"I’m going to make Hollywood wherever I go..."
~Noxzema Jackson

Friday night after church I went to Le Chevalier Bleu (The Blue Horseman) with some friends– while sipping our wine and eating our cheese and chocolate, we looked out the window to see... I kid you not... Willy Wonka walking down Boulevard Rambuteau. Which is called a Boulevard but is really more like an alley. Anyway, this man was walking toward us in the dark and the rain, wearing a knee-length tailored purple velveteen coat– the kind that flares from the waist, Mr. Darcy style, with a top hat so dark purple it may have been black, black cigarette trousers sticking out from below the coat, pressed so stiffly I was curious how much starch he actually used in them, and a cane.
I think it might have been Johnny Depp himself, who lives in Paris somewhere. I don’t know what Johnny Depp does in France, because I am fairly sure he doesn’t speak French, but there are a lot of things I don’t understand about Johnny Depp, for example, why he is the only person ever to come out of Kentucky without an accent.

After our close encounter with the celebrity kind, we went back to our Beaujolais and moelleux au chocolat and pretty soon two older men sat at the table directly next to us. Wouldn’t be weird except that this was a typical Parisian café, meaning that the tables are about six inches apart (sorry, 30 centimeters) and there were empty tables all over the place. So why in Heaven’s name do they have to pick the table next to ours?
Ohhhh, right, so that they can commence picking us up in some weird variety of broken Franglais. The other two girls I was with speak absolutely no French; the two men (one of whom was older than my father, the other was probably at least 45) spoke a very meager amount of English, which means that suddenly I am thrust into this weird position as interpreter... Because we were in the corner and only halfway down with our Reblochon; we couldn’t leave yet, and suddenly we were getting, "Oh, where are you from, Mesdemoiselles?" And this part was in English so one of the other girls says we’re from the US, and the men say, "Oh, California?" I’ve noticed, now that I am about to claim Cali as the next place I am living, that when people find out I am from the US, their automatic next question is "California?" Which may be because my French is spoken with the rapid clip of a true Valley Girl or perhaps just because California is the most well-known place in the US, but either way it has happened 3 times in the last week. So I say, "No, je viens de Floride." ("No, I’m from Florida." I never know when I open my mouth to tell someone where I am from what will come out– Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky... California? But with French people it’s usually Florida because it’s the easiest to explain.) And not only was it a mistake to say this in French because now they know I speak it, but also then I just get, "Ahh, Miami! You live at Miami!" But it wasn’t spoken like a question, just an exclamation; a declaration, and how are you supposed to explain that, although you spent the first half of your life living in Florida, you’ve never been south of, like, Sarasota and definitely never been to Miami? AND then he says, in French, "Ahh, you know David somethingsomething." Again, not a question, but a statement. I know no Davids from Florida. But he is convinced I do– finally the really old one steps in and says, in French, "You know, the basketball player."

[insert "duh" look from Blair here. Basketball. As though I know ANYTHING about this, even when I live in the US, where it is actually played. As though I CARE anything about this, at all, ever.]

So I make up an excuse for not knowing him, we try to ignore them, but we keep getting awkward questions like "why are you in Paris?" which leads to "Where are you studying?" and as it turns out, the old one is, like, head of something at my university– the third-world internment camp one– where the riots of last year were centered. Oh, great. But I couldn’t tell if he was the guy locking the students out or the one trying to get rights for them... either way, WE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON, you know, given the generation gap, language barrier, etc.
My friends and I are feeling more and more awkward, and more and more cornered. Being picked up by Frenchmen is not an odd experience here and I have kind of just gotten used to saying, in French, as I push my hair back with my plain silver ring-clad left hand, "Oh, I’m waiting for my boyfriend, actually..." or "I’m here with my boyfriend, that guy right over there," at which point I gesture vaguely in the direction of a small crowd. I am really a very good liar when it comes to doing so in other languages. But there is no lying to these guys, as we are clearly alone, and since we are in a back corner of the café, there is no way to get away, except to down the rest of our wine and jet. Which is, being good city girls that we are, what we decide to do. As we start pulling on our coats, suddenly the younger of the two (who was, I remind you, still middle-aged) passes me a business card with his name and number scrawled on it.
It wasn’t even his business card, but the other guy’s.
And honestly, does he expect any of the three of us are going to call? There was an age difference of over 20 years. In some states coughKentuckycough that is like two generations! (I say this with no disdain, and keep in mind I choose to spend, like, all my vacations there. Plus Johnny Depp and 40% of the Backstreet Boys hail from that fair state, so please take it not personally.)
Awkward awkward awkward.

