I look so French it hurts.
When I arrived in this country, I thought I was going to have to quit listening to rock music and dressing like a rock star and wearing my hair as though I am a groupie or left-handed bassist. I soon realized I was wrong– the French rock/emo scene is crazy, full of hipsters who wear better clothes, listen to worse music, and wear more eyeliner than the American ones. But unfortunately for me, I got my hair cut into this sophisticated, terribly chic and unbelievably short style three days before moving to this country, so I have been condemned to not looking like a hipster for months now. I kept putting off getting a haircut because, though unbelievably glamorous, I knew it would cost my first born child for me to get a decent cut in Paris.
Enter the Quartier Latin, street where the riches of ages are sold. No, wait, that is somewhere in London, but still, the Quartier Latin, streets where everything you thought you couldn’t afford is suddenly 35% cheaper when you brandish your student ID.
(I’ve noticed, by the way, that I have become significantly more impulsive since living in this country– there are several plausible reasons for this, all of which are too complicated to explain here, but it helps to know that when listening to any adventure which occurs in this lovely city.)
Completely randomly, I decided to get my haircut today– I passed a window of a salon offering student rates, it looked nice, I didn’t have anything ELSE to do, so I went in and asked for an appointment. I had just enough time to run back to my cybercafe and print a picture online of a haircut I liked– though in the US I usually just talk it over with the stylist and leave it in their hands, I figured here it would be way simpler to have a picture. So I went and printed the picture, which happened to be of a male American rockstar. This is not unusual for me– I wear my hair short, rockstars wear theirs long, and so on the off chance I DO bring a picture for the stylist, it is, more often than not, at least since graduating high school, of a guy.
But that is in the US.
And here in France, "why would you want to look like a man?" So as I am trying to explain that, no, I don’t want to look like him, I just like the layers on the sides of his head and the diagonal bangs... I realize I am completely unprepared for this experience. When I go to the salon in the US, we use words like "bangs," "messy," "piece-y," etc., and I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO SAY ANY OF THAT IN FRENCH. So I come armed with my black and white picture of a man with emo hair, and more or less nothing else. I don’t even know the word for "part," when I have to explain to her that she is doing it on the wrong side. (In case you are wondering, it is "le raie.") But the thing is, the stylists have to check with you before they just start whacking your hair off. So she keeps saying, "Il n’est pas tres jolie; vous devez etre plus jolie que lui..." "He is not very pretty, though– you really ought to be prettier than him, we will make you look much better." And then she starts explaining to me, in complicated terms I am sure not even a neuroscientist could understand, the exact process my hair is going to go through in the next 40 minutes, to which I nod my head and pretend I understand, till she gets to the back and says, "VOL-OOOOOM! Ici, PLUS DE VOL-OOOOOM!" "Back here, MORE VOLUME!" but in this tone of voice which suggests I have not been doing my own hair justice by wearing it messy and slightly flat. I wanted to explain to her that I do not have a diffuser or flat-iron compatible with her country’s ridiculous electric current, but I realized it was useless and she was right anyway– I did need more volooooom. The place was amazing... they massaged my head and shoulders, brought me coffee to drink while she cut my hair, wrapped me in a black kimono to keep the hair off my clothes... all the while chatting about my hair, the guy’s picture I had brought, etc. Slightly awkward, but it went off without a hitch, and now, I promise you, I look so French I fool myself. Sometime after I moved out, I started wearing my hair over my eyes, which everyone in the USA over the age of 35 hates, and everyone with any style under the age of 30 loves. This cut is no different, but in the French winter wind, with all the layers and voloooom, it is ridiculous.
Last night a friend called me and wanted to know if I could go to the circus... in an hour. She had extra tickets (four of them) that her famille d’accueil had given her, and needed someone to go with. Because the circus is, quite possibly, number 3 on my list of favorite things to do (after, incidentally, going to concerts and getting my haircut), and because I am a college student and thus completely incapable of passing up things that are free, I had to say yes. This particular circus (Le Pinder Cirque) is located in the 19th or 20th or something, and is thus as far away from my apartment as it is possible to go while still remaining in Paris. It is also about 30 feet from the periphérique, the edge of Paris.
(Sidenote: I have a grave fear of the periphérique. Once you leave it, you are in veritable no-man’s land, with no guarantee of a Metro stop for kilometers around, no maps, and a high likelihood of no one understanding when you open your mouth, even if you do speak Parisian french. Beyond the periphérique is the Wide Real World, le Grande Monde Vrai, and it terrifies me. I stay away from it as much as possible. In Paris, it is completely impossible for me to become truly lost because I have this fabulous book of maps of every quartier, that fits neatly in my poche and goes everywhere with me. But beyond the periphérique... no maps. No guarantee of ever returning to Paris, or the US, or anywhere really.)
But the circus is pretty much ON the periphérique, so I had to conquer my fear for the night... We thought the circus was outside, so we were both dressed like onions– a synopsis: camisole, oxford shirt, wool sweater, heaviest winter coat ever (which comes to my knees); gloves, scarf, hat, boots, knee socks. But we get there to discover it is in a legitimate tent. A REAL one. Which is amazing. It was just like walking into a Killers video... Everything was red and gold and navy, with a huge tiger head at the entrance, carnies yelling things in French, selling gaufres, crepes, popcorn sucré, barbe à papa, orangina and 1664 bière. The fact that they were selling beer should have been our first hint that this was no Ringling Bros., but we continued like nothing was amiss. We noticed signs that read "soiree privee," private night, but didn’t think about it because we had tickets... apparently, though, we got some kind of exclusive circus night, since it was a private function. It was a one-ring circus, which at first made me think it would be lame, but it was most definitely not. Growing up, I remember going to the circus every year with my whole family– not surprising since my dad worked his way through undergrad as a professional clown/magician (what?), but this was nothing like the American version.
