A MAGICAL EVENING
My second full day in Paris was dark and rainy. Still without an umbrella I stayed at Hotel Tim and ate their quite expensive but very good breakfast at 10 and strung it out to noon so that it was lunch as well which let me sit at the table and write for a couple of hours. In the afternoon I timidly went out to finally buy an umbrella. I didn’t know how to buy an umbrella (or do anything else) in Paris, so searched for Carrefour grocery store, a chain all over France, whom I trusted not to sell me a poor quality umbrella at a high price. I finally found Carrefour Express, a smaller version, and their umbrella, high quality I’m sure, was 19 Euros or about $21. So I went around the corner and bought a 6 euro black umbrella from an Arab store as my brother had suggested when he FaceTimed me, a simple solution that would have kept me dry yesterday as I walked back from the Apple Store. It wasn’t much of an adventure, but enough for me in my cluelessness in Paris.
And then in the late afternoon I used the 1.90 euro Metro ticket I had bought at Abbesses and got on at the Pigalle metro station, not knowing if it would work, not knowing if I had the right ticket in the first place since I had to buy it from a machine, Billy in Wonderland. But it took me to the Nation station where I changed to the 9 line taking me to Croix de Chavaux where I got off in the rain and under my black umbrella I located the theater and then ate nearby at an Italian restaurant where all they had, apparently, was thick crusted pizza and a glass of red wine. I was the only patron. My brother Richard called me as I sat there, him snowbound in Minneapolis, as I wandered in confusion in Paris, ordinary to Parisians.
I walked back to Theatre Barthelot and Nini, Mary Holden’s daughter and the organizer of the shadow puppet, sold me a ticket and I sat down in an audience, mostly of ten year olds, to watch. It was magical, a project started with her former Egyptian husband, and a very complicated production with live and recorded music and multiple screens that a dressed in black crew of four managed with everything carefully synchronized.
I decided to photograph some scenes using the night mode on my iPhone, expecting nothing, and being surprised later at the results. The story was mostly without words. A pigeon keeper in Cairo who comes to Paris and makes a place for his pigeons but who never fits in in the rush of the big city and who is lonely and finally loses his pigeon roost to new construction. It ends sadly. At least this is what I think was going on. But the show was as unreal to me as Paris is.
After the show a group of performers and friends were led by Nini to an nearby bar where 12 of us had drinks around a long outside table. Much of the conversation was in French, but I was sitting next to an American man in his forties who told me about his 20 year, mostly illegal, stay in France and his efforts to become a French citizen. His girlfriend Alison, is a stained glass artist (on line at alisonkoehler.com) who invited Susie and me to a show she has in Montmartre and to the final day celebration on the 21st. Another man, a British citizen, very irritated at Brexit and being cut off from Paris, but now a dual citizen, told me about being the arranger of an Amtrak trip across the USA for a movie producer who didn’t like to fly so rented a train car with multiple rooms, attached to various Amtrak trains, to go across the United States, snowbound one day and hot in Arizona the next.
All this time I was Bill Mosher, octogenarian, a fish out of water, very much like the central character in Midnight In Paris having one fantastic meeting after another with famous American expatriots, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, being accepted for some reason by young, lively, very artistic creative people. I went home to Hotel Tim reeling and had trouble going to sleep from the excitement.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 