them to be deluded, taken in by the small amount of power they wield to disrupt the daily lives of innocence. I also believe it is time, as a friend once said, for the civilized world to grow a pair and do what is needed to eliminate those who threaten peace and make war on innocents.
One thought: Make it such that any European or Western volunteer who takes up arms against the rest of us becomes nationless. Let his or her passport immediately be revoked. Let it be known they will never go home again. Ever. We may be too enlightened to behead, crucify, stone, burn or flay, but we can make it so that those who do kill and torture with impunity will never live in peace. And your 72 virgins? May they all have the pox.
Paris 11/13/15
After a while I couldn’t watch anymore, but is seemed wrong not to. Aching with powerlessness, glued to the screen like everyone else, information coming in tiny morsels, watching as the banner at the bottom of the broadcast changed to show an increasing number of dead.
I called my sister; her voice was funereal. Her family was okay, huddled in their apartment like most others in Paris. I wondered at the staggering cowardice involved in such acts, and how anyone, anyone at all, could be so morally backwards as to perpetuate and condone the murders. My only satisfaction was thinking, “Alright, you despicable sewer rats. You’ve just started a war. It’s on you.”
Now, the morning after, I’m no less furious. Yes, hurray for liberté, égalité, fraternité, but let’s remember as well the really chilling part of the Marseillaise, where the anthem speaks of enemy blood watering the country’s furrows.
Here is my fear: That the vengeance will be long and bloody, that far more innocent and law-abiding Muslims will suffer than anyone else, which is, of course, what the cowards want. Every alienated youth is a potential terrorist. And faced with such a dire reality, I’m afraid the French can be, and have been, quite uncivilized now and then, and this may be one of those times.
I believe it is up to the Muslim communities in Europe and elsewhere to police themselves. It is inconceivable that such coordinated acts of violence could have occurred without—at worst—the tacit approval of many and, at best, a decision by some who could have prevented the carnage to stay silent.
Whether ISIS, the Taliban, Al Qaeda or the St. Germain Sewing Club is responsible is not the issue, and I don’t know whether these pathetic criminals were French citizens or not. I do believe them to be deluded, taken in by the small amount of power they wield to disrupt the daily lives of innocence. I also believe it is time, as a friend once said, for the civilized world to grow a pair and do what is needed to eliminate those who threaten peace and make war on innocents.
One thought: Make it such that any European or Western volunteer who takes up arms against the rest of us becomes nationless. Let his or her passport immediately be revoked. Let it be known they will never go home again. Ever. We may be too enlightened to behead, crucify, stone, burn or flay, but we can make it so that those who do kill and torture with impunity will never live in peace. And your 72 virgins? May they all have the pox.
I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no hat.
November 13, 2015
Carol Ann Doda
Amidst grain-filled pyramids, babies butchered (or not) by Planned Parenthood, giant retaining walls to keep out willing workers, and ill-informed presidential candidates thankfully bathed in the blood of the lamb, you may have missed an important passing. Carol Doda died four days ago in California at the age of 78, marking the end of an era.
Ms. Doda was the country’s first (public) topless dancer. (I add the word public because I suspect that even before her performances, somewhere, sometimes, someone danced topless for someone else.)
She was a waitress at the Condor nightclub, a faceless place on Broadway in San Francisco, and she wanted to be in show business. She had a good smile and pouty lips, a sort of Americanized very blond Brigitte Bardot, and she could sing a little and dance a little. The mid-60s were heady times on the West Coast, so when the Condor’s owner suggested she model designer Rudy Gernreich’s monokiny bathing suit, she did just that, and the world was never the same again. In time, she decided that her poitrinne did not adequately represent her ambitions, so she became another pioneer. Her breasts were surgically augmented to a generous 44-DD. Playboy magazine did a photospread of her ample figure, and soon she was a household name.
My mother, who found my copy of Playboy as she was searching my room for God knows what, was amazed. “I would fall over,” she said. “How can she stand up straight?” My father, ever the realist, inspected the photo for a good five minutes before saying, “She must have a very strong back.”
Ms. Doda was now a world-wide celebrity, and the Condor put a twenty-foot-tall sign of her likeness on its roof. Tourists from Europe and Asia flocked to the club. Tom Wolfe discovered her and wrote, in the introduction of The Pump House Gang, “I met Carol Doda. She blew up her breasts with emulsified silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, and became the greatest resource of the San Francisco tourist industry.” And indeed, she played Sally Silicone opposite the Monkees in the movie Head. She recorded a not-very-good ten-song album that today is a collectible. Then she went bottomless as well as topless, which led to a state suit prohibiting nude dancing at places that served liquor. There was a never-confirmed rumor that she might start dancing at a Dairy Queen.
In time her ample chest began to sag. There were more operations. She retired from her dancing platform in 1985. She opened up a gift shop, sang with a rock band, and, one last time, was a pioneer of what has become a staple of the adult industry. She ran Carol Doda’s Pleasure Palace, one of the country’s first fantasy sex phone lines.
Ms. Doda never married. Her life was strangely free of the scandals permeating the lives of more modern celebrities. There was no substance abuse or addiction, no seven-foot-tall drug-addled basketball players, no illicit affairs, no sex changes, no shoplifting or drunken driving charges. Instead, she nurtured the fantasies of a generation of adolescents and, in a strange way, weas at the forefront of the movement that stated women’s bodies were their own.
