I would not be the least surprised if someone comments telling me that this is not the first time I’ve used this titled. Like the great author Virginia Woolf, I am obsessed with needing a room of my own. A space of my own, where I can work and concentrate and get things done.

Mr French does not understand this. When I suggested that we should perhaps invest in a chambre de bonne so that I could have a place to write, he was literally aghast. It is the first time I have ever seen the facial expression “aghast” so it made an impression on me. A mix between shock, horrified and absolutely confused. It took me a while to understand that we were having a cultural difference. For Mr French, a dynamic young woman like myself requesting a room of her own is the Parisian equivalent of suburban housewife suggesting that you hire the hot new pool cleaner the Johnson’s down the street are using. It is a sign that Madame is looking for adventure.

I tried to explain that I find it impossible to work when I know there is dirty laundry piling up on the other side of the wall. It is easier just to throw it in the machine, which rumbles for hours, then beeps, demanding to be fed again. The cat wants out every hour, the post lady rings, the concierge buzzes, then Em comes home and my attention is required elsewhere. Mr French didn’t hear all that. He reminded me that I had spent months searching for a flat because I had insisted the living room be off the street. I needed quiet to work from home. And that the beautiful bookcase in our living room has a built-in desk so that I could work from home. He was hurt, confused and a little concerned, so I dropped the topic.

But I am obsessed and don’t give up easily. I thought shared work space would be a fair compromise. I found a couple of options, but they were all either too loud, too far, or unheated. Like Goldilocks testing the porridge, I was waiting to find something that was just right.

Monday morning my phone vibrated. A good friend was calling. A single Mom with two grown daughters who live abroad. Work was asking her to go to New Caledonia for a month. She has been working towards this position for years and needs a break from Paris. I was thrilled for her. But that was not why she was calling. She was looking for a cat sitter and thought of my quest for a room. Would I be willing to feed her cat for a month in exchange for a room of my own. An airy, light flooded apartment, more precisely, just a few blocks away from my home. She didn’t have to ask twice.

When I awoke this morning the sky was a vivid winter blue, the sun shone brightly and cast a gorgeous light over the city, making my heart smile as I headed out the door to a room of my own.

This post is what the French call and Hors Sujet. It has nothing to do with Paris and it is uninterestingly personal. Consider yourself warned.

When I was a young bride in Montréal, I met this incredible woman, Anne-Marie. The instant I met her, I wanted to be her. She was beautiful, charming and oh-so-elegant. Her home was charming, she’d lived in Africa; she and her husband went to balls and belonged to the fine art museum and were simply perfect.

AM and I became fast friends. We’d go on road trips together, sometimes with our husbands, sometimes without. We explored the East Coast, California, and once, with 4 very young children thrown into the back of a truck, the small villages of Hungary. When my husband du jour and I moved to Northern California she and her husband pour la vie moved to Southern California. Then we moved to Paris and they moved to Nevada; we divorced, they moved to Chicago. Our lives have been an adventure.

One of the things that AM and I shared was our belief in Creative Visualization. There is a book with the same title and it was our bible at the time. Basically, we believed that to live the life you dreamed, you had to dream it. It was that simple. Dream yourself into a gorgeous Bordeaux château, and it would happen. Yes, we were young and naïve. LIfe is not that easy, it interferes more than one ever imagined, throwing financial crises, illness and heart break across everyone’s path. And our dreams were incredibly silly. Once you’ve lived a week in a château, you realize that it takes 20 minutes just to open the shutters each morning… its a LOT OF WORK. But we had our dreams and we both dreamed large.

AM’s dream was to have a boutique that supported local artists and artisans. Well, its not a shop, but 20 years later she has a very successful website that does just that and more as she supports and inspires women. Amazingly, despite the geography that separates us, I can say “I was there” when inspiration struck and AM came up with the name “The Succulent Wife“.

One year for the holidays my husband du jour gave me a “dream” journal; it encouraged you to define your dream job, your dream vacation, your dream day.

