Monthly Archives: May 2006

notes from long island

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1.  I forgot how damn good it can feel to get all my aggression out by hitting the piano to play Beethoven’s Pathétique at full volume when no one’s home.

2.  I love jet lag when it helps me wake up early in the morning.  I hate it on the other end when I can’t fall asleep at night.

3.   I’m "blog of the week" at Paname Ensemble. Cool.  Check out my Q&A here.

4.  Today was Katie Couric’s last day on The Today Show, and NBC threw a giant party in her honor.  Harvey Fierstein sang a very clever song, backed up by four harmonizing fellows from some Broadway play about Frankie Valle.  The Central Park jogger shared her thoughts on Karie’s humanity.  Apart from those highlights, the whole thing was rather nauseating.  Katie even said so herself.  Glad we’re in agreement on that.

5.  My dog got a haircut and I got my highlights done: all is well in the world.

born to perform

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this maitresse was born a ham.  the earliest signs of it were manifested when I would come home from nursery school at age two and show my mom the songs I learned that day.


"head, shoulders knees and toes, knees and toes!"

as I grew up my music teachers were more and more impressed with my, ahem, perfect pitch, and uncanny ability to replicate different series of rhythmic claps.  my reward for this was getting to sing the solo in "edelweiss" at the third-grade chorus concert.

fast-forward to middle school and high school– first chorus parts in all the shows, then lead roles.  then on to syracuse university to major in musical theatre and

Homeward Bound

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Gearing up for a ten-day trip to New York! I gave my students their final exams a week early, amid much groaning and complaining; I don’t know what they’re griping about, I’m the one who has to grade them! I’d much rather write an exam than have to decipher their handwriting… so at least I won’t lack for activity during the 8-hour flight home.  I see it as a challenge: can my brain watch bad airplane movies and grade papers at the same time? We shall see.

(I should point out here that I am a completely responsible English professor and would never disregard my students’ efforts so callously as to watch TV while I grade their papers.  That is, as long as I can tell that they weren’t watching it when they wrote them.)

Ten days is a long time and a short time…  it’s a short time to be with my family, who I miss terribly over here, but it’s a long time to be away from a certain someone whose arms I’ve only recently gotten back into, after a strange and intermittent month of disquietude.  It’s a short time to see all my friends  and a long time to be away from my friends here, some of whom are leaving Paris soon to go back to NY for good.   And more practically speaking, it’s a short time to get all the work done I have to do in the New York Public Library and a long time to be away from my apartment hunt (that’s right kids, I need to move at the end of June, if you know anyone vacating a great studio or 2 pièces, this would be a good time to speak up!)

So, without further ado, and in case there’s anyone out there who still cares after my heartless remarks about cow art and impatience with my high school French teacher, here’s the to-do list of an expat New Yorker momentarily touching down on home soil:

-Highlights
-Haircut with Nigel
-Mani/pedi (these are ridiculously overpriced in Paris)
-Darling sister’s 23rd birthday
-Tix to Threepenny Opera for the above (Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper in the same show, I think I might keel over)
-A session in the Berg Collection to find out what Woolf was saying about Lawrence when she wasn’t being published
-Meeting up with A White Bear, H*BOMB, Kristin, various other friends who don’t know I’m coming yet because I’m a lazy email correspondent
-Consuming very very much pizza
-RDV with former boss/agent
-hours and hours at Borders with a stack of American magazines, new releases, and Chai latte after Chai latte
-driving my mom’s Audi cabriolet to:
-hit the beach (good old Robert Moses)
-walking my dog on the boardwalk (good old Sunken Meadow)
-BBQing with the fam
-watching my dad swing in his hammock
-going to the mall with my mom (*ahhhem*Club Monaco*coughcough*) (poor old Walt Whitman, the man will forever be known to me primarily as a mall and secondarily as My Captain)
-watching reruns of the second season of "Grey’s Anatomy"
-and what will I be doing in between all these activities? hugging my mommy.

an elk-hound and a rosebush:

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the only two things which matter to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, at least by the end of the sixteenth century (things do get better for Orlando by the twentieth, by which time he’s had the great fortune to be transformed into a woman). I’m in the midst of writing a paper on the novel, to be delivered at a conference in the UK this June, and so I thought it would be appropriate at this juncture, having recently been subjected to some of the very worst most mean-spirited condescention that human nature can spew, to turn to Woolf’s hero/ine herself, after her own similarly fatiguing run-in with "society" (in the eighteenth century):

"’Is this,’ she asked–but there was none to answer, ‘is this what people call life?’ The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of sympathy.  The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue.  Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand.  Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips.  In short, there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its mistress, and yet, it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a great impediment to the refinements of intercourse.  They wag their tails, they bow the front part of the body and elevant the hind; they roll, they jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber; they have all sorts of ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail, since speak they cannot.  Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlingon House.  They, too, wag their tails, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot.  ‘All these months that I’ve been out in the world,’ said Orlando, pitching one stocking across the room, ‘I’ve heard nothing but what Pippin might have said.  I’m cold. I’m happy.  I’m hungry. I’ve caught a mouse.  I’ve buried a bone.  Please kiss my nose.’ And it was not enough" (195-6).

