Stories

I was out for a walk today in the neighborhood and I took three photos – left, center and right – and PhotoShop stitched them together into this panorama. I'm determined to do that everyday, walk that is, regardless of the weather. I've got cabin fever and need fresh air and exercise!

I have slipped on ice three times this winter right around the house, and hit the ground all three times. I bruised my hand one time as I went to break the fall. I've convinced myself that next time, I'm going to tuck my arms in and break the fall with a shoulder. They recommend that for skiers and snowboarders – sidewalks aren't snow though – I may be going in for shoulder surgery...

I spend a great deal of my life working functions that exceptionally wealthy people go to. My official jobs have ranged from handing out escort cards to rangling opera singers, to making emergency Staples runs, to standing and looking pretty. I’m especially good at that last one.

But my unofficial job is where I really excel: soothing the savage rich lady.

Actually, I’m pretty great with rich old men as well, but soothing the savage rich man sounds like the subject for a whole other blog, by a writer who isn’t me, and you need to buy a subscription to read it.

If any of you are considering entering into the exciting field of nonprofit fundraising, you need to learn one thing: rich ladies like it when you like their blouse. Ok, or their jewelry or their hair or their bag, but blouse is a funnier word, and relates specifically to one unfortunate such occurrence I experienced recently.

A good friend of mine from London moved back to Paris a few years ago and met her now-husband on her first weekend back in the City of Lights.  He is now a Senator, and this lovely couple invited us to join a private tour and dinner at the Sénat last night.

I hadn’t entirely understood what we were getting ourselves into.  I’ve strolled around the Jardins Luxembourg almost every day since we arrived in Paris seven weeks ago, and though I knew that the gardens technically belong to the Sénat, I hadn’t stopped to consider the actual building and what went on inside.  We were late (of course), and the tour was in rapid fire French, so I can’t be too precise about the politics, the electoral system, how a bill becomes a law, or even if Senators are the people who are responsible for making laws in France.

I can, however, speak to the few gems that I was able to glean on our whiz through the second half of the tour, including some obvious contrasts between the Sénat here and the United States Senate and its Capitol Building in Washington, DC:

Although predicted to be arriving in the two thousand tweens, the age of "Artificial Humor," or A.H., is too quickly upon us in these waning, whining days of 2009, and contemporary artists are feeling threatened by the competition.

“We never thought it would happen to us,” said Woody Allen, once  considered the Jews’ Jewel spewer of comic genius, now competing with an avatar of his early stand up persona which is WRITING NEW ALLENESQUE MATERIAL!  “Machines originating intelligence (A.I.) and music (A.M.) seem logical, but artificial comedians? Sure, plenty of funny looking Baby Boomer kids mimicked me in the old days, but now I’ve been completely cloned by some computer.  At least they waited til Dangerfield was dead…the lucky dog.”

The late Dangerfield’s avatar has been booked to perform for a week in Vegas via a Powerpoint presentation this Chanukah, and seats sold out mere moments after going on sale.  It’s also featured as a nude centerfold in this month’s “Wired” Magazine, which is watching the "Artificial Humor" movement closely.