I Could Have Danced All Night

We went to a Masquarade ball last night and if I hadn't been dancing I would have been taking pictures like crazy.  Everyone looked amazing and and THE DANCING!  Waltzes and quadrilles and Virginia reels and dance cards and lemonade.  Everyone needs to go to a ball at least once in their lives. 

The Kid dressed as a skeleton and danced very, very carefully.  It was adorable. He was out there quite a bit, too.  He's a keeper, that one.  The Guy wore a suit and a very cool mask and helped stuff me, my gown, and my six feet of peacock feathered train into the car because he is a gentleman. 

My mother, who went as a butterfly, made both of our costumes and people went bananas over them. She is a genius with needle and thread. 

It's occurred to me more than once that I am a very lucky lady, have worn twice in as many years the most incredible gowns in the world. 

The dancing was so much fun, partly because dancing and partly because the dances were 'called' - a lot like square dancing but more falling on the ground as ladies trip over their skirts. There is also the possibility of crashing into someone because you turned left when the other seven people in your set turned right.  It's all very exciting and surprisingly dangerous.  I almost fell over my own dress but I was lucky enough to be partnered with a dance instructor who caught and steadied me so smoothly that the whole thing looked like a very cool dance move.  The floor was crowded and if I'd been with anyone else, I'm pretty sure I would have taken half the ballroom down with me. 

I'll put up some photos in the next couple of days.

Hanging out with Quasimodo

One of the most fun things to happen to me on any trip happened in Paris. Our hotel was very near Notre Dame and on our second visit to the Cathedral, we took the tower tour. This is a very basic sort of thing - for $20 each, you wait in a very long line, then climb up a whole bunch of stairs in the north tower. Upon reaching the top, you are funneled into the narrow bridge connecting the towers. Very tall chain link fences on either side of the walkway prevent the tourists from tumbling over the side and locked gates keep you from going anywhere except along that walkway and directly to the stairs of the south tower, where you climb back down again. 

The day we took the tour was beautiful. It was cold and sunny and clear and we waited in line with a hundred other people, climbed a bajillionty steps with them, and finally reached the top.

We oohed and ahhed and then I noticed the gate right next to us. I gave it a shove because that's what I always do when I see a gate and to my complete surprise, it opened. I am not one to ignore an invitation.  Five seconds later, I'm through the gate and it's magical. There are no fences, there are the creepiest gargoyles I've ever seen and they're RIGHT THERE. 

 

 

 

The kid and the guy followed me and it was just the three of us romping around the tower.  

We hung out for quite a while, poking around, touching gargoyles and taking pictures.  

At one point, I realized that I'd left the family behind and when I went back to find them, I saw the guy taking a photo of the kid holding a broom. They'd found it leaning against a wall of the tower and it had the name Quasimodo burned into it. 

By this point, a few other people had trickled through the gate, maybe five or six in total.  We hung out for a while and then I continued around the tower. Now I could see the walkway, packed with people and to my right, an open door. I stood there for a second, wondering what I should do when a guy in overalls came out the door and stopped in surprise. We kind of stared at each other for a second and then he said something in French.  I have no idea what it was but I'm pretty sure it ended with a question mark.  I made my very best Lost and Confused face.  He asked something else, I still didn't understand and then we stared at each other some more.  A second later, another guy came out the door, this one much older and clearly in charge.  He took one look at me and started yelling, arms waving, face going red, the works.  I was still doing Lost and Confused and then I added Feeble Shrugging. The older guy yelled some more and marched over to a gate that opened onto the walkway where everybody else was. I followed meekly behind and just as he's unlocking the gate, two more people pop out from around the corner behind me. The guy completely lost it. He pushed me through the gate and locked it behind me. Then he stormed the people behind me, yelling and shooing the other stragglers back around the tower and through the first gate we'd all come through. I could hear him yelling the whole time. He locked the gate, yelled some more, and stomped off. The kid and the guy found me on the walkway eventually, we took some tourist-approved photos from the tourist-approved location and that was it. We were safely part of the group and our self-guided tour was over. 

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

Always look for the unlocked gates.

So much with the things

There's been a lot of really great stuff happening in the last year.  For example, a friend and I are hosting monthly Tea and Shakespeare gatherings.  We get a pile of people together, choose a few acts from various plays, and everybody reads and laughs and drinks tea and generally has a great time.  We have our victims friends do ridiculous awesome little things when they're reading, like talk in a squeaky voice or spin in place and this, in our opinion, improves the play quite a lot.