It’s too good for me to even gloss.

By the way– I’m back together with my own Orlando furioso. Hurrah!

oh, la vache!

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There are cows all over Paris right now.

I know what you’re thinking: the dogshit is bad enough.  But these cows don’t produce shit, they (ahem) are the shit.

Ok that’s mean of me.  But seriously, there’s a big old "art" installation of decorated cows dotting random parts of Paris.  And I’m sorry to sound like a blasé New Yorker, but these painted cows are so turn of the millennium– I mean, we had them back in  1999, if I’m not mistaken.  And I could be exaggerating, but only to underscore just how very over cutesy-painted farm animals are.

Incidentally, my French teacher in high school was nuts about cows.  So much so that my father nicknamed her Madame La Vache.  I think she would plotz if she found out I live in Paris and speak French with a humble level of fluency.  Does anyone else ever want to email their high school English teachers and gloat, or is that just my desperate need for validation rearing its ugly head again? Madame Leclair, il est vraiment dommage que vous m’avezayez sous-estimée pendant toutes ces années-là.  N’est-ce pas ironique que je n’ai pas été admise dans le French Honor Society et pourtant alors même que je suis sans doute le seul ancien élève de Commack High School deà démenager en France? Ce n’est certainement pas vous que m’a appris de parler français comme je fais, et même mes erreurs ne vous doivent rien.  Faites bien attention, car les étudiants timides ou silencieux, comme moi, qu’il me semble ne méritaient pas votre attention, ne peuvent pas tous se débrouiller aussi bien que moi.

But I think I heard she retired anyway.  Oh well.

the cure for a boy is a boy

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I’ve never been one of those girls with tons of male friends– when I was younger, either boys were objects of my desire or they barely registered at all.  In fact, I was extremely nervous talking to any human with a penis for a really long time, even if I wasn’t attracted to them.   I’m convinced this is because I don’t have any brothers and have only two male cousins, neither of whom was around when I was growing up, for one reason or another.

Then, after high school, I went to a women’s college.  I definitely had relationships here and there, but never saw the guy as a person– they were more like really attractive aliens.  It went across sexuality, too– even though I did theatre for a long time, I never even hit it off with the gay boys.  Objects, totally.

All that changed when I dated a boy for four years after college.  He wasn’t an object or an alien, and his friends were the kind of guy’s guys I had no experience with.  I could joke with them, drink with them, watch sports with them, watch them hit on girls, feel protected by them.  These guys were like the big brothers I never had.  They were awesome, and they changed so much for me.  No longer was every new male in my path someone to worry about my effect on, or someone to try to flirt with.  It sounds strange, but guys became humans to me.  Funny, drunken, smelly, rambunctious humans.

And now, since I moved to France, my entire social circle has been reconstituted.  Sure I have my girls, but probably seventy percent of my friends are guys, and fifty percent of those guys are gay.  When did this happen? Why did this happen? It would be interesting to get deeper into the demographics.  They’re mainly Anglophones, these boys of mine, and I’ve met them in a variety of ways.  Some have (unsuccessfully) hit on me in bars. Some I met on Friendster. Some I’ve worked with or taught with. Some date guys I’ve taught with.  Some I’ve met through friends or family.  Some I’ve had class with. You get the picture.  They’re non-threatening and supportive, and they make me feel good about myself.  Yay for male friends.

But now that I’m, er, single, things get tricky again.  For example: if I turn to my straight male friends for advice about my breakup, the likelihood that they will slam N into oblivion is very high, because they’re protective, because they want to sleep with me, because even if they don’t want to sleep with me no guy is good enough to sleep with me, certainly not a guy whose reason for breaking up with me is that he wasn’t good enough for me ("Bullshit!" two of my male friends said just last night).  If I turn to my gay friends, they’re totally supportive, telling me I’m so cute and charming and smart and all that jazz, but they clap a hand on my shoulder and tell me to move on, because I’m too fabulous for some lame hetero fool.

