Paris, Day 2 -- Further Up and Further In on the Islands

26 July 2011

The line to go up to the top of the Notre Dame Cathedral is as long as the cathedral itself.  I am standing behind three Italians (I think they're Italian), and in front of a Russian family (I think they're Russian).  All these voices!  I was in front of some American teenagers, but they decided ice cream was more important than history.

This morning I slept in a bit.  Traveling does take it out of a person.  The gas stove and coffee maker were easier to use, from experience, so I decided to try the shower.  (I had sponge-bathed the day before, but as Uncle Harold noted in an e-mail, it would be a long couple of weeks if I didn't figure out how the shower works!)

If I was staying in a hotel, I'm sure things would require less figuring out.  But staying in a hotel would not be free.  And there's nothing wrong with learning new skills.

"What is there to figure out about a shower?" you may be thinking.  Well... there is a brass hand shower apparatus hooked by a hose to the faucet.  And there is no shower curtain.

Grace and coordination have never been my best qualities, and I am quite sure that trying to use the hand shower apparatus would result in a flood of biblical proportions, with poor Pepito and Bout de Zan looking on in horror (and hoping for an ark).  So I took a bath.  It's a very nice bathtub for a bath -- deep and comfortable.

I can't remember the last time I took a bath.  I always seem to be rushing somewhere.  Fast shower.  Fast get ready.  But everything in Paris seems to be urging me to slow down, and be more mindful of what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.

Including this line outside the cathedral.

Which I'm still in.

So here is something that amused me when I came in the other day.  I was a little embarrassed at the size of my suitcase, and I had to wait a bit for it to come through.  But even trying to pack light, I couldn't manage just doing a carry-on.  But then D. (who picked me up at the airport) said, "That's all you have?  For three weeks?  I take two of those just for a weekend!"

An interesting thing about the subway doors here, that I noticed on that same trip.  They do not open automatically.  You have to manually unlatch them when you want to get out at the station.  I'm so glad that D. picked me up at the airport, because these are the kinds of little things that get you.  It's good to be able to see someone else doing something before you need to do it yourself.

I am still in line.  I have moved the length of three crepe shops.  We're getting close, now!  Fairly close!

The Italian people in front of me have the same (DK Eyewitness Travel) guidebook that I do, except theirs is in Italian.  Funny.  I show mine to them, and we are all amused.  "Al mismo," I say.  The same.

The stone stairs, when we reach them, have deep dips in the middle.  How many years of feet have passed this way, to wear the stone down so?

I got in.

It is several hours later, now, and I am sitting in a Spanish tapas bar, where all the menus are in French, but the waiter speaks English with me.  "Where are you from?" he asks.  "New Jersey," I say.  Which I sort of am.  Most recently, at least.  He has a friend who is about to go off to school in Boston.

The tapas bar is on one of the little side streets off Sebastopol, which I am finally bold enough to venture into this evening, in search of dinner and a place to sit down.

The side street is immediately more interesting than Sebastopol.  Little restaurants, shops, bars, lots of people.  A bakery, which I might check out tomorrow, and a little market with fresh fruit.  No cars.  Just people (and motorcycles).

The sangria (only 2 Euro during happy hour!) tastes good.  It was dipped out of a large vat of the stuff that's sitting on the counter.  On the waiter's recommendation, I am eating Plancho Manchego y Serrano.  Which is basically a ham and cheese sandwich, but the meat and cheese and bread are all really good, and it's served on a fetching little bread board, and "plancho manchego y serrano" sounds much cooler than "ham and cheese sandwich."  A glass of gazpacho tops off my tapas supper.  (Gazpacho is basically tomato soup, except cold and spicy.)

I spent the afternoon at the top of the cathedral, then buying an ice cream cone on the Ile St. Louis, then visiting the Holocaust Deportation Memorial.

Gargoyle keeps watch.  Seine and Eiffel Tower under his care.

The upper decks of the cathedral were worth the hour wait, eight euros and 387 steps.  The views!  The gargoyles!  And the detail you can see on the cathedral itself from up there.  Statues and gargoyles on the roof have been given the same loving attention to detail as the things inside.

Ellen, with gargoyles, at the top of Notre-Dame.  Photo by the nice Italian lady who was in front of me in line.

Is it still called a gargoyle if it's an elephant?

I'm not sure who the green people are, but I like them.  They lead up to the base of the spire, which was designed by Viollet-le-Duc.