Saturday morning I met up with a friend to go to my favorite market in Paris, at Avenue Sachs. This market only goes on Thursday and Saturday mornings, and it’s amazing. It’s a couple blocks long, set on a street that faces the gold-domed Invalides, and they sell everything from freshly dead [whole] octopi to homemade grainy lavender honey, "100% genuine, mademoiselle" jade bracelets, and the best dates I’ve ever tasted. She decided to get an herb and feta sandwich from this Lebanese booth, and we stood there watching them make it fresh, when the guy turned to me and asked what I wanted. Not a particularly big fan of... herbs, I told him I didn’t want anything, and he said, "Oh, you are going to share this one?" And I laughed and said no, and he said, "Mademoiselle, please let me make something for you!"
I shook my head again, and he asked me (thanks to my accented French), where I am from. I said the US, and his first response was "California?" very hopefully. To avoid an explanation, I just nodded, and he said, switching suddenly to heavily Lebanese-accented English, "I dream to voyage on your Road 66... in Washington to California." I told him that was my dream too, and he said, "Oh, mademoiselle, please don’t you want to try a sandwich? Can’t I just make you a little one?" (We’re back to French now.) And finally, because he seemed hurt that I didn’t want one, I gave in, "But only a very little one!" So he sliced a small circle of dough out of one of the full-size pieces, spread it with some kind of herb-olive oil mix and tons of feta, then tossed it onto a convex griddle, folding and twisting it extravagantly. He finished, wrapped it in waxed paper, handed it to me and said, "for you, mademoiselle, it is no charge," and then he bowed.
It was the highlight of my day, because for some reason he was so much less sketchy than the old men from the night before.

After the market (the same market where I was once scolded when I asked for a handful of dates from an Egyptian vendor. "A handful? A HANDFUL? Mademoiselle, you can not eat a HANDFUL of these dates! These are the most superior dates ever grown! You cannot eat a handful, you must eat only one, and savor it!" At 27Euros a kilo, which is about $17 a pound, I realize he was right, but I wasn’t going to EAT them all at once, and anyway shouldn’t he be glad I am taking them off his hands? It’s not just anyone who’s willing to pay that much for dates, despite the fact that they are as big around as my fist and a handful is probably only 3 actual dates. I’m afraid to go back to his stand now, so my life is consigned to second-rate dates. Funny how that statement seems to relate to so many areas of my life...), we went to the Catacombs.
The Catacombs.

Now, I have had this weird and morbid desire to visit the Catacombs ever since I got to Paris, but they are hard to find, keep weird hours, and I just never searched it out till yesterday. I had visions of torch-lit chambers where the Bible was translated and early Christians hid out... despite the fact that, oh, yeah, Paris wasn’t actually POPULATED until, like, the 3rd century. Or at least visions of that guy from Indiana Jones, the one who keeps the grail but can’t leave the room...

That is not what I got. My first clue should have been the sign in the ticket window that "viewers who are pregnant, claustrophobic, or subject to nervous anxiety should not attend." That and the fact that it’s forbidden to people under the age of 13. A word of history about the Catacombs: in the early 1800's, the French realized that their cemeteries (most of which had been around since the 3rd century when the city was founded... not really, but definitely since the Plague times) were overcrowded. But cemeteries are not like school systems, and you can’t have residents move out of them in order to reduce crowding. At this same time, there was a huge danger of the Left Bank of the Seine caving in from too much digging out of dirt from underneath it to build stuff, so they decided to kill two birds, if you’ll excuse the death reference, and take the bones out of the cemeteries and put them underground where the banks were about to sink. This was apparently not too difficult since not only back in the day they didn’t use coffins in Paris, but also since the majority of the exhumed bones were from bubonic plague victims, they were in mass graves with no identity anyway. So they dig up the bones and put them underground somewhere else, only, in typical "why make it ugly when you can make it pretty and then charge people to see it?" French mentality, they hired bone artisans to come arrange the bones underground. We’ll get to that in a second.

