Galleries Lafeyette, 2:14 PM

Look.... over there....NO - not at THAT TABLE...why would I want you to look at an old Bavarian couple? Left....See her? Obviously French. Who else would pair fingerless cashmere gloves with 2000 Euro snakeskin boots? No, definitely not from around here. Oh, bless - she's reading a used copy of "The Second Sex". I'll bet she's not reading it at all - just bought it at the second hand store so she could come here and LOOK like she was into it... Reading Simone de Bouvoir in public is simultaneously alluring and forbidding. Men don't understand, but they want women to think they understand, but only so they can screw them, and she knows this. I should get a chair in Women's Studies for that one! Who upholsters the chairs in Women's Studies? Is it Laura Ashley! Oh, I am so horrrrrible. Say, have you ever read that short story "Hairball" by Margaret Atwood? It is about a woman who tries to play by the rules in a man's world and gets so pulped in the process she develops a huge tumor...which, once removed, she rolls in cocoa, places in a box of chocolates, and messengers to the man that left her for someone younger and cuter. It is the only work of fiction I have ever read which made me comprehend what it must be like to be a woman scorned.

Oh that girl! You'd think she was HOMELESS the way she was dressed, but I assure you her outfit is VERY expensive. It takes a lot of money to look like a bum.... but as they say, God is in the details and the sweater is angora. Did you know Angora is rabbit? They shear bunnies to make sweaters. The world is fucked.... And she KNOWS she is driving them crazy! Classic Madonna/Whore - chaste, ethereal makeup with slutty red lips and black nail polish, chipped just so, but lustrous enough so you know its Chanel or something. Please tell me you've read Camille Paglia!

Look at her now...nibbling her croissant like a cat drinking cream. Liberty leading the people, not with a raised tricolour, but a pain au chocolate…hot as an affair.

…God, how I love the French. Who else can make a 3 act play out of a piece of pastry....build an entire civilization on something ephemeral as taste - on the complex alchemy that turns butter and flour into a thousand layers? But really, that is how the French are - they do some fancy tricks with base elements, puff themselves up , put themselves on display for all to see.... then poof -gone in one bite. But what a moment! The first time I went to Paris, I arrived at 6 in the morning - pulled my suitcase down the Avenue Montaigne, and it was so beautiful I forgot to breathe. Seriously... I had to be revived by an immortel from the Academie Francaise in full regalia. He just happened to have some smelling salts.

Yes, I know I have an overactive imagination. How else are you going to get through Berlin in February? Maybe I should just go to France? But you don't GO to France, you REMEMBER France. You remember every detail and it throws the quotidien into high relief. The contrast between your daily existence and the gloire of memory is intoxicating. God - if I eat another Madeleine they'll think I'm Proust. And then I can write a big fat book and we can REALLY do Paris - and not the aide-memoire kind either. I'm talking about a suite at the Crillon....high tea at Fauchon. Fashion shows and sable throws.....

I'm talking about the moment you spend your life waiting for. You take base elements. With a little luck and ingenuity you puff yourself into a thousand layers, and even if it only lasts 10 seconds you can say you really lived. Yes I am comparing life to a dessert. Oh don't look like that.... they both come out of the oven.

But you should KNOW by now that I am completely ridiculous. Ridiculous and lovable and contradictory and avaricious, yet saintly when required. I am all of these things, and I am more. It isn't any special insight, just what happens when I drink in the afternoon.

Oh, shit - the girl is gone. She left with the Bavarian couple. How odd. Kinky, even. Maybe they liked the boots. Have you ever wondered what it is with Germans and boots?

For God's sake, don't STARE. Do what women everywhere have done for centuries - look at the mirror in your compact. And if you're not going to finish your french fries, I would be happy to oblige. They fry their potatoes in beef tallow here- the only way.

Oh, STOP IT...life is cruel. Rabbit sweaters, snakeskin boots....objects cooked in rendered cow. All about conquest. Sex and death, Sex and death - a thousand different times, a thousand different ways. And the sooner you realize that, the more exciting your life will be. God, there is this fabulous Helmut Newton photo of a perfectly manicured woman wearing huge diamond rings, tearing apart a roasted chicken...only the most erotic thing I have ever seen.

Now, what was I talking about? Oh, I can't remember.

But wouldn't it have been fabulous to have met Diana Vreeland? She said that in Paris, before the war...In Paris, people used to have 3 fittings for a NIGHTGOWN. She said that when war was declared, she was at a fitting with Chanel…she said how sad she was, moping her way to the last boat out of town before the Germans came.

All she could think about were her clothes.

Shocking, isn't it.

Ooooh.... I love your new sweater. Purple is such an august colour.

Did you know they used to make royal purple out of mollusc shells?

Did you know that molluscs don't have bones, but still have weird exoskeletons?

Fascinating…

Did you know I can't eat molluscs, even though they are my favourite thing?

Last time I ate them I ended up in the hospital with a Benedryl drip.

Oh I fear I shall PERISH before I run out of things to say.

I have a solution!

Live forever. What do you think?

Maybe I should just shut up and die?

Oh, fuck off and give me your fries....