Critics might say she opened the floodgates of sexual permissiveness. I prefer to think of her as a revolutionary feminist.
Rest in peace, Carol Ann Doda.
Ms. Doda was the country’s first (public) topless dancer. (I add the word public because I suspect that even before her performances, somewhere, sometimes, someone danced topless for someone else.)
She was a waitress at the Condor nightclub, a faceless place on Broadway in San Francisco, and she wanted to be in show business. She had a good smile and pouty lips, a sort of Americanized very blond Brigitte Bardot, and she could sing a little and dance a little. The mid-60s were heady times on the West Coast, so when the Condor’s owner suggested she model designer Rudy Gernreich’s monokiny bathing suit, she did just that, and the world was never the same again. In time, she decided that her poitrinne did not adequately represent her ambitions, so she became another pioneer. Her breasts were surgically augmented to a generous 44-DD. Playboy magazine did a photospread of her ample figure, and soon she was a household name.
My mother, who found my copy of Playboy as she was searching my room for God knows what, was amazed. “I would fall over,” she said. “How can she stand up straight?” My father, ever the realist, inspected the photo for a good five minutes before saying, “She must have a very strong back.”
Ms. Doda was now a world-wide celebrity, and the Condor put a twenty-foot-tall sign of her likeness on its roof. Tourists from Europe and Asia flocked to the club. Tom Wolfe discovered her and wrote, in the introduction of The Pump House Gang, “I met Carol Doda. She blew up her breasts with emulsified silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, and became the greatest resource of the San Francisco tourist industry.” And indeed, she played Sally Silicone opposite the Monkees in the movie Head. She recorded a not-very-good ten-song album that today is a collectible. Then she went bottomless as well as topless, which led to a state suit prohibiting nude dancing at places that served liquor. There was a never-confirmed rumor that she might start dancing at a Dairy Queen.
In time her ample chest began to sag. There were more operations. She retired from her dancing platform in 1985. She opened up a gift shop, sang with a rock band, and, one last time, was a pioneer of what has become a staple of the adult industry. She ran Carol Doda’s Pleasure Palace, one of the country’s first fantasy sex phone lines.
Ms. Doda never married. Her life was strangely free of the scandals permeating the lives of more modern celebrities. There was no substance abuse or addiction, no seven-foot-tall drug-addled basketball players, no illicit affairs, no sex changes, no shoplifting or drunken driving charges. Instead, she nurtured the fantasies of a generation of adolescents and, in a strange way, weas at the forefront of the movement that stated women’s bodies were their own.
Critics might say she opened the floodgates of sexual permissiveness. I prefer to think of her as a revolutionary feminist.
Rest in peace, Carol Ann Doda.
Carol Ann Doda
Amidst grain-filled pyramids, babies butchered (or not) by Planned Parenthood, giant retaining walls to keep out willing workers, and ill-informed presidential candidates thankfully bathed in the blood of the lamb, you may have missed an important passing. Carol Doda died four days ago in California at the age of 78, marking the end of an era.
Ms. Doda was the country’s first (public) topless dancer. (I add the word public because I suspect that even before her performances, somewhere, sometimes, someone danced topless for someone else.)
She was a waitress at the Condor nightclub, a faceless place on Broadway in San Francisco, and she wanted to be in show business. She had a good smile and pouty lips, a sort of Americanized very blond Brigitte Bardot, and she could sing a little and dance a little. The mid-60s were heady times on the West Coast, so when the Condor’s owner suggested she model designer Rudy Gernreich’s monokiny bathing suit, she did just that, and the world was never the same again. In time, she decided that her poitrinne did not adequately represent her ambitions, so she became another pioneer. Her breasts were surgically augmented to a generous 44-DD. Playboy magazine did a photospread of her ample figure, and soon she was a household name.
My mother, who found my copy of Playboy as she was searching my room for God knows what, was amazed. “I would fall over,” she said. “How can she stand up straight?” My father, ever the realist, inspected the photo for a good five minutes before saying, “She must have a very strong back.”
Ms. Doda was now a world-wide celebrity, and the Condor put a twenty-foot-tall sign of her likeness on its roof. Tourists from Europe and Asia flocked to the club. Tom Wolfe discovered her and wrote, in the introduction of The Pump House Gang, “I met Carol Doda. She blew up her breasts with emulsified silicone, the main ingredient in Silly Putty, and became the greatest resource of the San Francisco tourist industry.” And indeed, she played Sally Silicone opposite the Monkees in the movie Head.She recorded a not-very-good ten-song album that today is a collectible. Then she went bottomless as well as topless, which led to a state suit prohibiting nude dancing at places that served liquor. There was a never-confirmed rumor that she might start dancing at a Dairy Queen.
In time her ample chest began to sag. There were more operations. She retired from her dancing platform in 1985. She opened up a gift shop, sang with a rock band, and, one last time, was a pioneer of what has become a staple of the adult industry. She ran Carol Doda’s Pleasure Palace, one of the country’s first fantasy sex phone lines.
Ms. Doda never married. Her life was strangely free of the scandals permeating the lives of more modern celebrities. There was no substance abuse or addiction, no seven-foot-tall drug-addled basketball players, no illicit affairs, no sex changes, no shoplifting or drunken driving charges. Instead, she nurtured the fantasies of a generation of adolescents and, in a strange way, weas at the forefront of the movement that stated women’s bodies were their own.
