Bonjour! Well, if you’ve even the tiniest bit of Francophilia, you will know that tomorrow is Bastille Day (or Fete National, and I apologize as I don’t know how to use special symbols on Blogger so I don’t have the proper diacritical marks on those words), the huge, huge holiday in which the French celebrate the storming of the Bastille and the birth of the modern nation of France as we and they know it.
How will you be celebrating it? Will you be celebrating it at all? With the economy in shreds, I’m wondering if people will be putting on parties as many often have done in the past, with endless bottles of Veuve Cliquots, catered hors d’oeuvres and mini-film festivals on big, flat screen TV’s. Not that I’ve ever attended such an event, but I’ve heard they exist. (The closest I’ve ever come to throwing such a party myself was my mother’s 60th, when I and B. hosted a Parisian-themed party at my brother’s big house. I wore the standard striped tee, framed a huge poster of the Eiffel Tower and played a couple of compilation CD’s, including Cafe de Paris, as well as a Jane Birkin album. To be quite honest, I’m not sure anyone noticed the theme at all.)
One of the local papers offered up some tips on how to celebrate Bastille Day, including a suggested list of films to get into a “Frenchy” mood. The list is, to say the least, confounding: The Devil Wears Prada? The final season of Sex and the City? Forget Paris? Ratatouille???? Okay, I kind of get that the first three picks were all set in the City of Light, or at least parts of them were. But Ratatouille? The only truly French film on that list was Marion Cotillard’s earth-moving La Vie en Rose, but otherwise almost all the others represents Paris through the very limited eyes of Americans, and Hollywood Americans at that. (Although I do have a soft spot for Love in the Afternoon and Gigi. At least they had real French and European actors in them, and Gigi was based on a real French story.) Oh well. The article does offer some tempting recipes for lamb chops and banana crepes, so all is forgiven.
With all that’s been happening off-line (the moves, planning MIFG’s migration to its very own site, writing, etc.), I haven’t really had much time to think about Bastille Day itself, for which I’m a bit embarrassed. After all, my bloody blog is My Inner French Girl, and how can I possibly miss such a milestone event? I’ll simply chalk it up to this unbearable Texas weather (100+ F weather almost every day for a couple of weeks!) and leave it at that.
I will, however, head over to Whole Foods tomorrow morning and pick up some wine, cheese, bread, fruits, and maybe crackers. I’ll pop in one of my go-to French music CD’s — or tune my computer into TSFJazz.com and crank up the speakers. I have a bunch of striped tees and will pay homage to Jean Seberg’s iconic image by donning one. (I’ll even press it, if need be. But I hope I don’t have to. That would be My Inner American Girl coming out.) And no faux depictions of Paris for me. This being MIFG, I’ll be sure to sit down and revel in a real French film, which I will make sure to review for your reading pleasure on Friday!
What I will not do, however, although I know I had said I would, is unveil the new-and-hopefully-improved My Inner French Girl tomorrow. Again, I will defer to My Inert French Girl, the one who let the days fly by until she woke up and realized, Oh damn, it’s tomorrow??? As many of you are aware, MIFG will be moving (at last!) to its own URL (www.myinnerfrenchgirl.com) and will have a cleaner, classier, more personalized layout and tons more content to help you tap into your own Inner French Girl. It’s still a work in progress, but one that’s coming along nicely. I will announce its debut here quite soon, but in the meantime know that I’ve simply succumbed to the lazy, hazy days of summer and am working slower and more deliberately than I intended. Not that I’ve any regrets. Summer is for lovers, summer is for layabouts, summer is for…doing very little, if anything at all.
Photo, Drapeau Francais, by Cyril Plapied, on Flickr.com.
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