I went with two girlfriends who I talked into going at the last minute, one of whom is seriously claustrophobic. I was going to go by myself. Had I done so, you could probably find me stuck down there still now, the newest addition to the place. So we’re standing at the top of the worn down stone staircase, and the other two appoint me to lead, since, after all, it was my idea. "Fine," I say, "I’ll go first. I’m half pirate. I can handle it." I spent the whole time down the staircase fronting like I wasn’t scared, because, honestly, my school’s unofficial mascot is a dead guy who has been buried in the library for a couple hundred years... he appears at school with 8 bodyguards on special occasions to create mischief or welcome visiting celebs like The Roots, Jimmy Carter, or Howie Day. If I can handle Dooley, I can handle this, right? Apparently flashlights are recommended for this tour. We were not aware. The staircase is worn down from hundreds of years of use, and spirals so tightly that when we get to the bottom I am dizzy. About halfway down the staircase, I realize there is a conspicuous silence behind me, and I turn around to see that they are not there. The claustrophobic one has just noticed the picture of a skull on the front of the brochure the man handed us, and she looks up slightly pale from her position 10 stairs above me and says, "Blair, what’s an ossuaire?" It’s the french word for ossuary, a room made of bone. I tell her this, and she says, "That’s it, I’m leaving," and whirls around like the lion in The Wizard Of Oz. The other girl (bringing up the rear) grabs her arm, much like the TinMan, with a warning of "Oh no you’re not! Come on, Jeanette, you knew we were coming to the Catacombs, what did you expect?"
"You told me it was Catacombs, not a room made out of humans!" she hissed back. Already none of us were talking in normal tones of voice. We convince her to keep going and continue tiptoeing down the stairs, weird shadows cast on the walls like in the Beast’s dungeon when Belle sneaks in and grabs the live candlestick by accident. I’m lost in the likening of my life to my favorite movie when, a moment later, the claustrophobe whispers declaratively, "I smell death." I snorted, to which she replied, and this is a direct quote, "Don’t you dare snort at me, Blair, I have exceptionally keen olfactory senses and I am telling you, I SMELL DEATH." By this time we had reached the bottom of the stairs, and, looking around, the room was... not that bad. No bones to be seen, just a tiny, dank, dungeon-like brick room with a ceiling so low I could barely stand up straight and a plaque reading, in archaic French, "DEATH IS A GAIN." We followed the tunnel in front of us, winding around and around, me leading, the girl behind occasionally grabbing my arm for comfort, me nearly shrieking every time she touched me without warning. No one in front of us, no one behind, several hundred feet below ground, and the only light coming from single electric bulbs every 50 feet or so. This is the difference in my thought processes and the rest of the world’s, though: I am walking along with visions of my life in comparison to Belle, my favorite French princess, when the girl in the back of the line whispers in a gravelly voice "My PRECIOUSSSSSS," causing the other two of us to jump. I have never seen any Lord Of The Rings movies, but I’ve seen enough of the previews to recognize the Gollum quote... and then the other one says, "I think we have entered Middle Earth and any minute the Orcs are going to appear..." I am thinking princesses and enchanted castles, and they are behind me with (more realistic) theories of underground monsters. We had gone a few hundred feet when one of the two behind me said, "this is just like being in a cave..." and the first thing that came into my head was "what caves have YOU been hanging out in?" because in MY cave (so called because, well, I think I was one of two people to ever work on The Mountain who actually LIKED the stupid cave) there are large clearish-orange cave crickets that look like spiders, endangered bats that fly at your head if you aren’t careful, and water that comes mid-calf after a hard rain. This was more like a Willy Wonka chamber, shrinking gradually till I realized we were walking single file out of necessity, and that if I stood on tiptoe I would graze the ceiling. Soon we reached the doorway to the ossuary itself. I hit the doorway first, and, as though it wasn’t even real, I put my foot out to take a step, caught a glimpse of what was inside, and whirled smoothly back around, colliding with the two following me. We looked at each other terrified, then the one behind me grabbed my shirttail and we took our first step in.

Imagine, if you will, Edgar Allan Poe’s dream come true. Remember The Cask of Amontillado? (spelling?) Where the guy gets walled up in the bricks of the wine cellar, never to be heard from again? Yeah. Think about him, and then multiply it by SEVERAL THOUSAND and take away the bricks. The walls of the ossuary were made completely of dead people. And this wasn’t like one room– most of the Catacombs were just chamber after chamber of ossuary. Remember what I said about the French appreciation for art? Yeah, so the bones are lined up, skulls at ground level and then forming a kind of macabre crown moulding, in between row upon row of row upon row of femurs, with the occasional skull thrown in– sometimes in a design: a cross, a heart. Rotted to what appeared to be a dark brown color (though I couldn’t really tell since it was so dim), they were mostly in remarkably good shape, except for here and there were there was a hole in someone’s cranium. During WWII, the French Resistance used the Catacombs to hide out in. I think I can not think of anything worse. It was, quite honestly, like stepping into an Indiana Jones movie, and though I love Indy and have a predisposition to fall in love with archaeology professors, the fact that this was not a movie set and not a Planet Hollywood display but ACTUAL REAL PEOPLE who had been dead for 700 years was really unbelievably... bizarre. To the credit of the French, the part with actual bodies in it does command respect, and they don’t treat it as a tourist trap. It’s not like the Haunted Mansion at Disney– it’s real people, who had the misfortune to be buried in mass graves twice. Every room has a label– this room came from the Cimetiere des Innocents, this one from Cimetiere des Halles, etc. The Innocents is so sad, in a historic kind of way– the children’s cemetery, mostly used by orphanages to bury children dead from plague, starvation, etc. At one point, while I was trying to read a Bible verse posted on an ancient plaque in French, something dripped on my head and I almost lost it. I jumped pretty much out of my skin and almost shrieked, squelching it at the last minute. I have no idea what it was– some kind of underground dampness, but it could have been the hand of death for all it mattered at that moment. Eventually we made it out, and I realized the girl was right– once we were breathing Fresh Air it occurred to me that it did totally smell of death down below.

A note on relativity: The bottom of the staircase that was to lead us out had a note posted on it warning us to take the staircase slowly, as there were 83 steps and it is very steep. I laughed in the face of the sign...well, not really, because I was afraid to offend the million potential ghosts behind me, but my best friend in Paris, whose apartment I am at several times a week, has a 87-step climb to get to her garret room. 83? Pssh, that’s a breeze. When we got to the top, a man sat at a podium to check our bags to make sure we had not stolen any bones. No kidding. There are signs everywhere warning that stealers of bones will be prosecuted, but WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND COULD ACTUALLY TOUCH THEM?

Bombs Away,
B

P.S. Steve Vai is coming to Paris to do a concert. I wonder if he’ll play on the double-necked guitar that looks like a heart with two legs coming out of it?