Critics might say she opened the floodgates of sexual permissiveness. I prefer to think of her as a revolutionary feminist.
Rest in peace, Carol Ann Doda.
I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no hat.
November 6, 2015
Good Parenting
Recently, a friend reading my blogs asked me if I thought my mother had been a good parent.
I’ve been writing a lot about my mother, lately, as the 24th anniversary of her death in Paris approaches. I’ve been trying to depict the complexities of a woman whom I loved, who raised me during unforgiving times, and whose life saw war, peace, divorce, and estrangement from her daughters, genteel poverty, migration, settlement abroad, and a return to the country of her birth. All of this was marked by anxiety, passion and obsession.
The question—was she a good parent?—took me aback.
I thought about it for a day or two, weighing pros and cons and throwing in the importance of thing’s I could not know and never will, and now I have an answer. She, like most everyone else in the world, did the best she could.
She was never a helicopter mother, and parents nowadays, obsessed as they are with the safety and every-moment whereabouts of their sons and daughters, would undoubtedly say my mother afforded me far too much freedom. When I was seven years old, I walked to school, a good ten blocks, crossing the Boulevard Malsherbe and skirting the Parc Monceau. I walked home for lunch, and back to school for the afternoon session. I did this six days a week—Thursdays and Saturdays were half-days back then.
At home on the third floor of the apartment building on Rue de la Terrasse, I entertained myself. We had no television, of course, and the radio was turned on only during the evening. I was rarely supervised. My parents both worked and the aged maid, Louise, had better things to do than oversee my actions. I knew not to be underfoot, and spent hours assembling and re-assembling a tabletop diorama of cowboys and Indians with here and there an Eskimo and a Roman legionnaire. I remember that there was also a triceratops in the mix, and oversized farm animals. I read compulsively: Tintin, Spirou, Paris Match, and an amazing illustrated book of world history, festooned with photos of pyramids, Asian people in conical hats worshipping at pagodas, and Genghis Khan’s invading hordes.
There was also a book I discovered hidden behind the collected works of Rousseau—naked ladies from the thirties, buxom and round and smiling, posed against backgrounds of vineyards, Pompeiian ruins, and rococo beds draped in shiny sheets. I could only access that particular book when my parents were out and Louise was doing that day’s shopping. To get to it, I stood on a chair, and shoved Monsieur Rousseau’s oeuvre aside. I snuck quick peeks in the privacy of my tiny bedroom. I’d replace the book after a few minutes, heart beating hard and fast by the daring of it all. Things are less naïve today. Sex and naked ladies are not mysterious anymore. Children are not allowed to walk anywhere unaccompanied.
It was actually rare for either parent to engage with me in any way. We each had separate lives and knew what our responsibilities were. Mine was to eat all the food in my plate and not put my elbows on the table. I was to do my homework quietly and ask for help only when I truly stymied, or when the task at hand was beyond my capabilities. I couldn’t draw, for example, whereas my mother, a trained artist, could sketch a map of France free-hand, which she did for me once or twice a year. I don’t think she ever gave such assistance a second thought.
To the best of my recollection, neither parent ever went to school to talk with my teachers. Communications were established through the carnet scholaire. What the teacher wrote there concerning my disposition, my behavior, and my intelligence, was gospel.
Nor was I involved in family decisions. The very idea that a child should have a voice in such matters was plainly ridiculous; I learned of our move to America when large, muscled men came to pack up the furniture.
When I visited my great aunt in St. Germain outside of Paris, I immediately took off to wander the thirty-three acre estate surrounding the local chateau. I made friends as I went, got beaten up a time or two, and had my entire collection of glass marbles taken from me by a much bigger kid. When I complained about the unfairness of this, my great aunt walked me to the local toy store, bought an assortment of incredibly dull-looking clay marbles, and told me about her travails during World War II.
The adults in my childhood were deeply involved in their own lives We, their children, were to be polite and respectful. Well into my teens, I knew sons and daughters who, when talking with their parents, addressed them with the formal ‘vous,’ rather than the familiar ‘tu.’
We were expected to be well-informed and not offer opinions based on anything but knowledge. I remember, as a nine- or ten-year-old, getting into an argument with one of my parents’ friends over the difficulties of communicating by radio with submarines. It’s easy, said the friend. Not so, said I, having that very morning read a lengthy article about this very subject in Science et Vie. My father retrieved the article. The friend was dismayed. I was never feted for this important achievement, but my mother glowed with pride.
I’ve been writing a lot about my mother, lately, as the 24th anniversary of her death in Paris approaches. I’ve been trying to depict the complexities of a woman whom I loved, who raised me during unforgiving times, and whose life saw war, peace, divorce, and estrangement from her daughters, genteel poverty, migration, settlement abroad, and a return to the country of her birth. All of this was marked by anxiety, passion and obsession.
The question—was she a good parent?—took me aback.
I thought about it for a day or two, weighing pros and cons and throwing in the importance of thing’s I could not know and never will, and now I have an answer. She, like most everyone else in the world, did the best she could.
