Little Insufferable Distractions

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Participants et participantes,

Last Friday evening, my friend Gwen and I attended a dance recital in Belleville in which two of her friends, Sandra and Julien, were performing. I'd met Sandra and Julien on numerous prior occasions, and I've also been to the studio near République where they and Gwen study with a woman named Elsa, a well-known figure in the world of modern dance and choreographer of Friday's piece. Elsa had saved us two of her block of reserved seats for the sold-out event at the small theater, and Gwen and I sat in the second row, just behind and a few places to the left of a man with a small child.

Sandra and Julien's dance, "Les Amants," was the second of five in the evening's program. When the lights came up, Julien appeared stage right crouched in a frozen pose with his back to Sandra who, to the quiet rhythm from a drummer at the back of the stage, approached him cautiously from stage left. It was a slow, suspenseful advance expressing both curiosity and hunger, and nothing in Julien's posture or facial expression revealed how he would receive her as the distance between them finally closed. Would her stalking be foiled in some way? Would it be violent? Tender? The subtle, rhythmic drumming continued, building ever so slowly ... the predator/lover closing in on her prey/lover ... and ... the infant on the man's lap started babbling!

Oh! My! God! I was so enraged!

I tried to ignore the kid and regain the lost sense of suspense, but the infantile "ba ba bleh bleh" continued as Sandra arrived within two feet of Julien and with a dramatic flourish and thunderous boom of drums, Julien leaped from his crouch, spun 180 degrees, and was caught in Sandra's tight embrace with his legs firmly wrapped around her waist, his cheek to her shoulder, his eyes closed.

Silence.

Sandra stood absolutely still with Julien locked to her upper body. Their stillness was as suspenseful as Sandra's approach had been. Where was this going? Was this to segue into something violent? Tender? Julien's eyes remained closed, content … his legs and arms held tight around her, one hand cupping the back of her head … the drumming started up again as they … "ba ba bleh bleh bibbebeb!"

What the fuck was this guy thinking bringing this kid in here? What the fuck were the theater people thinking letting this guy in here with a kid?

The dance between the lovers continued, magnificent. Dramatic and exciting, it wove a marvelous path through sweet and savage emotions with its earthy, almost tribal drumming and the dancers' sensual, expressive movements. The kid quieted down about a third of the way through, but he was waving his hands in the air and fidgeting through the remainder of the piece, and the distraction caused by him—and by my rage at him—from the one dance in five I specifically came to see made me completely crazy.

Many of you may recall that years ago, before my earnest attempts to learn the French language, I had arrived for the very first time in Paris knowing only one French phrase—the unusual and rarely useful words one would use to tell someone that her children were insufferable. After two weeks, I returned to San Francisco greatly disappointed that I never found just the right circumstance to say, "Madame, vos enfants sont insupportable!" This memory returned to me as I tried to watch my friends on stage while in the corner of my eye a two-year old squirmed, his chubby fingers searching his daddy's pockets for who knows what.

After all these years, finally, an enfant insupportable! I had just been to another event the previous evening, a performance by Gwen in a gallery in my neighborhood, at which I'd had had a long conversation with someone entirely in French. I was ready for this. I was so ready!

After Sandra, Julien, and the percussionist left the stage and the applause for them ended, I leaned over and tapped the guy on the shoulder. Understanding that I really couldn't blame the child for the insufferable sins of the father, I adapted my dusted-off admonition:

"Monsieur," I said to him, "vous devriez emmener votre enfant à l'extérieur. (You should take your child outside.) C'est une distraction insupportable!"

And he replied, "Avez-vous un problème?!" (Do you have a problem?)

And I said "Oui! J'ai un GRAND problème!" (I don't know how to say, "You bet your ass I have a problem," but I plan to learn it soon.)

And then the guy had the audacity to tell me, "SORTEZ!" (Leave!)

Man, was he pissed off! I was expecting someone else nearby to support me—or rather I was expecting the entire audience in this small theater to rally behind me—but no one did, and then he turned again to face the stage and I sat back in my seat, and we were both fuming. And then, just before the next dance started, the guy got up and left the theater with his kid.

Good riddance.

And that's when Gwen leaned over to me and said, "That was Sandra's husband. That was their baby."

Cough.

So, as I said, that was Friday. Tonight I went to meet Gwen again and took Alex, my former San Francisco neighbor who's here for the week, to a small jazz club where a trumpet player whom Gwen had worked with was appearing. When we arrived, we descended some stairs to a tiny basement performance space where a trio was making the kind of atonal, arrhythmic jazz that even under ideal conditions isn't my favorite type of music. The trumpeter was there doing a kind of wheezy thing on his horn, and there was another guy sitting pigeon-toed in a chair and leaning so far over his electric guitar that his long hair fell forward to give the audience the impression that the Addams' cousin Itt had taken up jazz guitar. As he slowly scraped macabre, dissonant sounds out of the strings with an under-rosined violin bow, he and the trumpeter tapped their feet at unrelated tempos (maybe "tempos" isn't an accurate word, but I would call it tapping … I think) and the drummer—well, the drummer was doing something else altogether.

I think this kind of jazz was better before Paris's smoking ban took effect, when little rooms like this quickly became too dense with smoke to let patrons see too much foolish detail, or perhaps I just need to take up heroin to properly appreciate this particular musical genre, but it really wasn't what I had expected or hoped to endure. I didn't want to make an immediate beeline for the door, and Gwen hadn't yet arrived, so I gestured to Alex that he take the one available seat while I stood against the wall and watched for a few minutes from behind a row of chairs, and that's when I noticed that seated in them were a woman and her small child, about the same age as Sandra's kid. The child was sucking quietly on a bottle, and the mother had a whole passel of baby-pacifying paraphernalia on her lap.

I made a quick inference from her definitely-NOT-a-smack-whore appearance that the mother wasn't there in search of Paris's quintessential smokin' jazz-club scene—and because she, her baby, and the drummer were the only three Asians in the room I guessed that they were all related. The reason for the umbrage Sandra's husband took at my invitation for him to step outside two nights earlier was suddenly apparent, too: It seems I still had more French vocabulary to learn, and performance du jazz and représentation de la danse are actually Parisian slang terms for "baby night." (I'm just sending out a little warning to any of my readers who dream of coming to Paris, taking up heroin, and playing sweet jazz in a smoky club with other cool daddy-o's: Those days are over, man, and the term "daddy-o" has a completely different meaning now.)

Fortunately, I had no urge to ask this parent to remove her child from the joint. If anything, I would have welcomed some dulcet-voiced babbling during this show. And if the baby had piped up, likely no one would have thought a "ba ba bleh bleh" in b-flat (or even some outright caterwauling) hadn't been arranged as part of the evening's presentation.

I did, however, practice great restraint in not exclaiming, "Madame, vos musiciens sont insupportable!"

A 'toot' à l'heure.

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