Muppets On The Métro
Sorry the puppets in the puppet show at the rear of the train are a little hard to see, but I was a bit jetlagged, and too tired to get up and get in closer. Luckily, I still got a nice tight photo of this guy who's clearly campaigning very hard to be my French boyfriend.
Anyway, we have this friend in Paris, my friend's boyfriend, a retired master woodworker named Pierre, who speaks no English. Despite that, he and my boyfriend Gregg, whose command of French includes the words "bonjour" and "merci," and the ability to point to exactly the right cut of meat at Boucherie Roger, really hit it off.
Gregg and I are coming back to Paris in a while, enroute to a noir film festival in Italy he needs to attend, and he wants to be able to talk directly with Pierre. He proposed hiring a translator. I told my friend, who said this would be a bad idea, because Gregg would miss too much, as Pierre carries on the French tradition of mime. No, not Marcel Marceau whiteface mime, but Pierre's in-the-moment hilarious imitations of people to get his point across if ever he says a word in French we don't know -- or just to make us laugh. Typical of this is his pantomime, when he sees very old ladies on the bus, of giving them an injection (description not complete without his "psssst!" sound effect) and sending them on the bus line all the way to the end, to the cemetery Père Lachaise.
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