She was never a helicopter mother, and parents nowadays, obsessed as they are with the safety and every-moment whereabouts of their sons and daughters, would undoubtedly say my mother afforded me far too much freedom. When I was seven years old, I walked to school, a good ten blocks, crossing the Boulevard Malsherbe and skirting the Parc Monceau. I walked home for lunch, and back to school for the afternoon session. I did this six days a week—Thursdays and Saturdays were half-days back then.
At home on the third floor of the apartment building on Rue de la Terrasse, I entertained myself. We had no television, of course, and the radio was turned on only during the evening. I was rarely supervised. My parents both worked and the aged maid, Louise, had better things to do than oversee my actions. I knew not to be underfoot, and spent hours assembling and re-assembling a tabletop diorama of cowboys and Indians with here and there an Eskimo and a Roman legionnaire. I remember that there was also a triceratops in the mix, and oversized farm animals. I read compulsively: Tintin, Spirou, Paris Match, and an amazing illustrated book of world history, festooned with photos of pyramids, Asian people in conical hats worshipping at pagodas, and Genghis Khan’s invading hordes.
There was also a book I discovered hidden behind the collected works of Rousseau—naked ladies from the thirties, buxom and round and smiling, posed against backgrounds of vineyards, Pompeiian ruins, and rococo beds draped in shiny sheets. I could only access that particular book when my parents were out and Louise was doing that day’s shopping. To get to it, I stood on a chair, and shoved Monsieur Rousseau’s oeuvre aside. I snuck quick peeks in the privacy of my tiny bedroom. I’d replace the book after a few minutes, heart beating hard and fast by the daring of it all. Things are less naïve today. Sex and naked ladies are not mysterious anymore. Children are not allowed to walk anywhere unaccompanied.
It was actually rare for either parent to engage with me in any way. We each had separate lives and knew what our responsibilities were. Mine was to eat all the food in my plate and not put my elbows on the table. I was to do my homework quietly and ask for help only when I truly stymied, or when the task at hand was beyond my capabilities. I couldn’t draw, for example, whereas my mother, a trained artist, could sketch a map of France free-hand, which she did for me once or twice a year. I don’t think she ever gave such assistance a second thought.
To the best of my recollection, neither parent ever went to school to talk with my teachers. Communications were established through the carnet scholaire. What the teacher wrote there concerning my disposition, my behavior, and my intelligence, was gospel.
Nor was I involved in family decisions. The very idea that a child should have a voice in such matters was plainly ridiculous; I learned of our move to America when large, muscled men came to pack up the furniture.
When I visited my great aunt in St. Germain outside of Paris, I immediately took off to wander the thirty-three acre estate surrounding the local chateau. I made friends as I went, got beaten up a time or two, and had my entire collection of glass marbles taken from me by a much bigger kid. When I complained about the unfairness of this, my great aunt walked me to the local toy store, bought an assortment of incredibly dull-looking clay marbles, and told me about her travails during World War II.
The adults in my childhood were deeply involved in their own lives We, their children, were to be polite and respectful. Well into my teens, I knew sons and daughters who, when talking with their parents, addressed them with the formal ‘vous,’ rather than the familiar ‘tu.’
We were expected to be well-informed and not offer opinions based on anything but knowledge. I remember, as a nine- or ten-year-old, getting into an argument with one of my parents’ friends over the difficulties of communicating by radio with submarines. It’s easy, said the friend. Not so, said I, having that very morning read a lengthy article about this very subject in Science et Vie. My father retrieved the article. The friend was dismayed. I was never feted for this important achievement, but my mother glowed with pride.
Good Parenting
Recently, a friend reading my blogs asked me if I thought my mother had been a good parent.
I’ve been writing a lot about my mother, lately, as the 24th anniversary of her death in Paris approaches. I’ve been trying to depict the complexities of a woman whom I loved, who raised me during unforgiving times, and whose life saw war, peace, divorce, and estrangement from her daughters, genteel poverty, migration, settlement abroad, and a return to the country of her birth. All of this was marked by anxiety, passion and obsession.
The question—was she a good parent?—took me aback.
I thought about it for a day or two, weighing pros and cons and throwing in the importance of thing’s I could not know and never will, and now I have an answer. She, like most everyone else in the world, did the best she could.
She was never a helicopter mother, and parents nowadays, obsessed as they are with the safety and every-moment whereabouts of their sons and daughters, would undoubtedly say my mother afforded me far too much freedom. When I was seven years old, I walked to school, a good ten blocks, crossing the Boulevard Malsherbe and skirting the Parc Monceau. I walked home for lunch, and back to school for the afternoon session. I did this six days a week—Thursdays and Saturdays were half-days back then.
At home on the third floor of the apartment building on Rue de la Terrasse, I entertained myself. We had no television, of course, and the radio was turned on only during the evening. I was rarely supervised. My parents both worked and the aged maid, Louise, had better things to do than oversee my actions. I knew not to be underfoot, and spent hours assembling and re-assembling a tabletop diorama of cowboys and Indians with here and there an Eskimo and a Roman legionnaire. I remember that there was also a triceratops in the mix, and oversized farm animals. I read compulsively: Tintin, Spirou, Paris Match, and an amazing illustrated book of world history, festooned with photos of pyramids, Asian people in conical hats worshipping at pagodas, and Genghis Khan’s invading hordes.