My legs were wobbly after descending the stairs, which were all long, narrow circular staircases.  (Which reminds me of another trip I took, a long time ago, with my family.  We visited the Astor Column, at the northwestern tip of the Oregon coast.  Dad and I walked around and around, in wider and wider circles, reading the story of Astoria that is wrapped around the outside.  Then we walked up the inside, around and around.  I still remember how the world spun...  I had to hold onto the railing.)

So I went for ice cream.  Today, not then.  Both D. and my friend Peter had recommended the ice cream on the Ile St. Louis, so I crossed the bridge behind the cathedral to find it.  "I think the name translated as butterfly," Peter said.  "Ask for Berthillon brand," D. said.  So I did.  It was excellent.  They had all kinds of flavors, but there's nothing wrong with vanilla...

If Ile de la Cite is for history, Ile St. Louis appears to be for shopping.  I strolled along the sidewalks, peering in the windows of scarf shops and candy shops and jewelry shops and even a marionette shop.  For all your marionette needs.

It was nearly six by then, so I knew that the Crypt Archeologique and the other cathedral were not going to be possible today.  But the Holocaust Deportation Memorial was right there on the end of the Ile de la Cite.  I passed over the bridge again, which contained a Parisian singer, an accordion player, a man with a harmonica and a marionette, and a young man singing the blues with his jazz combo.

I made my way through the plain gate, through the plain square, and found two guards at the entryway to the memorial.  They made sure i was where I intended to be, checked my purse, then said that pictures were okay and flash was okay, but don't go left.  So I went right.

This was the place where the Jews of France were gathered up and deported to the concentration camps and death camps by the Nazis during World War II.  Two hundred thousand men, women and children.

This, too, is our history.

"Forgive, but don't forget," it says on the wall over the door.  And on the other walls, the names of the camps.

I plan to visit the Crypt Archeologique and Cathedral Saint Chapelle tomorrow.  And then I feel like I will have fully explored Point Zero -- the place where all distances in Paris are measured from -- the arrondissements (neighborhoods) circling out from there like the shell of a snail.

Paris, Day 1 -- Nervous Beginnings and Notre Dame

25 JULY 2011

I am in Paris.

I am on another continent.

D. met me a the airport yesterday, and navigated us via train and subway to her mother's apartment, where I will be staying for the next three weeks.

You might call it a railroad flat, as all the rooms are in a row, but the outside wall curves, and the doors are in different places (and are different sizes), so I'd say it's more of a meander flat.

We had a good hour of instruction on where things are and how they work, made more interesting because a lot of things work differently here than in the U.S.  And I don't speak French, and D's mum doesn't speak English.  D. translated some, her mum demonstrated some, and we all waved our arms a bit.  And then they left on their vacation, and here I am!  An American in Paris.  A broad abroad.

It was late afternoon when they left, and I didn't go out after.  I was exhausted from the overnight flight, and a little intimidated by the apartment lessons and all the little Google Translator translated notes that Madame left me, taped to the walls.

In my little Parisian flat!

The kitchen.

The sitting room.

I believe this is a player piano, but haven't opened it yet...

The view out the window, through Madame's plants and along the winding, narrow walk-street.

This first morning in Paris, I set my alarm for six.  I fed Pepito and Bout de Zan, and figured out how to use the gas stove and the little coffee maker.

Pepito!

Bout de Zan (named after a licorice candy).

I'm taking my time, settling.  I have three weeks, so I don't need to rush, for once.  But also, I'm a little scared to go outside.  Will I be able to work the strange door locking mechanism?  Will I be able to find my way back to the apartment?  It is on a tiny walk street, off a small street, off a boulevard, and all the signs are in a language I don't speak.  And my little brother inherited all the genes for navigation in our family...

I begin with a trip to the Monoprix -- both supermarket and department store.  It is right around the corner.

I manage to buy bread and milk and cheese and fruit and shampoo.  I'm fairly certain it's shampoo.  The blond neighbor lady smiles at me, and says bon jour (and other things I don't understand).  I met her yesterday, when Madame showed me where to take the garbage.  It is nice to see a familiar face.  I pass the door coming back, but backtrack and find it.  My key fits the lock, and I make it back through the door, and my first little Parisian adventure is a success.


I've had a bit of lunch, and am now setting off to try to find the Ile de la Cite.  And hopefully find my way back again after!

Even before I find the Ile de la Cite, it is a landmark for me, as I am staying in the garment district, just north of it.  On the Paris map, I find the Seine, then I find the Ile de la Cite in the middle of it, then I go up from there along Sebastopol, to Reamur.  That is my important corner to remember, for getting back again.  It has its own Metro station, which makes it even easier to find on the map.  "M" for Metro.