This morning, as I completed my second lap around the Luxembourg Gardens, that journal and the dream day filtered through my thoughts. In my dream day I had breakfast with my girls, went to yoga class and came home to run my photography studio before preparing the (organic!) evening meal for a dinner at home with the family. I wrote that 15 years ago. This morning I breakfasted with M, went for a run and came home to spend the day writing. Tonight we’ll be having a lovely home cooked butternut squash soup. The painting has changed a bit; E has moved away, I now run instead hit the mat, writing supplanted photography and my ‘family’ has changed more than I ever imagined possible. But the framework: its all there and its wonderful and terrifying at the same time.

Of course, I was a dreamer, so I forgot some of the important stuff. Like earning enough to make a good living, having a room of my own and finding time to give back to the community (as for the health and well-being of my loved ones, remember, I’m a Jewish mother, you don’t write that kind of stuff down…it will attract the evil eye (ach, ach, poo, poo) and anyway, you’re saying it in your mind with every exhale you breathe!).

I am off now, to buy myself another dream journal and fill in the gaps for the next 20 years and a warning for you all to be very, very careful what you wish for!

by the Brazilian Ethos

Da Vinci, Picasso, Mehdi Ben Cheikh. I believe the art world has a new genius. Not in the traditional way, because Monsieur Ben Cheikh is not an artist, he runs the Paris art gallery Itinerrance, which specializes in Street Art. But he has created a modern masterpiece, ideal for the digital age.

In an interview, comparing street art to the 100 yr old cubist movement, the 38 year old, Tunisian born galleriest spoke of needing to create a new venue for street art, which, he asserts, doesn’t really belong in a gallery, or a museum. He is not wrong. He is so convinced of the need for alternative venues that he was able to convince the Mairie of the 13th arrondissement to lend him a housing project that had been vacated by its tenants and will be torn down Nov 1. Then he convinced 100 street artists from across the globe to come and do their thing in the 4500M2, 9 story, 36 apartment building.

The result is phenomenal and word spread quickly. After two weeks, the lines were 5 hours long, then 7 and by the time I arrived at 8:30 on a brisk autumn morning they were predicting a 9 hour wait. Visitors had been there since 5am for the 10am opening, using abandoned couches and found furniture to make the wait more comfortable. There were families with young children, grandparents, teens and hipsters of every color and every social background. Guards were helping the handicapped get to the front of the line where they have priority.

Like the artists who participated, journalists from across the globe showed up, gathering in a small park near the entrance. An unusually chatty and punctual local press arrived; nobody was going to risk missing this experience and we were all giddy in anticipation.  An elderly lady with a crutch approached a guard, yelling at him about the line and how it was destroying her neighborhood; notebooks came out, pens scribbling down the conversation. This had been her home and she did not like seeing the swarm of humanity at what had once been her doorstep. She came every morning to yell at the guards and collect her mail.

There was a loud uproar when the press agent opened the doors for 45 lucky journalists. We were told we’d have one hour, not one second more, to visit the entire project. We rushed up all 9 flights to the sound of frantic foot steps, laboured breathing and comments about needing to join a gym. In instant contrast, there was total silence on the landing of the 9th floor; no matter how in shape we were, the art had taken everyone’s breath away.

Its hard to explain the sensation. It isn’t merely street art, this is a carefully curated collection featuring the best graffiti artists in the world and they were given an extraordinarily rare opportunity, which inspired some truly incredible art. Unlike a museum, or a gallery YOU ARE IN THE ART. It is above you, below you and all around. The colors are rich and saturated. The light was dim, streaming in from random windows and the occasional spot. The mood became reverential. I think every one of us was completely awestruck as we rushed from room to room, some of us taking photos, other notes and the lucky few who were just taking it all in.
The time limit created an internal frenzy; we wanted to see it all, but needed to absorb it, to. I recognized some of my favorite graffiti artists from exhibitions at the Cartier Foundation and the Musée de la Poste; local boy C215 who pochoir-ed in some crazy cats, and the Brazialian Ethos with this playful bright scenes. Some of the artists have something to say. There were hommages to other great artists and authors, commentary on urbain decay, studies on the definition of home, or graffiti’s place in the world today. Other works were just about the beauty of the image.

