vacation

For the past week my host mom has been on vacation. Her son has been staying here “watching” the dog, and it’s been a little strange. I apologize in advance for any offense that is taken on the following profile of this young man (looks to be in his early thirties), but I call it as I see it, and this is what I see:

He doesn’t change the toilet paper. I can’t reach it or else I would do it, but it’s on the top of a cabinet in the WC. There must be a fold-up ladder in the wall or a button that shoots the toilet up high enough for Renée to get at it, because she’s shorter than I am, and there is no way she can reach up there if I cant.

He doesn’t take out the garbage. It’s been overflowing for the past week, so I finally stalked the hallway through the peephole in our front door until I saw a neighbor walk out with a garbage bag. I lowered the sunglasses and followed them to the big garbage bins.

He doesn’t do his dishes. I figured machinery like dishwashers would be relatively universal in how they function, but not the French ones. There are ten different settings for hot water, ten different settings for cold water, ten different settings for warm water, a few for hot then cold or the reverse, a few for pots and pans or just dishes, one for utensils, combinations of all of them, a setting for cooking fish, one for baking a cake, one for flying to the moon, and one for forcing unruly sons to learn how to use the dishwasher. I couldn’t get that one to work.

He doesn’t have a job. This, I can’t really knock as I look across the Atlantic to America… or can I? I am in France after all, a fact I seem to forget way too often.

He doesn’t take the dog out. The only reason he’s here is to walk the dog and feed it. No, I’m not that naïve, I know he’s here to make sure I don’t throw giant parties like I normally do and end up burning the apartment complex down too. I leave for classes from anywhere between 9 and 11 in the morning. I wake up somewhere in between 7 and 8 AM, and usually Renée has already left for work, which means she’s already taken the dog out. Mr Slick on the other hand doesn’t wake up until after I’m gone for the most part. I can’t imagine the confusion in that poor pup’s head and bladder. Wait, I can, because I’ve cleaned up his confusion a few times this week.

He parties hardy. I woke up this past Wednesday morning to a gurgling, heaving sound. He was barfing up the 3 bottles of wine he had consumed the night before. It was obviously wine; I won’t even get into how I know. The night before, he had taken the dog with him to wherever he went, because he didn’t want to come home to take it out. That was a great idea, it got him out of a world of difficulties.

Please don’t think I abhor this character though; he’s very nice, which is the problem. People like him park a truck in the path of my behavioral logic thought process. I can’t hate him, but I want to, and I can’t like him, because I’m trying to hate him. He’s not much of a conversationalist but he’s inclusive; if he goes to the store he asks if I need anything, he asks how my day was when I get home, and he helped me tweak the grammar in a paper I wrote for a class. So I’m left dumbfounded, thanking him with my grammatically correct paper in hand, and cursing him a little later while wiping up runny dog crap from the living room floor with toilet paper I had to climb up a wall for, as a dish falls over the sink and shatters on the floor.

Renée is coming back this evening, but I'm leaving for my vacation in an hour. I won't be able to tell her how much fun we all had together until after I've gotten over it; but upon my return, it may still be fresh enough in my mind for me to ask her who has babysitting who exactly, because the dog and I were really confused.

a singing silhouette

A French funk band was playing when I walked in. The room was packed from the back wall to the door on the left side of the stage I walked in through. It was hot and sticky – the humidity hit me like a bucket of hot water propped on top of the door, soaking me as I entered. I spotted my friends at the front of the mass, right at the foot of the stage, but there was no way I was pushing through to get to them, so I waited and watched the fog play with the lighting around the band. The band wasn’t bad actually, the drummer was particularly solid.

The band finished and the crowd dispersed to the corners of the bar to rehydrate with over-priced watered-down beer. Some went outside for a cigarette break, and some just left. The group of friends I was meeting diminished considerably. It was a Tuesday night, and we had classes the next morning, so most went home. They came to the show to see Ben Lee anyways, a singer/songwriter from the States who played earlier that evening. I didn’t really know why I came when the show was half over…
We stood in the middle of the bar waiting for the next band to start. A strange looking couple took advantage of the open space and started dancing. We had to dodge their feet a few times; they got pretty into their own moves, flinging themselves in the most awkward manners from one side of the room to the other. The girl lost her balance once and flew into Sarah, almost table-topping her. They looked like they were really good imitators of people who actually knew how to dance, but they just weren’t at that level themselves. If the next band wasn’t good, this dance show redeemed the 5 Euros I paid to get into the bar at least.

Just when the tiny dancers had enough, the curtains opened. The lights turned off and a lone figure stood in the center of the stage, one light from behind showed only a silhouette. A loop of voices started playing, harmonizing with each other – I thought it was Bjork secretly touring on her acapella album Medulla for a second and got really excited. Then I realized whoever this was with this amazing voice had an afro and leather pants, so it couldn’t have been Bjork. Lights came on from the sides of the stage and a voice belted out words onto the crowd like I’ve never heard before. Three or four people with intense cameras jumped to the front of the stage and started shooting while everyone else in the bar dropped their jaws and did a half-smile-type movement with their mouths. It wasn’t Bjork, but she got the same reaction Bjork does for the most part.

Three songs in and the entire crowd was still a mass of statues, our eyes unable to move from her energy above us. She sang in French and English, but words didn’t matter much with the quality of sound she was producing. Such soul! Such energy! Such passion! Such ingenuity! She had no instrument but her voice for us at first, her Boss RC-50 loop pedal let her toy with self-created beats and harmonies right in front of us. Halfway through her set she was joined by the drummer of the funk band that played earlier, a bassist, and a keyboardist. They all harmonized with her, accentuating her melodies and complementing her better than TV does to Sunday afternoons.

The closing of the metro pulled us out of the venue unwillingly – we had to leave before the end of her set. Walking to the underground tunnels, all we talked about was how ridiculous her voice was, and how soulful she sang.

A few days later, putting together notes to write this little blog entry, I realized I needed one bit of information that I didn’t catch while I was at the concert. I went on the venue’s website to search for it, but it was already gone. No one in the group I was with caught the singing silhouette’s name.