Not much has really happened since my last post. Finished the school week, had a weekend, bought some opera tickets for my summer research project, took a nap I didn’t want to take — you know, lived the life in Paris.
Mostly, I just wanted to have a post with the French title you see above. (Run it through your translator if you don’t read French) The title refers to the strange Act 3 of “La Calisto,” a Baroque Italian opera about the Roman myth behind the creation of the Ursa Major and Minor constellations. I could dissect the plot, or explain some of the strange sets and costumes and the like, but mostly, I think it’s important to know that the titular character gets transformed into a bear at the beginning of the third act. And in this production, at the beautiful Art Deco Theatre des Champs-Elyssées, the bear is huge, fuzzy and astonishingly pink.
The production was better than any of us expected — I went with a small section of my French music and politics class as a make-up session — and we all enjoyed ourselves immensely. If anything, it made me excited about my coming summer research project.
The rest of the weekend was fairly straightforward. Saturday, I visited my friend Elizabeth out in the suburbs, where she and I made chocolate chip cookies and had tea with her absolutely adorable French host family. I was pleasantly surprised with how much of a normal conversation in French I was able to have with her parents — including the father, who is an alum of SciencesPo — and we both enjoyed how much the family loved our cookies, which they called “très Americain,” in a good way.
Saturday night was simple — went to a friend’s house, shared dinner and watched obscure Yugoslavian short films from the latest film issue of my favorite magazine, “The Believer.”
Sunday was student brunch day with a random group of French, Canadian and American friends — a fact which I initially forgot and thus ate breakfast in the morning before the brunch — but my friend Claire and I rented some nifty Velib public bikes and biked along the Jardin de Luxembourg to get to the brunch cafeteria. I even got to bike back, which was a lot of fun. In fact, I might bike later this evening.
This post is kind of random, I realize, and I haven’t really explained anything at all about my weekend, but tant pis. It was a good weekend, and there was a big pink bear involved. So, all is good.
The Whether Man 