At 10am exactly, I was on the rez de chaussez, ready to go, but there was more. I should have known, they’d gone down the basement, using reflective paint under black light. A large cow head loomed over the space like an ancient deity. There were abandoned strollers, body parts, a street sign. I walked out into the daylight trembling. I had been an integral part of a work of art for the last 55 minutes, and somehow, it had changed me. Created a gentle shift in my soul, like a true masterpiece.

There is a movement to save this work of art. I am against that. This is a home for people who would otherwise not have a home and it is for the greater good. I do hope the gallery saves some of the work. A wall here, a bathtub there. But I suspect that Monsieur Ben Cheikh will stay true to his original mission and let it go up in dust. Geniuses are like that. Able to stick with a vision.
There are more photos on my Facebook Page

If you’d like to learn more about the project and see some videos, click here

Yesterday, through the bizarre-atude that is the internet, I landed on an old article in Le Figaro listing the 100 things every Parisian should do at least once in Paris. Intrigued, I printed it out and head for #26, a café at “my” Café de Flore, where I sit writing this, scrunched between a very chic Parisienne and her actress daughter, and two ebullient Italians. At 13h30, the Parisiennes are having their morning coffee, the Italians wine.

My mind wandered to Miami, where I once found myself having to spend the day alone with a woman I hardly knew. My husband was a lawyer, hers a doctor and they were best friends, bound in friendship by a neurotic, Montreal Jewish upbringing. The woman and I took my rental car down to Key West and rented scooters, touring the island without helmets. Knowing that the very idea of our adventures would strike fear in our husbands’ hearts, we relished the moment! Scooters without a helmet would strike nothing in a Parisian, but according to Number 1 on Le Figaro’s list, locals get that same living-on-the-edge sensation by eating at a museum restaurant, without visiting the museum. Such rebels !

The categories themselves are pretty revealing. First and foremost, where to splash out on a gourmet delight! Then comes what to do when you’re in love, when you’re free, nightlife, culture and finally, things to do when you’re feeling blue, a common state of affairs in a city that puts so much emphasis on love. There is a miscellaneous category, which ends at 100, but the official list goes on to include 8 other activities, because, well, following the rules, even if its the writer himself who sets the rules, is just so unFrench!

The list inspires me… I start checking off what I’ve done; 66 activities, which include getting refused from the über chic night club Castel, missing my stop at Michel-Ange Molitor and having to do a major detour, finishing a book while sitting in the chairs in the Luxembourg gardens, and of course, running in the Tuilleries Gardens as dawn.

There are 9 that I’d never dream of, like paying 80€ for a roast chicken at L’Ami Louis or sharing a large steak for two at La Tour de Montlhéry, Chez Denise at six o’clock in the morning! I have, as the French say, passé l’age for that one.

Which means there are 25 things in Paris I’m now tempted to do. Mr French and I have not tried 3 of the 7 romantic things to do, which gives me some great ideas for how to greet him when he gets back from China next week! Its too late for him to order a cocktail the color of my eyes at the Ritz Hemingway bar before it closes, which leaves carving our names somewhere in Paris (they specify the catacombs) and getting a room for an hour, or three, at a love hotel.

I was surprised to see a visit to Deyrolle, the taxidermist, was not on the list, nor was anything even remotely related to fashion. I’d also have added a merry-go-round ride at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, demonstrating in a manif’, ice skating at the Hotel de Ville, the Champs Elysées Christmas market, and cycling the Canal Saint Martin on a Sunday. And a café at Flore? My n’est plus ultra at Flore is a flute of champagne with their cracked pepper kettle chips. Les Berges de la Seine didn’t exist when the list was compiled, so I’ve let that one slide.
Now I’m anxious to attack the 22 must do’s I haven’t done….a serious film festival, a pétanque game on the Canal Saint Martin, and making my hair stand on end at the Palais de la Découverte. So, next week I’m off to try and accomplish as many must do’s as possible in one day… wish me merde* !

*French for good luck.

Click here for… THE LIST Its in French, but its pretty easy to decypher. I’d love to hear what you’d add, what you’ve done and what you’d have left off!!!