There was also a book I discovered hidden behind the collected works of Rousseau—naked ladies from the thirties, buxom and round and smiling, posed against backgrounds of vineyards, Pompeiian ruins, and rococo beds draped in shiny sheets. I could only access that particular book when my parents were out and Louise was doing that day’s shopping. To get to it, I stood on a chair, and shoved Monsieur Rousseau’s oeuvre aside. I snuck quick peeks in the privacy of my tiny bedroom. I’d replace the book after a few minutes, heart beating hard and fast by the daring of it all. Things are less naïve today. Sex and naked ladies are not mysterious anymore. Children are not allowed to walk anywhere unaccompanied.
It was actually rare for either parent to engage with me in any way. We each had separate lives and knew what our responsibilities were. Mine was to eat all the food in my plate and not put my elbows on the table. I was to do my homework quietly and ask for help only when I truly stymied, or when the task at hand was beyond my capabilities. I couldn’t draw, for example, whereas my mother, a trained artist, could sketch a map of France free-hand, which she did for me once or twice a year. I don’t think she ever gave such assistance a second thought.
To the best of my recollection, neither parent ever went to school to talk with my teachers. Communications were established through the carnet scholaire. What the teacher wrote there concerning my disposition, my behavior, and my intelligence, was gospel.
Nor was I involved in family decisions. The very idea that a child should have a voice in such matters was plainly ridiculous; I learned of our move to America when large, muscled men came to pack up the furniture.
When I visited my great aunt in St. Germain outside of Paris, I immediately took off to wander the thirty-three acre estate surrounding the local chateau. I made friends as I went, got beaten up a time or two, and had my entire collection of glass marbles taken from me by a much bigger kid. When I complained about the unfairness of this, my great aunt walked me to the local toy store, bought an assortment of incredibly dull-looking clay marbles, and told me about her travails during World War II.
The adults in my childhood were deeply involved in their own lives We, their children, were to be polite and respectful. Well into my teens, I knew sons and daughters who, when talking with their parents, addressed them with the formal ‘vous,’ rather than the familiar ‘tu.’
We were expected to be well-informed and not offer opinions based on anything but knowledge. I remember, as a nine- or ten-year-old, getting into an argument with one of my parents’ friends over the difficulties of communicating by radio with submarines. It’s easy, said the friend. Not so, said I, having that very morning read a lengthy article about this very subject in Science et Vie. My father retrieved the article. The friend was dismayed. I was never feted for this important achievement, but my mother glowed with pride.
I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no hat.
November 2, 2015
My Mother--Epilog
By the time I got to France, my mom was already in a coma from which she wouldn’t awaken. There was no opportunity for last words. She had a private room at the American Hospital in Paris on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. Forty-six years earlier and almost to the day, in a rare Parisian snow storm, she’d given birth to me in the very same hospital. Now, the cancer that slowly destroyed her had progressed too far for another operation. When it became obvious that there was no chance of survival, her oncologist increased her morphine drip and she passed away quietly.
I arrived at the hospital hours after she died. She looked incredibly small under the white sheet that was pulled up to her chin; her room smelled of flowers and disinfectant, and a light Parisian rain streaked the windows. I didn’t have any great, illuminating thoughts save the hackneyed one that, finally, she was at peace. She had always been terrified that my father would die before her; that worry was now at rest.
I remembered that the last time she’d been hospitalized, about a month earlier, I’d spoken with her on the phone and all she could talk about was how she had received more, and bigger, bouquets than a patient down the hall, a famous French singer called Serge Gainsbourg. “Qu’est ce que tu penses de ça,” she asked. “What do you think of that?” It reminded me of the time, decades earlier, when the impossibly French Maurice Chevalier came to our American home for dinner. My mother had met him shortly after the war and he was touring the States one final time, still garnering recognition and accolades for his role in the movie, Gigi. He was very old and frail by then, but could still command the attention of all the other guests. Getting him to come to our house was one of my mother’s major social a coup, but he failed to impress her. “Hmm,” said she after the star had left. “His table manners are terrible. If I were on tour, I wouldn’t eat salad with the desert fork.”
Before being hospitalized for the last time, she spent her last days at home in her Paris apartment being the perfect hostess, playing bridge with her friends, serving hors d’oeuvres and refusing to accept the inevitability of her own death. She had told no one about the severity of her illness but my sister, Isa, knew. She had summoned me from Washington with a late-night phone call. “Viens vite. C’est sérieux,” she said, and Isa was never one for exaggerations.
My father may have also known—how could he not—but he so feared the awareness that he simply refused to accept it. The Alzheimer’s that would kill him a few years later had already taken hold. It worsened immediately. He was confused, alternately laughing, then in tears, her disappearance too much for him to comprehend. When he finally did, a light in his eyes faded and never returned.
There was a flurry of activity. Even in death she was a center stage and this would have pleased her. Some four hundred friends, acquaintances and, I suspect, a nemesis or two, attended her funeral service. My father shook hands woodenly, accepting condolences with the nod of his head but never entirely there. I stood next to him in a suit that was too thin for the weather and held on to his right arm. He too, seemed smaller.
Her ashes were spread at the Père Lachaise Cemetery on Rue du Repos, and she was well surrounded by famous people. Guillaume Apollinaire, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Marcel Marceau and yes, Jim Morrison, whom she’d never heard of but probably would have liked.
Note: So this is the epilog. It’s probably premature. I’m sure I’ll keep writing about the indomitable Marie-Thérèse after I catch my breath.
