Lights. Camera. Action.

On Sunday evening Charles and Clydette de Groot invited PWW faculty and staff to a soirée at their apartment on the Champs de Mars. A charm-filled apartment with unimpeded views of the Eiffel tower. To match the location I slipped into my dark blue cocktail dress and silver sandals and swept my hair up high.

Tom had his camera rolling as the guests walked through the door. I took a gift for Clydette - one of my photographs - and presented it to her on entering. She was thrilled and showed the photograph to the rolling camera as a close-up. I made sure to invite her and Charles to my vernissage.

It was a delightful event - a chance to drink nothing but champagne and eat wonderful food (filo-wrapped asparagus with sweet chilli dip, satay sticks with finely chopped chives, mozarella ball, basil and tomato kebabs, enormous prawns with alioli). I listened, I talked, I charmed. I elicited some new guests for the vernissage.

Clydette and I shared our lists of the good and bad books written about Paris. I discussed moose with my professor for the coming week (Kevin Jackson) who will be teaching a group of us how to produce Creative Non-Fiction. I listened with attentive ears when Charlotte Puckette mentioned her need for a photographer for her forthcoming cookery book - The Ethnic London Cookbook. I talked to Siobahn about the difficulties of initiating cultural change in an organisation. It was both fun and stimulating - a fabulous evening.

Outside in the street I slipped off my silver sandals, delved into my bag for a pair of flat ballereins and happily rode a solitary metro home.

Movie Dinner

After several e-mail exchanges (mutually complimentary) and a couple of phone calls (about timing) Tom Rudolph and I eventually met in the lobby of his very bijou hotel on rue de l'Université in the 6e. He wore the big smile of an adopted Parisian returning home.

His first words were to admire my dress (see previous blog posting - phew) and to describe a small restaurant down the street that he is particularly fond of. We ordered aperitifs followed by dinner and wine and swapped tales from childhood to Paris and back again seamlessly for several hours. 

He asked me what I found so inspirational about Paris. I looked up the height of the building dwarfing the street in shadow as the evening sun fell below the roof line and pointed out the golden glow in two window panels and the last vestiges of sun on two bars of a three-barred balcony. Tom did not follow my line of sight but was looking at me. "You should see your face right now," he said. "You are in love."

Practical movie conversation was limited to the sound equipment (lost by Air France between LA and CDG). They mis-labelled it "Transit". Interesting movie conversation was about how he knows Sherry Stringfield (she is his next door neighbour in LA). 

Back at his hotel I met Sherry and her boyfriend and Coco (the other videographer). I will see them around over the next couple of days but our time together is Thursday, filming Paris through my eyes. Sherry and I will have microphones on and I will take her on a tour of the 18e, cameras in hands, walking, talking and photographing. The crew, and Sherry will then come to the vernissage and film there too. Tom promised not to break any plates.

A Literary Walking Tour

John Baxter is described by his French in-laws as a "bon raconteur" and it is this attribute that ensured he was accepted into the family. He now lives in the 6e arrondissement in a building whose staircases and bannisters have been touched by the shoes and fingertips of writers such as Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. I visited John in May when he suggested I might like to be more involved with this year's workshop than simply as their web designer and attendee. I love him for the suggestion!

John conducts walking tours of the city, especially the area around Montparnasse where he explains why artists and writers were drawn to this particular part of the city in the 1920s, how the writers lived, how café culture grew as a result of Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann's sweeping changes to the city, where the most exquisitely overlooked Art Deco buildings can be found and how the philosophers, artists, actors, writers, and their muses lived and partied. 

He shepherded a group of us along rue Vaugirard, boulevard du Montparnasse, rue Delambre, Square Delambre and the Montparnasse cemetery for 2 hours and on Tuesday next week he will do the same thing in the film that Tom is making.