I 'ad zee time of my life

Hqppy feqst of St. Cécile…

Ok, I’m back. My essay submitted…one down, five more to go...

Saturday was fun and interesting and I wqnt to co;;ent on it…darn French keyboqrds again…I have to leqrn to type in tzo different languages…

I woke up just a little too late for morning mass across the street…I discovered some sisters of notre dame with a chapel with nine thirty mass everyday but Sunday…and turned on the TV expecting to find cartoons…(still wondering if the prince with the burned face has caught up with the avatar and his friends yet…) and they’re playing a…mass…of all things. And commentating on it. That guy in front in the hat is the Prince somebody of Morrocco. The woman with the big feather thing on her hat (really frighteningly fashionable, as in its frightening someone would wear something like that) is the first lady of Greenland, the lady in red is Princess somebody else of Sweden (did you know Sweden still has royalty? I didn’t.) And then the guest of honor arrives, followed in hierarchical order by his family.

Prince Albert II of Monaco is bald on top, and his hair is closely shaved everywhere else. I think the red striped navy blue pants with his military uniform were his mothers’, Princess Grace’s idea…His mouth was firmly set, as if determined not to cry. Toward the end of the mass, his sisters Princess Caroline and Princess Stéphanie were crying quite a bit. Surprisingly, the national three month mourning period wasn’t long enough for any of them to get over their father’s death.

Princess Caroline’s oldest son, next in line for the throne after his mother, as apparently Prince Albert has no children., gave the first reading, about Solomon’s request for the wisdom to justly govern his people. The Archbishop of Monaco (or maybe he was just presiding and a deacon took over) read from the Gospels about the leader being the servant of all.

It’s a little weird to think of coronations going on in this day and age. (Heck, I was surprised they still have wild boars roaming the woods here. And getting run over on the highways, for that matter... ) In all the movies it seems rather grand…and y’all know what a sucker I am for movies where random American girl marries a prince or finds out her father is royalty or something….but what is royalty now, anyway?

I finished my wonderful wonderful French book “Ensemble, c’est tout” (Together, that’s all.) about an ailing old woman hopelessly devoted to her house in the country, her tough, macho, obscenity spouting grandson who spends virtually all his time working as a chef, a starving (literally) artist girl and a nerdy French marquis who stutters and sells postcards. At first you get little lines of their stories seperately but by the middle of the book they're all living in the Marquis' appartment in Paris...I wish I could recommend it to everyone but you'd have to learn French first...I'd start translating it sur le champ right here if I knew it was legal...what do you think, Ms. Lawyer?

In other news, I went to a Karéokée party at Annemarie's the other night. I discovered les inconnus, this French comedy troupe from the eighties...the great minstrals who sang:

(you have to imagine the cheesy eighties music in the background)

Isabelle a les yeux bleus
Isabelle a les yeux bleus
Isabelle a les yeux bleus
Bleus les yeux Isabelle a

Isabelle lorsque je t'ai rencontrée pour la première fois
t'avais les yeux bleus
Et lorsque tu m'as quitté
Tu avais toujours les yeux bleus

Heu, c'est normal

(Isabelle has blue eyes
etc.
Blue the eyes Isabelle has.

Isabelle, when I met you for the first time
You had blue eyes
And when you left me
You still had blue eyes

Thats the way it usually goes)


Not to mention this video where they're all dressed up like a hair band romping around in a cow field singing these lyrics full of big words that I'm pretty sure mean nothing together... see if you can tease something out of them, Adam If you're reading

Mais tu dis [mais tu dis]
Que le bonheur est irréductible
Et je dis [et il dit]
Que ton espoir n'est pas si désespéré
A condition d'analyser
Que l'absolu ne doit pas être annihilé
Par l'illusoire précarité
de nos amours [Dest...]
Et qu'il ne faut pas cautionner l'irréalité
Sous les aspérités absentes et désenchantées
De nos pensées iconoclastes et désoxydées
De nos désirs excommuniées de la fatalité
Destituée
Et vice et versa
Et vice et versa...

supported by the fact that the band members keep shooting eachother these lost looks when one of them sings something particularly obtuse... oh yeah, and there's the guy rolling around poetically in the cowfield who ends up with his face in a cow pie...

(ps playing apples to apples with a group I asked them what a cow pie was...they all thought it was something you could get at McDonalds... hmm...)

but funnier than all these...nine French people trying to sing Bohemian Rhapsody...
Or heck, me trying to sing Bohemian Rhapsody...