I write now from a little cafe on the island, where I am drinking a cappuccino and trying to find myself on the island map in my guidebook.  All this cartography all of a sudden!

It's good to be out and about.  Like most things (like writing!), it is easier to keep going than it is to start.

I think maybe this is the good sort of scared, the kind that makes you brave.  Maybe I should call this little blog series "Alone in a Language Not My Own."  Which reminds me of Walter Mosley's "Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned" -- an entry in my "Best Title Ever" list, along with Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" and Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."

My guidebook says that there is no place older than this in Paris.  And that the city is named for a Celtic tribe named the Parisii, who liked the island's defendability.  That must have been before they built all the bridges...

The view from Pont Neuf.

I crossed over on the Pont Neuf, which is the oldest bridge in Paris, even though its name means "new bridge."  (There is something in that which reminds me of Ozymandias.)  From the bridge, I can see the temporary beach they've constructed along the Seine.  They truck in sand so the city dwellers can lie out there and sun themselves, and the children can play.  It sounds strange, but it's really lovely.

Charlemagne!  

Now it is after six.  I heard the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral ring... and promptly sat myself down at a little restaurant on the island, and ordered a beer and some dinner.  What have I been doing with my afternoon?  I've been here!

Notre-Dame.

Mary, flanked by angels, over a long row of saints.

Me in front of Notre-Dame Cathedral!  Picture courtesy of the nice Michigan couple.

The cathedral is where I spent a good part of my afternoon.  It's magnificent.  I remember learning, in an art history class at Chemeketa Community College, that cathedrals were built to allow human beings to experience the glory of God, or Heaven -- as close as we could, here on earth.  To inspire awe.  And I have to say, Notre Dame took my breath away.

Inside the cathedral.  Candles and prayers.

In the gardens behind the cathedral.  This is where the flying buttresses are!  Also, a rose garden...

In line, I chatted with a nice couple from Michigan.  "We're sixty-six," she said.  "This is our big blow out trip, and we're trying to make it count."  They are tackling three cities of Europe, two weeks each.  They're ready to enjoy it all, and remember it for the rest of their lives.  Me, too.

Things I noticed today:

• There are lots of motorcycles here, and sometimes they ride on the sidewalk.
• There are lots of smokers here.
• Ballet flats are in.  Le mode.
• When you eat, here, you are encouraged to take your time.  
• People really do wear a lot of scarves here, both men and women.

Poor Heloise and Abelard... were here.

The flower market!

Things I liked today:

• The statue of Charlemagne, outside of Notre Dame.
• The flying buttresses of the cathedral.
• All the bridges to the island.
• Happening on the residence of Heloise and Abelard.
• Finding the flower market.
• Chocolate mousse for dessert on a perfect, warm evening in Paris, eaten outside as the sun began to set.
• Walking along the water, watching the people and the river.

The beach by the river.

Walking by the water.

Oh, beauty!

Lock your love, like a bicycle, to the fence on the bridge, and it will last forever...

Things I plan to do tomorrow:

• Return to the island to see several things that were closed today, namely the Crypt Archeological, the upstairs part of the Cathedral, the World War II Holocaust Memorial and the Ile de Louis -- which you can reach by bridge from the Ile de la Cite.

What a lovely day!

Upcoming Theater Travel!

This year is turning into one of unexpected opportunities for travel.  What a way to bring my time as a Hodder Fellow to a close!

Summer 2011:

Paris, France -- Tourism, housesitting and play research are all part of my first trip abroad.  And what a trip!  Three weeks at the "moveable feast!"  Stay tuned here for reports and pictures from the City of Light.

Oregon -- There's no place like home.

Fall 2011:

Oregon, redux -- I'll be the host playwright again this year at the Ashland New Plays Festival!  This is a fantastic event, held in the city that hosts the inimitable Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but a celebration of new work all its own.

Independence, Kansas -- I'm delighted to be joining playwright Ken Urban as the two playwrights-in-residence at the William Inge Center for the Arts.  We'll both be workshopping new plays.  I'll be working on my Antarctic adventure story in progress, "Magellanica: A New and Accurate Map of the World."

Alcyone Anthologized!

If you're interested in seeing how five contemporary women playwrights adapt or engage with the writing of five women playwrights from 1860 or earlier, I hope you'll buy yourself a copy of this anthology of plays from Halcyon Theater's 2011 Alcyone Festival.  Limited edition!  Special price!  Click here to check it out.  (Enter coupon code MYBOOK305 for 15% off the list price -- offer ends August 15!)