I arrived at the hospital hours after she died. She looked incredibly small under the white sheet that was pulled up to her chin; her room smelled of flowers and disinfectant, and a light Parisian rain streaked the windows. I didn’t have any great, illuminating thoughts save the hackneyed one that, finally, she was at peace. She had always been terrified that my father would die before her; that worry was now at rest.
I remembered that the last time she’d been hospitalized, about a month earlier, I’d spoken with her on the phone and all she could talk about was how she had received more, and bigger, bouquets than a patient down the hall, a famous French singer called Serge Gainsbourg. “Qu’est ce que tu penses de ça,” she asked. “What do you think of that?” It reminded me of the time, decades earlier, when the impossibly French Maurice Chevalier came to our American home for dinner. My mother had met him shortly after the war and he was touring the States one final time, still garnering recognition and accolades for his role in the movie, Gigi. He was very old and frail by then, but could still command the attention of all the other guests. Getting him to come to our house was one of my mother’s major social a coup, but he failed to impress her. “Hmm,” said she after the star had left. “His table manners are terrible. If I were on tour, I wouldn’t eat salad with the desert fork.”
Before being hospitalized for the last time, she spent her last days at home in her Paris apartment being the perfect hostess, playing bridge with her friends, serving hors d’oeuvres and refusing to accept the inevitability of her own death. She had told no one about the severity of her illness but my sister, Isa, knew. She had summoned me from Washington with a late-night phone call. “Viens vite. C’est sérieux,” she said, and Isa was never one for exaggerations.
My father may have also known—how could he not—but he so feared the awareness that he simply refused to accept it. The Alzheimer’s that would kill him a few years later had already taken hold. It worsened immediately. He was confused, alternately laughing, then in tears, her disappearance too much for him to comprehend. When he finally did, a light in his eyes faded and never returned.
There was a flurry of activity. Even in death she was a center stage and this would have pleased her. Some four hundred friends, acquaintances and, I suspect, a nemesis or two, attended her funeral service. My father shook hands woodenly, accepting condolences with the nod of his head but never entirely there. I stood next to him in a suit that was too thin for the weather and held on to his right arm. He too, seemed smaller.
Her ashes were spread at the Père Lachaise Cemetery on Rue du Repos, and she was well surrounded by famous people. Guillaume Apollinaire, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Marcel Marceau and yes, Jim Morrison, whom she’d never heard of but probably would have liked.
Note: So this is the epilog. It’s probably premature. I’m sure I’ll keep writing about the indomitable Marie-Thérèse after I catch my breath.
My Mother--Epilog
By the time I got to France, my mom was already in a coma from which she wouldn’t awaken. There was no opportunity for last words. She had a private room at the American Hospital in Paris on the Boulevard Victor Hugo. Forty-six years earlier and almost to the day, in a rare Parisian snow storm, she’d given birth to me in the very same hospital. Now, the cancer that slowly destroyed her had progressed too far for another operation. When it became obvious that there was no chance of survival, her oncologist increased her morphine drip and she passed away quietly.
I arrived at the hospital hours after she died. She looked incredibly small under the white sheet that was pulled up to her chin; her room smelled of flowers and disinfectant, and a light Parisian rain streaked the windows. I didn’t have any great, illuminating thoughts save the hackneyed one that, finally, she was at peace. She had always been terrified that my father would die before her; that worry was now at rest.
I remembered that the last time she’d been hospitalized, about a month earlier, I’d spoken with her on the phone and all she could talk about was how she had received more, and bigger, bouquets than a patient down the hall, a famous French singer called Serge Gainsbourg. “Qu’est ce que tu penses de ça,” she asked. “What do you think of that?” It reminded me of the time, decades earlier, when the impossibly French Maurice Chevalier came to our American home for dinner. My mother had met him shortly after the war and he was touring the States one final time, still garnering recognition and accolades for his role in the movie, Gigi. He was very old and frail by then, but could still command the attention of all the other guests. Getting him to come to our house was one of my mother’s major social a coup, but he failed to impress her. “Hmm,” said she after the star had left. “His table manners are terrible. If I were on tour, I wouldn’t eat salad with the desert fork.”
Before being hospitalized for the last time, she spent her last days at home in her Paris apartment being the perfect hostess, playing bridge with her friends, serving hors d’oeuvres and refusing to accept the inevitability of her own death. She had told no one about the severity of her illness but my sister, Isa, knew. She had summoned me from Washington with a late-night phone call. “Viens vite. C’est sérieux,” she said, and Isa was never one for exaggerations.
My father may have also known—how could he not—but he so feared the awareness that he simply refused to accept it. The Alzheimer’s that would kill him a few years later had already taken hold. It worsened immediately. He was confused, alternately laughing, then in tears, her disappearance too much for him to comprehend. When he finally did, a light in his eyes faded and never returned.
There was a flurry of activity. Even in death she was a center stage and this would have pleased her. Some four hundred friends, acquaintances and, I suspect, a nemesis or two, attended her funeral service. My father shook hands woodenly, accepting condolences with the nod of his head but never entirely there. I stood next to him in a suit that was too thin for the weather and held on to his right arm. He too, seemed smaller.
Her ashes were spread at the Père Lachaise Cemetery on Rue du Repos, and she was well surrounded by famous people. Guillaume Apollinaire, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Marcel Marceau and yes, Jim Morrison, whom she’d never heard of but probably would have liked.
