Pens & Paris

We were woken by a policeman as we'd fallen asleep on the benches of the Tuileries Garden after a night of walking the streets of Paris in August of 1984.

Impulsively, we'd taken a train from London to Dover, the ferry from Dover to Calais, followed by a train to Paris. Bullet trains and the Chunnel didn't exist yet. Neither of us had much money beyond the transportation costs, so we spent 24 hours in France; eating as simple and cheaply as we could: red wine, chocolate, bread, cheese and fresh fruits.

 I was 22 years old and spending a month in London with my old roommate who had been my acting professor in college, Peter Frankham. He was living in a squat is South Kensington, which was a contradiction of terms, but in being such it was lavishly furnished from neighborhood rubbish nights.

The impulse had been brought on by the fact that my month was drawing to a close and we'd either both been working or I'd taken many solo day trips out of London, but we wanted to do one grand adventure together before I departed. Paris was it.

Walking the streets for a full cycle of a day we saw how the city worked. They say it's the city of lights, but it was my first introduction to the red light district. Peter explained to me that prostitution was legal and monitored so as to insure the women engaged in the oldest profession were safe and healthy. A year later, in July in the same city, Rock Hudson would announce he was dying of AIDS and I would be in Paris again. But this summer we all still had the illusion of safe sex. After a night of cafes, bookstores, and many glasses of cheap wine we saw the city go to sleep. The grates came down over the shop windows on the outskirts of town, yet the nearer the Seine you went the less protection the boutique and luxury store windows seemed to need. In the dark hours before dawn, street sweepers, people with twig brooms, not machines, came out to clean the alleys for the new day.

We also talked about Art and Politics. I kept copious notes in my journal with my pen. Tried to make drawings, too.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was coming into his right wing place of prominence and power. Le Pen, from what we could piece out of the papers, was an anti-Jewish fascist who had no tolerance for the lower classes or growing immigrant populations.  Reagan was trying to get Star Wars, the missile defense system - not movies, sold to the European allies. From what little French I could read, the demonstrators seemed opposed to the idea.

On the arts side of conversation Peter showed me some of the best stoops and squares to perform for big tips. He'd been a Mime in Paris before moving to San Fransisco to start Make A Circus and then, later, to Portland, ME to found The Actor's Studio (and an adjunct Professor at USM, were we met). He told me tales of Marcel Marceau living in an apartment above Shakespeare and Company. The history of the bookstore and it's support of artists. We listened and danced to street musician in Monmartre and near the Louvre (before there was a pyramid to get in the way).

The policeman woke us by hitting the bench with a stick, and didn't carry the automatic rifles they do today. We were starting to sweat, as it was a warm morning in Paris, most Parisians were out of town.  Peter had been stopped often by police and customs officers since I'd known him.

He was a British Gypsy, or Traveller. His mother and aunt were the first two to stay put and he'd grown up speaking lower class English and Romani. As an actor, he was a chameleon with languages and accents. Yet, his too big brown eyes, slightly bow legged walk and complexion of his skin always had him be the one to be searched or stopped in a que. Later that week I'd meet his aunt in Tunbridge Wells. She was a petite woman who dressed exceedingly proper and had drawers of gloves. I admired her money plant and she showed me how to smuggles seeds back to the States in fingers of kid gloves. I didn't have the heart to point out that it was August, I had miraculously brought sun with me for most of my month there, and didn't own a pair of gloves except for x-c skiing in Maine in winter.

I returned home to Maine, only to discover that my closest girlfriend, Celeste Grenier, was going to be moving to France, for a YEAR. She told all her college friends and family that she had a scholarship to college in France. I drove her to the airport in Boston. As I hugged her goodbye, she was shaking. It turned out she had no idea what she was going to do once she got off the plane in France.  We wrote to each other weekly, sometimes more. We arranged it so that I'd join her in Paris the following summer and we'd travel together for as long as our money would last, hopefully all summer.

This time I arrived in Paris by plane in the summer of 1985. Le Pen was becoming a tyrant. Immigrants were being hassled harshly. Again, it was hot and sunny. Celeste's Paris was more contemporary and collegiate, as one would expect. We, being uninformed and reckless just randomly decided where we wanted to go. The one plan was to visit the relative of the family that Celeste had been working for all Spring. The relatives lived in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

That is a whole story in it self and will be saved for another time. We went to these countries: Yugoslavia, Germany, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and a few more in transit. The Netherlands was my least favorite, so it's ironic that I married a Dutchman 11 years later!

Now what happened in Copenhagen that summer, is relevant to what happened in France under Le Pen and in Paris today. Celeste and I were staying in a Youth Hostel, only it wasn't a bunk room setting, but room in a journalist's apartment in downtown Copenhagen. He took us to Jazz Clubs and steered towards the Little Mermaid and Tivoli Gardens. But I'll never forget how I was woken up the last morning. I wrote about it in depth in my journal and would speak at length about it with our host later that night.

I was sleeping on the floor or a mattress on the floor and I remember waking slowly and looking through a window up to the clear sky. Simultaneously, a loud noise consumed the air and the panes of glass bent, but did not break and returned to their original shape. It was the first of what would be three bombs to go off in rapid succession. I remember one was in a Synagogue, another a Jewish owned/operated Cinema and I don't remember the third location. The journalist, burst out of the kitchen, ran past me to the doorway leading to the stairway down to the lobby where his bicycle was waiting. I stood to look out the window at a the boulevard and rotary below and half the people were racing towards the blast and the other half seemed to be stunned and disoriented.

That day, for me, was the beginning of a loss of innocence I didn't even know I had. I grown up in the era of American assassinations, investigations, Watergate, and Iran-Contra. I'd lived through busing and divorce. I'd not been waited on in Bailey's (and ice cream parlor in Harvard Square ~ the supposed bastion of liberal "tolerance") because I was with a black boyfriend. I'd lived in St. Croix and worked as the only white woman on a construction site with 4 other women and 500 men. But this was my first experience of terrorism and being near a bombing.

The last time I was in Paris was in November, just under two months ago.. At that time they was an alarm to a possible Tiger on the loose. The City was in full alert mode and it was a fun kind of adrenaline rush propelled by social media. It was the first time I'd been back since my stay with Celeste, almost 30 years ago. Now Le Pen's daughter, Marine, has risen to the top of the political food chain. I returned the Shakespeare and Company and shoved Euros into the floor of the "wishing well" to help support the writers-in-residence. I listened to three young musician play in the room upstairs, in front of the infamous "piano room". Time telescoped during my stay between my 23 year old self and the woman who was now a single mother and who felt ready for anything.

And today an atrocity has happened in the City of Lights. I'm very much a believer in the pen being mightier than the sword. That terrorists shall never win with their violent acts, but rather the majority of people want peace and freedom of expression will prevail.

My tragic flaw is that I'm an optimist, and I refuse to give in to the tyranny of people who want to control others with violence - physical, emotional, psychological, material, or financial. We are all Paris. We are all Berlin. We are all NYC. We are all Boston. We are all one. WE ARE.

I write tonight to anyone who feels helpless or voiceless. You are not alone. WE ARE here.

(Photo taken by me from a boat on the Seine 9 November 2014)