So I’m not relying on my guys for advice.  They’re too biased.  Instead, they’re helping me get through this by drinking with me, cooking for me, downloading "The Family Guy" and "The Sopranos" to watch with me.  My rockin’ publicist cousin N was in town this week and took me and some friends to Kong for dinner.  My co-correspondent is going to get me soused on Sunday.  I’m getting together with a (male) editor friend tonight to do some work.  There’s no cure for a broken heart, but it’s clear to me that the cure for losing one boy is filling up your time with lots of other boys.

That said, I’m also looking forward to this Saturday with the girls…

similies, metaphors, endings, postponements.

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I hate having to come to terms with the end of a relationship.  You feel like you’ve been gripping a glass so tightly that it shatters in your hand, and you look down at it, as surprised that it broke as you are by the pain and the blood.

With this breakup, it’s as if some malevolent spirit removed all the nails from the structure of our relationship in the middle of the night.  For another two weeks the house remained standing, held together by love and by habit, but after all, love can’t hold the whole thing up forever; you do need nails for that.  And Sunday, the wind changed course and the house couldn’t stand the shift; it came crashing down around us and we had to run for our lives.

I’m tired of breaking up and breaking down.  I feel like I burn through relationships like wildfire through a forest, feeding off any available oxygen and destroying everything that gets in the way. Afterwards I stand among the tree skeletons and cry and cry, as if tears could water an entire forest of decimation back into bloom.

It’s particularly hard in France– they move so fast in the beginning, these French men; whereas their American cousins will take months to commit, Frenchmen will be your boyfriend after only one kiss, and they’ll slam on the gas pedal until you’re dizzy with love for them.  Then, at the slightest bump in the road, they jerk the emergency brake ( or "break," depending on his resolve).  You’re thrown from the car.  They drive away.

These destructive images belie what I’m hoping for the future, that he’ll get through his existential crisis and realize neither of us will ever have it any better with anyone else than we do with each other.  I refuse to believe that a man– French or otherwise– who truly believes his heart has found a home, will be able to move out for good, even if he thinks he might be a bad roommate.

[The period of self-indulgent prose will be over soon, I promise.]

finding the music

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The alarm was making its familiar fuzzy sound, an alarm clock stuck under a pillow, when in fact it was just my cell phone imitating an alarm clock stuck under a pillow.  I crawled out of bed this morning, my eyes puffy and stuck together with tears.  Had to teach at 9 am.  How on earth, how to get all the way to Nanterre, when my bed and my hangover from the Tylenol PM and my heartbreak were right there in the room with me, how to get dressed and out the door, up the street, to the 2, then to the RER A, then to Batiment F?

On my desk was the sheet music that had just come from Amazon: vocal selections from The Baker’s Wife.  Much like the tracks they laid across the Alps before they had a train that could make the journey, I bought the sheet music even though I have had no access to a piano since I moved to France.  And this morning, I looked at the music, sitting there, unplayed, unsung, and it occurred to me: somewhere in one of the numerous random Bauhaus buildings dotting the Nanterre campus, there must be a piano.  And today is the day, I said to myself, when I will find it.

I left the house feeling a little bit lighter, a little more optimistic, the sheet music stuck in with the lesson plans in my bag.   And when I had an hour-long break, the stars aligned and guided me on my way.  I very sweetly asked the guys who work downstairs in my building if they knew where I could find a piano.  They sent me to Batiment L.  The man at the desk sent me into the Office of Cultural Affairs.  The woman in the Office of Cultural Affairs pointed me to a little black door and said I could go ahead in and stay as long as I wanted.  And behind the little black door was a giant rec room, with a little brown upright piano, perfectly in tune, if a bit muted in terms of its resonance.  But I didn’t care. I took out my book, spread it open to the correct page, and launched into "Where is the Warmth."

A few years ago, I would have been incredibly shy when two students came in to get some stuff from a corner of the room while I was singing.  But almost two full years without access to a piano will do wonders to cure timidity!

I realized, during that hour this morning, that music is the thing that’s been missing from my life– for as long as I can remember it’s been my creative outlet when I’m tired of reading and writing, tired of forcing my thoughts into words.  I used to spend hours and hours practicing and singing.  Take that away from me and there’s a hole the size of a piano in my life, that I end up filling with obsessions and addictions.  Basta. Back to the piano! When I move into my new apartment I’m going to get myself one of those new-fangled electric keyboard things that has the weighted keys and the pedals of a piano, but the headphones that I can plug in and spare the neighbors when I want to play at 2 am.  And I’ll have jazz soirées and everyone is invited to come over and sing.  Provided you let me show off just a little.