Note: So this is the epilog. It’s probably premature. I’m sure I’ll keep writing about the indomitable Marie-Thérèse after I catch my breath.
I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no hat.
November 1, 2015
My Mother, Part 4
So since they’ve gotten a good reception, one more blog about my mother...
She was a supreme and wily entertainer who hosted large dinners at our home at least once a month, bridge games twice weekly, and cocktail parties whenever the urge hit her. She had a large contingent of friends, almost all of whom were Europeans, and freely admitted that she always invited the people she distrusted most because she thought it wise to keep the pyromaniac in the firehouse. She routinely made couscous for fifty people and strangely, considering her abhorrence of anything German (the war never completely left her), sauerkraut and sausages for a multitude.
My mom was a versatile cook but not always a good one. She authored lamb burgers from the leftovers of a leg of mutton, and the odor was so pungent I could smell it from the street. On lamb burger day, I’d bicycle past the house, and go to the local luncheon counter to have a grilled cheese sandwich. She also made poached eggs in aspic, a dish so repulsive I hid in my room whenever she prepared them for her guests, who pretended delight but left most of the treat in their plates. I remember the soft yellow yolk, once pierced, spreading through the aspic like gangrene. You had to be there.
Once or twice a year, my parents would host a costume party and the cream of the Washington francophone society would show up with the women in some sort of déshabillé featuring deep cleavages, mesh stockings and split skirts. The men were less original, coming as tired pirates or soldiers. One time, a visiting French consul came as an American, wearing a cheap suit from Sears and size fourteen shoes.
Then there was a party with a French Revolution theme, and one handy man built and brought over a working guillotine. There were no safety mechanisms whatsoever; you pulled the lever and a ten-pound metal blade, sharp as a razor, came crashing down on the cutout for the victim’s neck. The partygoers used it to slice the baguettes.
The guests always drank prodigiously, and the day before a large party my father would go to Paul’s Liquors and buy cases of booze The invited generally arrived already tipsy from a cocktail party or two, and a dozen couples, in one evening’s time, would go through two cases of wine and one of hard liquor, as well as a bottle or two of after-dinner liqueurs. One of my mother’s better tricks was to serve a few bottles of good French wine at the start of the dinner, and then switch to cheap Gallo poured from crystal carafes for the main course. No one noticed the difference and if they did, they didn’t care.
My parents were not heavy drinkers but in retrospect it seems drunkenness and alcoholism were simply part of the environment.
On any given evening, the guests might include the French parish priest, a severe looking heavy drinker with wandering hands and a penchant for dirty jokes, and the head of the French news service, Agence France Presse, and his wife. The two detested each other and would get increasingly vituperative as the evening and drinking went on. I remember that one night, the man’s wife, tired of the abuse, stormed out of our house after dinner, climbed into their car, and drove it into a telephone pole. She was too drunk to be injured but the arrival and departure of the ambulance taking her to the hospital added a surreal element to the gathering. I was often drafted to prepare and serve drinks, and got pretty goopd at knowing who drank what, and when to water down the liquor…
The after-party discussions focused heavily on who was sleeping with whom. Was the French wife of a CIA officer really having trysts with the correspondent for Le Monde? And what about the pretty blonde teacher at the French lycée whom everyone knew was conducting a passionate affair with the owner of a local French restaurant? Strange, considering everyone thought he was a homosexual…
As in any society, information in this small circle of friends and acquaintances was a commodity, and my mother was an artful gossip. She loved nothing more than getting the goods on someone and parlaying her knowledge into negotiable form. When the gossip was about her, which happened from time to time, she operated on the principle that there was no such thing as bad publicity. This philosophy never seemed to harm the doyenne of the French community.
She was a supreme and wily entertainer who hosted large dinners at our home at least once a month, bridge games twice weekly, and cocktail parties whenever the urge hit her. She had a large contingent of friends, almost all of whom were Europeans, and freely admitted that she always invited the people she distrusted most because she thought it wise to keep the pyromaniac in the firehouse. She routinely made couscous for fifty people and strangely, considering her abhorrence of anything German (the war never completely left her), sauerkraut and sausages for a multitude.
My mom was a versatile cook but not always a good one. She authored lamb burgers from the leftovers of a leg of mutton, and the odor was so pungent I could smell it from the street. On lamb burger day, I’d bicycle past the house, and go to the local luncheon counter to have a grilled cheese sandwich. She also made poached eggs in aspic, a dish so repulsive I hid in my room whenever she prepared them for her guests, who pretended delight but left most of the treat in their plates. I remember the soft yellow yolk, once pierced, spreading through the aspic like gangrene. You had to be there.
Once or twice a year, my parents would host a costume party and the cream of the Washington francophone society would show up with the women in some sort of déshabillé featuring deep cleavages, mesh stockings and split skirts. The men were less original, coming as tired pirates or soldiers. One time, a visiting French consul came as an American, wearing a cheap suit from Sears and size fourteen shoes.
Then there was a party with a French Revolution theme, and one handy man built and brought over a working guillotine. There were no safety mechanisms whatsoever; you pulled the lever and a ten-pound metal blade, sharp as a razor, came crashing down on the cutout for the victim’s neck. The partygoers used it to slice the baguettes.
