Paris Nonsense, Part V

Mesdames et Messieurs:

The water wasn't running when we woke this morning in our new apartment near Beauborg. Yes, a small disaster, but it has set the scene for some unexpected adventures, and the apartment is so charming, despite its location on the umpteenth floor, that we don't really mind. Parisians call the top floor the toutou etage but one might accurately describe this place as being on the toutoutoutouTOU etage. Rhonda and I are unsure if our lack of alertness is from not having had a shower since yesterday morning or if it's oxygen deprivation from the altitude of our new digs.

When the water pooped out, I earned the role of waterboy, a figure from 18th-century Paris that we learned about at the sewer museum. When the city first started providing Parisians with potable water from large neighborhood fountains, people who had the financial wherewithal not to wait in line paid one of 20,000 waterboys to fetch a pail for them. Those boys with little patience and even fewer scruples simply dipped their buckets into the Seine and delivered to their clients a healthy serving of cholera soup. When I climbed the stairs this morning with a five-liter bottle of Evian from the corner market, Rhonda eyed me suspiciously and took a distrustful sniff before using her ration to brush her teeth.

Still unshowered by late afternoon, we began to feel a tad sticky and stinky from a combination of sweat, pastry and crepe drippings, red wine, and some particularly odiferous cheese, and I was worried that we might be a bit too ripe to attend a theater performance for which Rhonda had purchased tickets. Even if Parisians did live up to their reputations for being bath-averse (and they do not), we were ready to give them a true run for their money, but that turned out to be a moot issue.

We entered the small Left Bank theater off an alley and descended a long flight of stairs into...a converted sewer! A tall, round tunnel blocked off from the main system by a stone wall at one end, it had an olfactory je ne sais quoi that in no uncertain terms explained the space's history. The performance was of an original play tied loosely together by Cole Porter and Noel Coward songs. When the female lead introduced "Night and Day" with the familiar lyrics, "Like the drip drip drip of the raindrops when the summer shower's through," I checked under my feet for hypersensitive rat hordes to see if I should make for safety through one of the two remaining manhole shafts above our heads.

More distracting was the long scarf worn by the female star. She tossed it around her neck repeatedly and at one point relinquished it to her male co-star who I was sure was going to hold it to his nose to filter the fetid air. The rest of the audience didn't share our point of reference that made the scarf prop so funny, but Rhonda and I had a hard time controlling our laughter, and managed to remain silent only by the fear that if we gave in to a guffaw, we would have to aspire a huge gasp of the theater's ambience.

Day Ten Statistics:
Cheeses tasted: 26
Cheeses to go: 220*

*Note to all you sticklers: I have been sent numerous suggestions that this figure is wrong, in both current and historic French cheese terms. For the record, my version of the Columbia World of Quotations cites deGaulle as asking how one can govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese, and I have handy no 21st century reference for how ungovernable, based on available cheeses, the people of France have become. I stand by my current statistics.
Paris Nonsense continues...