Paris the first time - May '94

Paris was the destination of yet another last minute courier flight I had purchased a day or two before departure. Although I had been to Avignon, this was my first time traveling without the benefit of bilingual speakers to guide me. I somehow managed to reserve a room on the Left Bank by telephone and fax with an old man who spoke broken English.

When I arrived at the place on Rue de l’Abbe de l’Eppe, a very elderly but spirited matron greeted me and began to rapidly question me in French. When she realized I didn’t understand her first question, she launched into another, and then another, in vain. I stood there like a deer in headlights, only able to muster “…uh” while she spouted out several exasperated “ooh, la, la!”s. Finally someone passing by translated. My room was not vacant yet, and I was to return in a couple hours.

It was a modest studio with a washbasin in the room, but shared bathroom. No television and just one lamp for reading. Simple but charmingly romantic for what one would expect from the Left Bank. It was six flights up on the top floor, with a small picture window that offered a view of the nearby Pantheon’s dome.

I loved wandering the Left Bank, browsing the music stands and bookstores and eating baguette sandwiches, romanticizing Paris enough to even buy a stamped copy of “A Moveable Feast” from Shakespeare and Co. bookstore. (a bit cliché but it I didn’t care.)

But after several days of climbing the stairs to my room with no a.c., I decided to try out the other side of Parisian life. Splurging, I booked myself into a more upscale hotel on the Right Bank, with elevator, a.c., television and a view of the Eiffel Tower.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had gone to Paris not knowing anyone there, but ran into several women at different times. It seems the McKarma was in full effect.

At the top of the Georges Pompidou Center I ran into Tory Jones, a production designer from New York who was visiting Paris alone. We hit some bars and drank the fennel-flavored absinthe while Frenchmen eyed my companion not so discretely. When joining Tory for dinner with some of her local friends in the Bastille neighborhood, I spotted my RISD classmate Karen Park, dining across the room. We both did a double take and then I went over to greet her. We arranged to meet up at Les Deux Magots the next day for a beer. My social life was suddenly busier than back in New York.

Karen, an apparel designer, lived in Paris and had married one of my artistic heroes, Jean-Paul Goude, a renowned art director who is practically a national hero in France and with whom many want to associate. When I went out to dinner with Karen and her visiting brother, she mentioned how she and her husband had dined with David Lynch and Isabella Rosellini the night before.

After dinner Karen sent her brother and I off to a club where she had put us on a list - Les Bains, a model-ly nightclub which was indeed filled with stickwomen bearing vacant stares.

Later in the week, while sketching in the wide courtyard of the Louvre, I recognized another attractive RISD grad named Christina who had been on the road traveling for seven months. France was her last stop before joining her boyfriend back home. (damn!) So I had yet another platonic woman friend to hit the town with. One evening we tried to get standing-room only tickets to the opera, but after finding it sold out we hopped on the Metro to an outer arrondissment for an English-language screening of the Irish film , "The Snapper".

It was a great intro to Paris, but I made a mental note not to return again without a girlfriend or at least someone who was available (stay-tuned for future postings to see how that panned out.)