The guests always drank prodigiously, and the day before a large party my father would go to Paul’s Liquors and buy cases of booze The invited generally arrived already tipsy from a cocktail party or two, and a dozen couples, in one evening’s time, would go through two cases of wine and one of hard liquor, as well as a bottle or two of after-dinner liqueurs. One of my mother’s better tricks was to serve a few bottles of good French wine at the start of the dinner, and then switch to cheap Gallo poured from crystal carafes for the main course. No one noticed the difference and if they did, they didn’t care.
My parents were not heavy drinkers but in retrospect it seems drunkenness and alcoholism were simply part of the environment.
On any given evening, the guests might include the French parish priest, a severe looking heavy drinker with wandering hands and a penchant for dirty jokes, and the head of the French news service, Agence France Presse, and his wife. The two detested each other and would get increasingly vituperative as the evening and drinking went on. I remember that one night, the man’s wife, tired of the abuse, stormed out of our house after dinner, climbed into their car, and drove it into a telephone pole. She was too drunk to be injured but the arrival and departure of the ambulance taking her to the hospital added a surreal element to the gathering. I was often drafted to prepare and serve drinks, and got pretty goopd at knowing who drank what, and when to water down the liquor…
The after-party discussions focused heavily on who was sleeping with whom. Was the French wife of a CIA officer really having trysts with the correspondent for Le Monde? And what about the pretty blonde teacher at the French lycée whom everyone knew was conducting a passionate affair with the owner of a local French restaurant? Strange, considering everyone thought he was a homosexual…
As in any society, information in this small circle of friends and acquaintances was a commodity, and my mother was an artful gossip. She loved nothing more than getting the goods on someone and parlaying her knowledge into negotiable form. When the gossip was about her, which happened from time to time, she operated on the principle that there was no such thing as bad publicity. This philosophy never seemed to harm the doyenne of the French community.
My Mother, Part 4
So since they’ve gotten a good reception, one more blog about my mother...
She was a supreme and wily entertainer who hosted large dinners at our home at least once a month, bridge games twice weekly, and cocktail parties whenever the urge hit her. She had a large contingent of friends, almost all of whom were Europeans, and freely admitted that she always invited the people she distrusted most because she thought it wise to keep the pyromaniac in the firehouse. She routinely made couscous for fifty people and strangely, considering her abhorrence of anything German (the war never completely left her), sauerkraut and sausages for a multitude.
My mom was a versatile cook but not always a good one. She authored lamb burgers from the leftovers of a leg of mutton, and the odor was so pungent I could smell it from the street. On lamb burger day, I’d bicycle past the house, and go to the local luncheon counter to have a grilled cheese sandwich. She also made poached eggs in aspic, a dish so repulsive I hid in my room whenever she prepared them for her guests, who pretended delight but left most of the treat in their plates. I remember the soft yellow yolk, once pierced, spreading through the aspic like gangrene. You had to be there.
Once or twice a year, my parents would host a costume party and the cream of the Washington francophone society would show up with the women in some sort of déshabillé featuring deep cleavages, mesh stockings and split skirts. The men were less original, coming as tired pirates or soldiers. One time, a visiting French consul came as an American, wearing a cheap suit from Sears and size fourteen shoes.
Then there was a party with a French Revolution theme, and one handy man built and brought over a working guillotine. There were no safety mechanisms whatsoever; you pulled the lever and a ten-pound metal blade, sharp as a razor, came crashing down on the cutout for the victim’s neck. The partygoers used it to slice the baguettes.
The guests always drank prodigiously, and the day before a large party my father would go to Paul’s Liquors and buy cases of booze The invited generally arrived already tipsy from a cocktail party or two, and a dozen couples, in one evening’s time, would go through two cases of wine and one of hard liquor, as well as a bottle or two of after-dinner liqueurs. One of my mother’s better tricks was to serve a few bottles of good French wine at the start of the dinner, and then switch to cheap Gallo poured from crystal carafes for the main course. No one noticed the difference and if they did, they didn’t care.
My parents were not heavy drinkers but in retrospect it seems drunkenness and alcoholism were simply part of the environment.
On any given evening, the guests might include the French parish priest, a severe looking heavy drinker with wandering hands and a penchant for dirty jokes, and the head of the French news service, Agence France Presse, and his wife. The two detested each other and would get increasingly vituperative as the evening and drinking went on. I remember that one night, the man’s wife, tired of the abuse, stormed out of our house after dinner, climbed into their car, and drove it into a telephone pole. She was too drunk to be injured but the arrival and departure of the ambulance taking her to the hospital added a surreal element to the gathering. I was often drafted to prepare and serve drinks, and got pretty good at knowing who drank what, and when to water down the liquor…
The after-party discussions focused heavily on who was sleeping with whom. Was the French wife of a CIA officer really having trysts with the correspondent for Le Monde? And what about the pretty blonde teacher at the French lycéewhom everyone knew was conducting a passionate affair with the owner of a local French restaurant? Strange, considering everyone thought he was a homosexual…
As in any society, information in this small circle of friends and acquaintances was a commodity, and my mother was an artful gossip. She loved nothing more than getting the goods on someone and parlaying her knowledge into negotiable form. When the gossip was about her, which happened from time to time, she operated on the principle that there was no such thing as bad publicity. This philosophy never seemed to harm the doyenne of the French community.I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no hat.