The Lineup:

• J. Nicole Brooks' Shotgun Harriet
  • inspired by Pauline Hopkins' Peculiar Sam
• Jennifer Fawcett's The Invaders
  • inspired by The Forest Princess by Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes
• EM Lewis's Strong Voice
  • inspired by works of Hrosvitha
• Coya Paz's  FA$HION
  • adapted from Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion
• Caridad Svich's A Little Betrayal among Friends
  • freely adapted Maria de Zaya y Sotomayor's La Traicion en la Amistad

Enjoying the edges of Williamstown

A talented director friend of mine, Laura Savia, is working at Williamstown this summer.  While the big slots were filled by bigger playwrights than me, Laura gave me a call when she was looking for material for the apprentices to work with.

Maybe some day one of my full-lengths will be on the mainstage at Williamstown (I can only hope!).  But for the moment, I am delighted to have student actors working with my words at that fabulous place, where old plays are revived, new plays are revered, and audiences receive the best of summer theater experiences.

A short play by EM Lewis in rehearsal by apprentices at the Williamstown Theater Festival.

Young actors in rehearsal.

Alcyone 2011 Blog Post, Part II

The Art of Adaptation

In the last year, I've had two opportunities to practice the art of adaptation.  They were my first tries, and I learned a lot as I went along.  The first thing I learned was that any adaptation is a sort of marriage of two minds -- and like any marriage, though it can be extremely rewarding, it ain't easy.

ENTANGLEMENT

The first adaptation project came to me through a playwriting colleague.  A book publisher was looking to add multi-media content to its offerings.  A first attempt had been successful for them, so they decided to branch out -- asking four dramatic writers to create new fictional stories for the screen, using the books of four of their non-fiction writers as a starting point.  Each thirty-minute film would ideally showcase the ideas of each of their writers, but be compelling stories on their own -- and able to stand together or apart, depending on how the publisher chose to market them.

I was getting ready to leave Los Angeles when this opportunity came my way.  I'd received a playwriting fellowship at Princeton University that was taking me to the other side of the world -- well, to New Jersey, anyway -- to work on my new play for the 2010-2011 academic year.  I'd already decided to quit my sensible day job at the end of May, in order to give myself a real-live summer vacation back on the family farm, in between.  I liked the director when I met him, the project sounded like an interesting challenge, the money they were offering would pay for my moving expenses... and so I signed on.  I now had a project for my summer vacation!  Here's how it went:

• I read the source material.
• I thought about the source material.
• I came up with half a dozen possible story scenarios, and then discussed them with the director and lead writer.
•  For the three favorites, I came up with rough outlines.
• With the director, we chose one scenario to be my project.
• After discussions with the director and head writers, I refined the outline, changing some key features to make sure it fulfilled the needs of the over-all project.
• Upon turning in the refined outline, I was paid the first of two installments for my work on the project.
•  I left for Oregon -- and began to write the script.
• There was angst and wrestling with the source material and some tearing out of hair.  But doesn't all writing feel this way sometimes?  There were also moments when it was fun and fantastic.  I liked the characters I'd created.
• I turned in my first draft.
• I took an hour's worth of notes on the first draft over the phone, scribbling as fast as I could.
• I struggled to figure out the notes, and how to implement them. 
• I turned in the second draft.
• I took another hour's worth of notes on the second draft.  But I'd clearly been writing in the right direction, despite that seeming evidence to the contrary.
• I struggled to figure out the notes and implement them.
• I turned in my final draft.  (We were contracted for three.)
• I was paid the final check for my work.

I'm very glad I did the project.  It gave me the chance to work with a bunch of smart, creative, hard-working people on a type of project I'd never worked on before.  I was paid -- well -- for my work.  I was proud of my finished script, even if it was a different kind of pride than I have in a creation all my own.  I used some skills from my graduate program at USC that I hadn't had a chance to before -- outlining the screen story with Frank Tarloff, and screenwriting classes with Ben Masselink and Jason Squire.  And I got a hint of what writing for television must be like -- something that I'm interested in, like a lot of playwrights these days.

Last week, the director sent me a promo for the film.  It's done, it's in the can, they're almost done editing it.

It looks gorgeous.

I hope it's good!

I'm glad I did it.

As a general rule, I’ve found that any time someone offers me the opportunity to work really hard at something I love -- I should say yes.  Which brings me to the second adaptation project I said yes to this year.

STRONG VOICE

Not long after finishing my summer vacation and film adaptation project and moving east, I received an e-mail from Tony Adams, artistic director of Halcyon Theater in Chicago.  He’d produced my play "Heads" in his Alcyone Festival of works by women a couple years before.  And he and his associate artistic director (and wife) Jenn Adams had decided to do something extra crazy and bold for the 2011 Alcyone Festival.  They were asking five women playwrights with whom they had worked before to either adapt, riff upon, or otherwise engage with the work of a woman playwright from 1870 or earlier.

