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“Speak French Pretty Today”
David Sedaris (author of Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim) is doing a reading on Thursday the 9th at the Village Voice Bookshop, not that he needs any publicity at all, he is a ‘Rock Star’ of literature as it says on their site. I seriously am considering going, just so that I can look through the windows. Or maybe just sit at the café across the street and hope that after the exhausting book reading and agonizing book signing for all of his thousands of fans, then he will come across the street to the café seeking refuge. The last remaining wicker chair is next to me, he will ask me for “un feu” in French and I light his cigarette, sigh, and then we will become best friends. He will bring Huge over for dinner and we can laugh about all the amazing things that we have in common, we will plan European vacations together, and even put special ring tones on our mobile phones so that we don’t miss each other’s calls. This is not a daydream that I made up just now, I have had an entire conversation in my head ready for the last 2 years for when I bump into him in the Metro accidentally.
I am not a stalker, I swear. It is just that we were separated at birth! One of the places that we definitely could have crossed paths is at French School in Paris. There are a few routes to take to learn French in Paris, but the cheapest way is via the Marie, the courthouse, that lists Federally funded schools that teach French to ‘étrangers’ as well as German, Computers, and anything else that public government schools are prone to teaching. The class that he had with the mean teacher in his book “Me Talk Pretty One Day” was word for word my exact teacher— her name was Claudine and she was evil to the bone.
My class was a hodgepodge of the UN: Italy, Thailand, China, Poland, Japan, Brazil, Russia, among others were represented.
I was the sole representative for the USA. Unfortunately for me, Claudine was a green-peacer/ tree hugger that thought I was the Axis of Evil. The first day was just the beginning of her terror, when we went around and introduced ourselves in all of our pathetic attempts at French. The war in Iraq had just started, America was all over the news, already a country not too well liked in France to begin with, and here it was bullying another country again. “Je m’appelle Riana et je suis américaine” was met with a hushed silence. I was attacked at once by Claudine—she rocket launched into the air to hover over my desk. I was unable to defend myself and complete a sentence other than the above, my battleship was sunk. “Oh, so how to you feel about YOUR president going to WAR and KILLING innocent people”. As if I had been the one in congress legislating for war and me pulling the trigger on machine guns in the desert. I stared at her green trekker shoes and then up at her bowl haircut on a makeup-less face unable to answer as she pummelled me with every anti-American sentiment that you can imagine. After class, I blindly walked home in the freezing rain when the Canadian student caught up with me. “Why didn’t you defend me back there,” I growled, “you share a border with us for Christ’s-sakes, not very neighborly of you”. He bashfully admitted that he was from New York, but after she picked my eyes out with her beak, there was no way that he was going to admit that to her in class.
I endured for three torturing months, I learned some French in passing, probably more at the farmer’s market than in her class. I sat in the back and tried not to answer anything for fear each time I said something, she would mock my voice with a Woody Allen version of French—which is horrible, if you have ever heard it. My speech problem from my youth combined with being in a foreign country where I was illegal (another story) in a teeny-tiny 24sqM apartment, my future In-Laws hatred for me also because I am American (they are card-carrying communists) plus the freezing rain and snowy weather sucked in comparison to my old southern California life and now the icing on my French Gâteau--a straight A student who was always teachers pet was now the root of all evil in the world. Did not do much for my first impressions of life in France. It’s a miracle that I survived at all.
Every night, I laid in bed at night tossing and turning envisioning telling Claudine off in French with nasty cuss words that I had learned from my future father-in-law. I mouthed the words in the dark and imagined her hurt by my words like sharp objects. But the only thing I could get out in class after a bout of her drilling into me about American blunders abroad and how I was responsible for a country’s actions was ‘Tu est méchant’ which came out a little too much like a little girl saying “you are a big meany!” That was my big exit the day before finals. I never went back. I can ‘speak French pretty today’, but I still have a complex about it in the back of my head. I bet you can all guess what my daydream is for when I bump into Claudine in the Metro?
