Paula sans chapeau et Emmanuel at Flint Hills Symphony
From: Emmanuel Magisson <e_magisson@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: l’art de la bicyclette
Date: June 10, 2011 6:33:20 PM CDT
To: Paula Adams <paulagravesadams@gmail.com>
The bike show seem interesting. 🙂
Attached is the route to my place from Wichita.
The route to the Concert will be pretty!!!
We can stop at Cottonwood falls and look at the Church!
For the time, it is up to you. Wichita-Volland is a 3 hour drive.
Your time is my time.
Bring a large chapeau for the sun. Like a Audrey Hepburn hat you know. 🙂
The black hat you have is a smaller version of the one she wears in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Very elegant.
A bientot,
Emmanuel
Well, what can I say?
Yes, it’s embarrassing for both me and more so for Emmanuel, I’m assuming. But, we’re over that.
first meeting
I met him at The Good Egg where we were both sitting at the counter on a Sunday. I had blown in from outside after walking here with Rosie who was waiting outside for her bacon. After hearing him ask the waitress for something, I seized the opportunity, being pretty confident it was a French accent. J’ai sauté et j’ai parlé. When in Wichita with the French, do as the Frenchmen.
History
So, we then had a bit of background about my summer in France and subsequent trips, and his youth growing up on his father’s family’s cattle farm outside of Lorraine before escaping to engineering school in Paris. After that, we were quick copains, and he walked me home with Rosie.
He also told me of various French cultural events in Wichita sponsored by fellow Frenchwoman Claude Puntel of the CCAI Institute but that’s another post.
How the friendly French say, “How-dee'”
So, here’s Emmanuel and how he said, “How-dee!” as he is very receptive and tries, at least in part and at first, to “when in Kansas, do as the Kansans.” That is, he let me take the picture. I would have gotten a disdainful look and promptly recoiled in France, I am sure. And, he is a farm boy at heart, hard-working, practical with money, true to his roots. The style this is a little different though….there are farm boys and there are farm boys…
Emmanuel and Paula at The Good Egg. March 2011
So, we’ve advanced to me helping him get his game on with the ladies in the US. He is very polite and reserved, a gentleman, and lives up in Newton doing high level mechanical engineering prototype design for agricultural implements. And, not getting any younger. So, my unsolicited advice was in the form of a comment re: the number of years he has been in the states and that he better get on it. Or at least, back on. And who will really ever know what he does back home on the farm?
So, we’ve decided the l’été-l’automne thing of being seen in public together might work for our respective programs though I am trying really hard to find him younger, fun’er female companions. But, he’s not pulling his weight on this part.
Emmanuel’s program as I see it for him, unsolicited of course: to highlight what I have told him are the cultural stereotypes that he will always have to endure to include the following…
a) the men thinking he is a snotty socialistic bastard and jealous of his ways with women.
b) the women thinking he is a great lover.
Paula’s program: to get attention for my blog which has no point except for me to have fun with hopes of a future design client to pay for this fun to include…
a) practicing my French
b) to promote one of a few good hardworking kind men with rural roots that I know on FB to women.
c) To allow my American men friends (C Michael Bailey) to have an actual Frenchman at whom they might hurl their European socialist political slurs.
[note: He bikes in Kansas with many men like this, so when a new rider takes him on as bait and his older buddy jumps in, Emmanuel says, “I can handle it.” Much of the time he takes it on the chin. In general, we don’t talk politics. Values are basically the same.]
c) to promote idea that I am really leading a secret wild life to work with basic “attention” program above
d) to flaunt c) so openly as to hide the possibility that this might in fact be a reality….no, that was a joke.
Yes, we tend to get our picture taken alot for some reason, possibly because we are speaking in French.
And so you’ll know, Emmanuel has no tolerance for a photographer asking his name once and then having to tell another person. He will say, “ask that guy.”
[He thinks that he blends in, does not have an accent, and is a totally polite Frenchman adopting all American ways. But I seem to always capture that inner French look of disdain that they are born with, humble and respectful and americanophile that he is.]
And possibly, we are also noticed because of how we dress in Kansas.
Emmanuel wears those black shirts that have like flat tabs on the shoulders, a very European look. He has about 20 and they all look the same. I think his jeans are levis, old school, but the history of “de Nimes” is another post. He was appalled at the cost of jeans in Brick’s in Wichita.
I wear my usual Paula clothes…a Degas-like tutu netted top with red belt, my black patent pale pink French whore platforms with cutouts, a small black hat with a big fuschia flower, that type of thing. Not all together of course, only a piece at a time and with French restraint. No “matchy-matchy.”
So, no. I do not want to be pictured in next year’s brochure for the Flint Hills Symphony, “Emmanuel Magisson with un-named much older woman.” Would I want the father of my children to be photographed and pictured in a brochure when he is touring the Frank Lloyd Wright house in Wichita (he has done this in Oak Park) with Emmanuelle Seigneur? We must have some respect for each other’s territory.
And especially not in Kansas… those Puritan roots run deep. Ah, but the French have always had a tolerance for such things. They call the after-office-hours rendezvous of a man with his mistress the ‘cinq a sept’ – after which he goes home, happy and relaxed, to his wife and family. It might be something we should adopt in the next century….but don’t tell my father I said that.
And, since I’ve spent this entire blog post making excuses for why I’m hanging out with a much younger French guy named Emmanuel, I’ll have to do the post of the evening in Volland at the Flint Hills Symphony in another place. So, I will just have to say….”whatever….” to what anyone thinks.
Okay, stay tuned for The Symphony and two concerts at The Bartlett Arboretum with Paula and Emmanuel. No more excuses.
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