From The Color Master to Simply Rouge

Disclaimer: This blog employs such literary devices as metaphor, satire, truth, semi-truth, sarcasm, whimsy, and out-right lies.  Proceed at your own risk.

Have you been to see Monet's Gardens at Givenry? He created his canvas, then spent his life painting it.

Getting there was quite a journey. We left before the bakery was open for business.  This was a sad thing.  We had to settle for croissants at the Gare De Saint Lazare; a sorry second cousin to the local boulangerie artisan.  We took the RER A, the express metro specially designed to be unpronounceable by Americans, a train to Vernon, then a bus to Givenry.  It was about a 7 minute walk to Monet's house.

Les fleurs! Les fleurs! Les fleurs! Good gracious the man loved color and shape.  We wandered the gardens for a bit, then over to the pond for willows and water lilies.  What I would have liked was to stay past closing and wallow in the beauty of it all.  It's no wonder he painted it over and over.

Then we almost missed the bus back to Vernon for the train.  Damn gift shops!  I actually ran to try to catch it.  is that legal at my age?  But "almost" is the key word. We made it on and made it back.

As we got off the train, a dog with a raggedy bandana jumped out of a car from which a man was unloading plastic shopping bags filled with clothes.  The man yelled, a woman yelled, too.  I looked into the car and there was a whole pile of bags next to which sat a woman with crutches.  The dog came back, the man grabbed it roughly by the scruff, the bandana came off, the dog squealed, and all the nice people tried to give the whole thing a wide berth.  We left it behind with no idea about the safety of the dog or the people.

10:15 pm we were standing in another line - hot, sweaty line in Monmartre for ( drumroll, please) The Moulin Rouge.  What I liked: sitting in the tiered cabaret audience at a table with 4 people we didn't know, the first look at those lovely, topless women, the excitement, the glitz.  What I didn't like: with one exception, neither the musical/dance numbers nor many of the acts had a good sense of how to end.  I was left, not so much with a sense of wanting more; rather I felt incomplete.  Oh, yeah, and the champagne was very nice.

I was reminded after a while of George Burns on Johnny Carson. He mentioned that there was a woman in a see through blouse on his flight.  He added, "You know, if you've seen one, you've seen them both."  In this case, having seen then both, you've seen aaaaaall of them, over and over.  The women were all tall, young, slender, fit, beautiful and with surprisingly small variation in breast size and type.  The rocketed got nothing on this place for strict casting qualifications.

The show let out after the metro closed. We walked back, a 35 minute jaunt through a decidedly hot, but otherwise peaceful Paris night. We had no hassles nor, in spite of my fears, were we ever lost.  Clearly the gods want us to walk, rather than take the metro.  Luckily, we're leaving on Saturday, so the train station will be open, I presume.  It's not Tuesday, at any rate.  And I hope the metro is running,