Anyway, the ringmaster (ringbearer? ringleader? What is the word in English?) came out and introduced everyone in French, obviously, and it was so... cinematic. The tent was warm and heated, and the canvas ceiling had gold stars painted on it. Delightfully kitsch. The clowns were all old-school, the kind one sees in Art Nouveau books, with the pointed hats that are so scary. The acrobat act came out– the Famille Baeta de Brasilia... The two women of the act wore feathers on their heads and thongs... and not much else. And this was a family event. I wanted to cover the eyes of the little kids sitting next to me– there is no reason anyone should ever be 30 meters in the air with no pants on. But here’s the real kicker: the women were not even acrobats. They didn’t do anything but climb up the platform and make Price-Is-Right style gestures at the men who did the tricks. The reason French circuses (circi? Cirqui?) are cooler than American ones: there are none of these silly concerns in France with things like... you know, safety... so no one used nets, not even the woman who came out in nothing but a corset and sheer pants to do a gymnastic act on a hula hoop hanging precariously 40 meters above the ground. (These meter distances, by the way, are approximately one third of what I think the distance would be in feet. This means that they are wrong for several reasons: 1) a foot is not 1/3 of a meter; 2) I can’t tell distances in feet at all anyway.)
The whole circus was amazing, much more R-rated than any circus in the US ever would be, in short, exactly what one should expect from a French circus– more Moulin Rouge than Barnum and Bailey, but I digress. High point of the show: "Far Western Jack," the "american" act. "Far Western Jack" came out driving a covered wagon, which held his menagerie. He wore rolled-up jeans, a plaid shirt, and a neckerchief. Not a bandanna, but like an ascot. What? Anyway, his covered wagon contained a gray poodle that can ride a Vespa (perhaps it is the same one I witnessed in my neighborhood a few weeks ago?), one of those dogs from Dutch Master paintings who let the guy stack a cat on his back, and a chicken that would lay an egg on Far Western Jack’s head on cue. So many objections to this as a representation of American culture, but perhaps the biggest problem was that, though I immediately wanted to repudiate (is that the right word? My English is failing faster than my French is improving) their idea of American culture, I couldn’t because as soon as the guy came out, "Cotton-Eyed Joe" came blaring over the speakers. I hate that song. I mean, I detest it, almost as much as the Hokey Pokey. But as much as I think it should be wiped off the face of the earth and never spoken of again, the fact remains that if there is one staple song of every event I have ever been to with dancing, it is "Cotton Eyed Joe." And, for someone who doesn’t really dance very well, I think I have been to an abnormal number of dancing events in my life... It doesn’t matter if it is a high school dance, prom, a sorority formal, a frat party, a camp dance, a wedding, or a nightclub, that song is always played– the only one that is on par with it is Nirvana’s "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but that is different because you obviously can’t play that at a wedding (though I probably will at mine), AND Nirvana, though American, is kind of just the quintessential angsty youth band worldwide. So the point is, despite the fact that poodles and those whippet looking dogs both originated in Europe, they still nailed the USA when they picked that song. And what’s even worse: now YOU will have it stuck in your head all day long.
Sucker.
The whole circus was amazing, but the fact that it was in a real tent made it unbelievably cool... and there was a magician act that consisted of 5 men and a woman dressed like The Matrix, who danced and cut each other in half.
But as I said, it has been an unusually eventful 48 hours... Yesterday a friend of the woman I live with called me. She’s a journalist for an international TV station based in Paris and she is doing a series on young foreigners living in Paris. ("I want to do something about strangers in France," she said in broken English on my voicemail.) And she asked me not if I was interested, but if I would meet with her today to discuss it. Because I can hardly speak French on the phone, and she can hardly speak English (though she does it better than I speak French), and she wanted to see what my language skills were like in person. She only lives around the corner from me, so I went to her apartment in the afternoon to discuss the series, which I didn’t completely understand. Apparently, it is (any amount of this may be wrong, we were both communicating in second languages) something between a documentary and MTV’s Real World... She has already written the storyboard for it, and they are going to film what she called a "pilot episode" to see if the network will buy it, and if they do, then they do a season of it... and if not, they don’t do a series, but just newsbites twice a week on the nightly news with updates or stories about the "strangers" they are covering. So when we met, it was pretty much an audition or interview or whatever to make sure I was interesting, not boring, could communicate, etc., and when I got to her apartment she said, in French, "Oh, I am so glad you could come, I just wanted to see what you looked like and make sure you were compatible with the image we are trying to present." I don’t know what that means. But whatever. So she is supposed to call me later on to tell me if they want me to be involved in the whole thing or just one or two episodes or whatever... She said, and I quote, translated, "The only problem I could foresee is that your French is very much in the middle– you are good enough that the average French person could understand you, but not good enough that they would want to listen to you for more than 15 minutes, and I don’t know if the network wants someone very good so they don’t have to pay for an interpreter, or someone very bad, so it looks like a true foreigner who can barely speak the language. But you speak pretty well, and much better in person than on the phone." I felt as though there were approximately the same number of insults in that speech as compliments, but since I had only just met this woman and I have only been studying this language for two years AND she called me to be in her show, I decided to forget the insulting parts and just go with the fact that a French person told me my French is decent.
That, mes amis, is huge.
~Tadpole