I said yes.

I also said I didn't really know the work of any women playwrights from 1870 or earlier.  (They weren't deterred by this -- it rather proved their point, that there was a canon there, ripe for retrieving.) 

Tony suggested I give Hrosvitha a try.  She was the earliest of the women playwrights whose work survives to this day.  She was a Tenth Century Benedictine canoness who lived in an abbey at Gandersheim in Saxony (now Germany) and wrote odd little comic plays and serious poems about the early Christian women martyrs.

I still don't know why Tony suggested her to me.  But as I read her work, and read about her, something pinged inside me.

It's hard to say what.  Maybe it's that I was raised Catholic.  Maybe it's that I remember reading books about the early Christian martyrs as a child (along with every other book I could get my hands on) that intrigued and disturbed me.  Maybe it's that I have struggled with issues of faith and philosophy and spirituality as an adult.  Or maybe it's that the notion of martyrdom seems so much more overwhelmingly complicated to me now than it did when I was a child.  It's not that I don't think there aren't things worth dying for (terrified as I am of mortality).  It’s that the practical application of so-called martyrdom seldom lives up to my expectations, and seems to frequently take a lot of innocent people with it.

So I ended up writing a play about 9/11.

Hrosvitha is known as (in fact, she called herself) the "strong voice" of Gandersheim.  So I called my play "Strong Voice."  Halcyon promised to produce it in their Chicago theater if I wrote it, so I set the story in Chicago.  Halcyon's mission includes producing plays that reflect the beautiful diversity of their city, so I made my heroes an African-American woman and a Latino man -- two Chicago police detectives who are investigating the disappearance of a nun and the desecration of a mosque in the wake of 9/11.

I've always liked detective stories, since the first Sherlock Holmes stories I devoured when I was in elementary school.  And what I ended up with was definitely a detective story.  But it was also the story of a bunch of people re-evaluating what they believe in the wake of events that challenged everything they knew to be true.

Hrosvitha herself became a character in the play, literalizing my own struggles to come to terms with her and her work.  And in some ways, it became a play about storytelling.  How we tell our own story, how we frame our lives and beliefs in words, and who will have the strongest voice in the most difficult times.

It hasn't been an easy play to write.  And even though it's playing now in Chicago, I'm not sure I'm done wrestling with it.

The process was helped along, though, by input from others.  Much of my work as a writer is done alone in my room, muttering under my breath in all my characters' voices in a strange, solitary, noisy literary schizophrenia.  But I love getting feedback.  I value being part of a writing workshop.  I want my course corrected when I veer and to be called on any and all bullshit, sentiment and overwriting I might allow to creep in.  Encouragement doesn't hurt either.

I received good support and feedback on pieces, parts and drafts of this project from the folks in my playwriting workshop at Passage Theater in Trenton, fellow playwright Jami Brandli (who kindly gave me notes on an ugly early draft), and my smart and capable director Margo Gray.  All mistakes remaining are, of course, my own.

Margo was casting the play before I'd figured out its ending.  The play changed drastically during rehearsals, as I refined the characters and figured out what the play was about.  (Because that's never something I know going in -- always something I figure out as I go along.)  Everything about the play happened very fast, in play terms.

When I sat out in the audience on June 12, watching the first performance, I wondered at it all.  Me, a dead Benedictine woman, and a bunch of blank pieces of paper.  Add research and work and time.  Temper with creative criticism and infuse with the talents of director, committed actors and a theater company that stands behind its promise to produce new work.  And you have a play.

Both of these projects were the broadest sort of adaptations.  I'd like to try my hand at a closer adaptation, perhaps of a young adult novel.  I'd also like to write a spec television script -- mucking about with someone else's characters for a bit.

I'm busy working on some original plays now -- entirely in my own head again, for better and for worse.  But I haven't seen the last of adaptation.  It's a challenge I'd like to take on again. 

Working hard at something you love is always good.

James Baldwin talks about writing...

I remember seeing this clip years ago.  It was in a documentary film about Baldwin that I checked out of the Salem Public Library, soon after discovering Baldwin's wonderful, complicated novels.  I loved his read-out-loud beautiful prose and difficult characters.  And after watching the documentary, I loved him, too.  Through my most difficult times, it was nice to think of someone whose difficult times made mine pale in comparison, and who replied to them with such strength, humor and spirit.