Tis Fall

The days have been bright and crisp. It's Fall, at last. As I said a couple of posts ago, I'm trying to catch up on posting news.

I changed art courses this year. I joined some friends who were at La Charpente in St. Mandé. (St. Mandé is along the Bois de Vincennes, between Vincennes and Paris.) I signed up for two courses: oil painting and drawing, and I'm enjoying them both. The oil painting is on Thursday morning and there are anywhere between 8 and 12 of us at a time. We each do our own thing and Jean-François, the teacher, does the rounds from painting to painting, helping us out with suggestions and corrections. We do have one painting with a common theme for the year, but even that allows us tremendodus freedom. We have to stick a citation somewhere in a painting. The studio is a former iron frameworks company and there is a galery, which must have been the offices of the company. There's a closet for us to keep our supplies, sinks to clean, plenty of easels and hanging space as well as shelves to stock finished paintings. 

Aude, the owner, started it just 10 years ago, but in a most professional way, recruiting other teachers to work with her and making it polyvalent immediately, so it seems as though it's an old established academy. There are a few students from the Sarah Lawrence study abroad program who get art class credit. I was told that there's a Pitzer student in that program, but I guess she's not taking art.

Aude is teaching the drawing class and it's good to get back to basics and build up from there. I still have lots of difficulty sticking to drawing what I see, at the angle I see it. Maybe that's what I like about Matisse, although I do know that he did master drawing before deviating.

The other activity I"ve signed up for is a Pilates class on Friday evenings. It's right next door, at the former PTT building that became a city gymnasium that bugged us for so many years with the noisy judo and karate classes.The only thing wrong with this class is that it is so late in the evening: 8:45! At least it's not far. There are certain exercised I refrain from -- all the stuff done lying on your tummy and bending backwards. There are exercises I am just lous at, but I'm not the only one.

And, of course, I still go into the library once a week to work at the circulation desk. 

Toys and People

After seeing the Stein exhibit, a week later, we went to see the toy exhibit. In French it says "Des Jouets et des Hommes", which literally translates as "Toys and Men", but it's "men" meaning "man" or "mankind" and that just doesn't work any more. So, Toys and People, to me.
There's a bit on the history of toys, earliest documentation of toys. An early Grecian tea set! Some Renaissance royal miniature carriages and so on. There are paintings, many of them by women, because, I guess, representing children with toys was a more domestic, amateur painter's fancy. There are, however, some very official paintings with children and their toys. The exhibit has themes. There are the horses, from the basic head of a horse on a stick to "My Little Pony" via the Fisher Price horse on wheels (of which we still have one dating back to Claire's time).



There are pull toys, dolls and doll houses. There are modern art installations, like Barbie Foot by Chloe Ruchon. There's a very interesting couple of photos: a girl in pink in her pink room surrounded by all her pink objects and toys and a boy in blue in his blue room surrounded by all his blue toys and other objects. There are professional themes, with girls being led to playing nurse or teacher and boys off to soldier or fireman. There are video games: war games, Sim City, being a vetrinarian, taking care of horses.... Films on toys or with toys in the plot: Babes in Toyland; Citizen Kane, Toy Story, ....
Again, no waiting on line. Well, this time, there was no one else waiting, and we had our Carte Sésame. So, if you are going to the Grand Palais and feel there are too many people crowding into the Stein exhibit, go to the corner and take in this Toy one.

The Stein exhibit at the Grand Palais

We've been doing a lot recently, and instead of loading up one post, I'm going to break it down into several episodes. I've just been too lazy to write more often.

Back in the days of the Pierwige, back before I stayed there, Paul was already living there and there were plenty of foreign students and young working people. Among them were Peter and Jeanne from Switzerland. They were not a couple, then, but they did become a couple and are still so. They came to Paris a few weeks ago and we all went out to eat on Tuesday evening and then to the Stein exhibit on Thursday morning.

The Stein Collection -- a great exhibit. I don't think I've ever seen so many Picasso and Matisse paintings together. Apparently Leo and Gertrude collected mostly Picasso and their brother and his wife took to Matisse. No matter. They collected early, before these artists became famous and overpriced. When they could no longer collect Picasso and Matisse or Cézanne, they started collecting newer artists. It's all interesting. Leo, the elder brother, left Gertrude when Alice B. Toklas came to live with her. And that's the Gertrude Stein I was more familiar with, the writer who befriended Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. We got to the Grand Palais a few minutes before opening and with our Carte Sésame we were in the direct access, no waiting line. It's so refreshing to see exhibits before the crowds come in and you can't see anything. (Last year, at the Monet exhibit, I saw the difference. I saw it once with Rita at 9:00 a.m. and then went again with the Pickars and Paul one afternoon. They allow too many people at once in the Grand Palais and it's tiring to try to see anything. You can get close. You can't stand back. Just keep moving.)

