As a teenager I was on fire. Passionate dreams of thwarting evil gripped my soul. The evil of the Holocaust and hateful dictators and people willing to turn their neighbors into the Gestapo. Greed, envy, fear fueled wicked behavior.
Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, chronicling his experiences as an Auschwitz concentration camp inmate during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose in life to feel positively about, and then immersively imagining that outcome, woke me up. This curtain of history was never revealed in my high school history classes. That one could heal from the horrors of a living hell was also a revelation.
To fight this from the shadows—to be a spy for the resistance. Derailing the human cargo trains snaking their sinful way to the German borders. These actions were my dream but I was born several decades too late to join the forces fighting the dark cloud of Nazism in Europe.
To be bold and beautiful. To be brave and vicious. To speak French so perfectly my American accent hiding behind French mannerisms. Walking silently, for was I not a tracker in a past life in the Pyrenees? Shadow to shadow dark of night on a mission or leading children and their families to coastal ports to escape.
Breathing silently. Falling in love with haystacks and old stone farmhouses and moldy chèvre and irony plonk. Shared sometimes with other freedom fighters. Eating alone leaning against the smooth bark of pale birches. My shadow imprinted on their trunks.
There were no war shadows where I grew up in suburban California but the call of rescue and danger appealed. In 1972 I moved to France on the day I turned 18. My shadow folded in my rucksack. Though the Nazis were vanquished 25 years before, the trails through the moonlit birch forests of the lower Pyrenees drew me to them and I wandered in remote stone villages darkened at night. Villagers still not turning lights on—living in darkness not wanting to draw attention to the bombers they still heard flying overhead or the crunch of leather boots marching into their homes tearing them apart, hunting for human quarry. Stars of David, gypsy clans, effeminate men all prey to the evil of that war.
Enjoy my story Licking Monet, which takes place in Paris and involves tasting a famous painting.
Paris is also where I first uncovered my desire to experience a place through dance interpretation (not just tasting and licking art but dancing with it.) This happened at the Rodin Museum. You can read about it in Rodin Woke Me Up.
For great current Paris travel tips including dance and music venues, read my story Perfect Paris—My “A” List For Music, Bistros, Museums, Neighborhoods.
You might also enjoy this dance video of Lil Buck dancing with Picasso in the Luis Vuitton Foundation Museum in Paris.
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