Letter from France 11

 

Wednesday, October 25, 1989

born: Pablo Picasso 1881

died: Bat Masterson 1921

 

Folks,

 

So far everyone I have heard from or about is okay. Rest assured our bridges and towers still stand. My immediate thought to send needed blankets, potable water (Perrier!), and fresh juggling supplies to San Francisco has cooled off in the light of day.

 

The reports I get are in French so a lot of the news is lost. I assure everyone here, however, that "yes, indeed, the bay area is a sinful place and this was certainly the act of a vengeful God for the drugs, immorality, and rampant sexuality of all flavors that are so prevalent."

 

Tomorrow I head off to Frankfurt and then Heidelberg to visit Sandy Brown and some friends. The real purpose is to take advantage of Sandy's American buying power at the PX and stock up on bbq sauce, chips, and peanut butter. The full-circle tour should take me back to Berlin and a stop in Paris before coming back to Châlons. Vacations here are hard.

 

Life has become pretty regular in France-land. I have a somewhat fixed, casual schedule and can generally find my students when and where they are supposed to be. Two days a week I have an early-morning class and am vigilant about arriving before the first-year students to make a good impression. Somehow they have gotten the idea that a good warm-up exercise for juggling consists of sitting around with two or three other students and a cup of coffee. Since this is a Saturday-morning class, I am lenient—assume they are talking about the day's workout—and wisely leave them alone. Last Saturday was the day before break. I had a cold so things were slow and casual. I sent one of the students out for croissants and the class had a relaxed, short juggling session. After that I had them go upstairs to the library and watch a video of a passing act and explained that something similar was to be their final. Universal babysitting behavior, feed 'em and turn on the tv. Nice to know it still works.

 

The other days are much more civilized. I have taken to sleeping in. There is a small danger in this and I must stay on guard; I have begun to think of the school as my personal message center. I stroll in mid-mornings to pick up mail and see who if anyone has called, say "hello" to a few jugglers and clowns, and then go to lunch. This is not the American work-ethic I was raised with and somehow seems to be appropriate behavior here.

 

Last week a meeting was called by the interim director for the entire school staff. As much as I understood it, he reinforced what we were already doing, said we were doing a good job, and to keep at it, a pretty standard start-of-the-year employee pep talk. This being France, at the end of the meeting champagne was poured and we toasted the upcoming year. This was eleven in the morning. During the small, informal conversations afterwards the director came up to me and—I think—congratulated me on not being able to speak French. I may have misunderstood some of the finer points, but there was a lot of talk about circus being international and wasn't it great that I was here to not even speak the language.

 

Speaking of which, last week I was in despair at ever really being able to speak French—too many subtle sound differences that were important to everyone but me. I had even come up with a new grammatical case for all the nouns I used. Along with the three standard nominative, accusative, and dative cases I now use the excusative case. This is the case where you actually apologize for mispronouncing the word while you are saying it. I had just about given up hope of ever finding a formal class to learn French when this week one was offered to me on a platter d'argent. The school has made provisions for the first-year students to have language instruction. Twice I week I troop off with all the other foreign first-year students to go to a language institute across town for communication skills. It comes, lentement.

 

As for the battle with the mosquitoes: I am definitely winning with the scientific use of meteorological warfare. I just waited for the weather to turn cold and am no longer troubled by them. What may have helped is the several travel brochures of sunny Spain, Greece and Italy I left lying around the room. I imagine most of the mosquitoes have already left, or at least booked passage on the next train south.

 

take care,

 

Todd Strong, Professeur du Jonglage

 

Centre National des Arts du Cirque

1, rue du Cirque

51000 Châlons-sur-Marne

FRANCE

 

 

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