Before going to the exhibit, we all met for dinner on Tuesday evening. Of course, over the years I had heard stories of the Pierwige before me and of Paul's friends there, so I felt as though I already knew them. Paul had found the restaurant on Lafourchette.com. He reserved us at Au Gourmand, where you get a 40% discount when you reserve via the site. Very, very nice. It was an excellent meal and, with the discount, not expensive, at all.

October and temperatures in the high 20s (C° -- in F° it's almost 90)!

It's going to be another hot, sunny day, today! It's wonderful. I almost regret having taken my camera in for repair. Not only is it hot, but when it gets this beautiful in summer, there's usually a high pollution level that creates a smog filter, but now, it's just perfect blue sky. The days are getting shorter and when the sun goes down, there is a slight chill, but this is one of the most beautiful "arrière saison" we've had in years. And I always feel that September is better than mid-summer. There's not the chill of a real American indian summer, but I remember how beautiful it was in October in Philly when Jon and Tobi got married.

Yesterday was "Bloom Where You're Planted", an annual event in Paris at the American Church during which English-speaking newcomers to Paris can attend a series of speeches and smaller conferences on settling in here and during the lunch break they can visit and shop around for interesting associations, schools, and other services catering to the English-speaking community. I was manning the AARO table, very near the entrance (way out, too), near the AAWE table. For me, many of the other associations and exhibitors are old friends, so the setting-up hour is nice -- going around, chatting with friends. Then there's the onslaught of newcomers. Find out if they are American (there are far fewer each year), if they are here as residents (more than 6 months) to determine whether AARO might be of interest to them. Then, pitch AARO. We had lots of people stop by our table and I think I reduced the weight of what I had to schlep in my back pack by half.

But attending such events makes me wonder what I'm doing there. I never sought out the American community when I came here. I never lived in an area where there were lots of Americans and when I occasionally ran across one, I was very happy to chat and sometimes have even made firm friends of American neighbors, but I wasn't looking for Americans. When I had kids and rejoined AAWE, it was to find English-speaking opportunities for the children, but at that time, living in Nogent, far from everyone else (it seemed) living in St. Germain, I never did more than participate in the annual Christmas bazaar. And of course, you make friends, friends that you see once a year working at the bazaar. No, I was firmly rooted in my neighborhood, with the friends I made when Claire was in Ecole Maternelle (nursery school), mostly. I never managed to speak English at home, and my life was here, in French. Even if I never managed to bring up my kids as mother-tongue English speakers, they all speak fluently, with different degrees of accents. They all cherish their American passports and faithfully file their US tax declarations, even though there is no tax to pay.

Things changed a bit when someone complimented me on my English once on a flight to the States. He didn't realize I was American. That's when I decided that when I went back to work, I wanted to be in an English-speaking environment. Things really changed four years ago, when I stopped working. I rejoined the library and decided to become more active in the associations I belonged to. This gets me into Paris. The Ile de France walks, I found out about through WICE, and that is filled with French and English-speaking people that I love seeing on a day out walking. The library also has a varied population, but is anchored in English. My French has gone down the drain, I think, but no one questions my American-ness any more.

And that brings me to how heart-breaking it is to say to Claire to think again about asking me to go through the procedure to pass on US citizenship to Aurelia. How I hate to think that I am seriously considering giving it up, myself. That the kids should consider giving it up. I feel as though I am being treated like a criminal. That I have to prove, every year to a greater degree, that I am not guilty; that I am not evading taxes; that I am not hiding millions of dollars .... I was brought up to believe that someone was innocent until proven guilty. That the burden of proof is on the accuser. We Americans overseas, over 6 million of us, are negligible because we don't make up more than 2% of any given constituency. Yesterday, a woman whose father had fought for her US citizenship when she was born in Rome, said she was feeling the same as me. Just take a look at this report Jackie Bugnion wrote, which is posted on the ACA site.
Last minute, since I forgot to "publish" the other day, I managed to go to the ball park yesterday, Sunday, and see PUC 2 win their game against La Rochelle. It was a good game and so nice to see familiar faces from the team. If you want to hear English, go to PUC 1 games; for Spanish, go to PUC 2. It doesn't matter that most of the players are French. The Phillies are in the post season and for the first time I decided to subscribe to mlb.com video. Unfortunately, the game I saw (this morning), the Phillies lost. :-(
And today was the AARO lunch. Jackie and Ed came so we could meet one last time before they head back to the States. Met some new people, too. But these lunches are getting too big and noisy.
That's all.