This was Midsummer's Night Dream in Echo Park. We wore flower crowns and blew bubbles because that is what you do when you are being very Arty and reading Shakespeare.

The other thing my brilliant friend organized was a square dance last Saturday and it turns out that square dancing is AWESOME.  You don't even have to know what to do!  They just order you around the whole time and it's fantastic!

 

It's quite a workout, all that hopping and skipping and do-si-do-ing.  I helped with the decorating and I'm pretty sure that was the first time in my life I had to move bales of hay around.  It's like I'm a real farmer now.

 

The beginning of catching up.

No posts here since April.....

That's a long time, isn't it?  I'VE BEEN BUSY!  I have!  Really!  There's a lot going on in Casa Banana.
Let's see... Since April there's been a trip to Mexico City with my BFF to visit my brother,

 That's us, there. In glorious Mexico City. More photos to come, eventually.  It was pretty great.  We saw the pyramids and ate a lot of food and went to a creepy witchcraft market and bought a lot of things and I finally learned how to haggle.  I am (was) a truly terrible haggler.  More than once, I've offered to pay full price for something once my shopping companion had talked the seller into a lower price.  I was concerned that the seller wouldn't actually commit to the lower price and if my friend wanted it that bad, I could just get it for her...  I did this kind of a lot and Jesse had basically forbidden me from saying a word whenever he was discussing prices with someone.  Mexico City changed all that.  I haggle all the time, for all the things and it's shocking how many people are OK with lowering their price.  I mean, it's not for places like Target but I do a lot of shopping in Downtown LA and those guys are tricking people into overpaying all over the place.  I realize that this is probably not new knowledge to everybody else in the world but it's exciting for me.

Then there was a trip to the Grand Canyon with the Guy and the Kid.

 That's us, there. At the glorious Grand Canyon. More photos to come, eventually.  We brought the Doctor along and all of us had a great time.  The trip was planned as a long camping road trip kind of thing and since I booked the campsite at the Grand Canyon, I asked the Guy to find campsites on the road to and from the place.  We ended up spending the first night of the trip at a campsite in Needles, California.  For those of you who are not familiar with Needles, California, I give you some information.  1) It is not actually in California, it is on the face of the sun.  There's some kind of travel science magic thing that makes this possible.  2) It is the most boring city of ever.  3) The average daily temperature there is roughly 3 bajillion.
We lasted one night because we are Ultimate Campers.  Then we went to a hotel and stayed there until our campsite at the Grand Canyon opened up because camping is the worst.   At the new campsite, feral Elk ate our tablecloth and giant ravens tried to eat my dog.  I imagine that's what living in the apocalypse is like.
The Grand Canyon was very beautiful, we oohed and aahhed and then canceled our stay at the third campsite in favor of our beds and air conditioning.

The kid had a big show where he got a pie in the face.  I have no photo of that magical face/pie moment but I have this:


 He's the tall one in the middle. It was a cute show.  Kind of odd seeing 11 and 12 year old girls vamping it up and singing about giving you a good time but hey - kids these days, amiright?

There's been a bunch more stuff but I've realized that if I illustrate every single thing with a photo, this post will be way too long to deal with.  I'll talk about more stuff later, possibly.


FLOSS EVERY DAY
I had my teeth cleaned for the first time (ever) today and the dental hygienist was surprised and impressed that my teeth are as good as they are.  Judging from her expression when I told her that I'd never done it before, she must have expected them to be falling out of my face.  I have good teeth, people. 

Believe

Inbetweens

I'm doing a thousand different things now and while sometimes it gets overwhelming, I'm having a lot of fun. 

One thing I'm doing is helping a friend open up a salon. Designing and arranging the space has become my favorite thing.  It's like creating a movie set!  Everything has to be just so, it has to say something specific and be harmonious with all the things around it. If I weren't doing a million other things, I'd want to take a design course!   For now, I'll stick to learning how to do lash extensions and teaching myself how to speak French and how to play bass guitar. 

Oh!  And how to develop my own film. I'll be using a friends darkroom tomorrow to develop some photos I took while at the Grand Canyon. I'm not sure if the camera I'd been using actually works so the developing process will be extra exciting. 

I'll get back to the trip to Paris soon. I've finally finished uploading all the photos. Now I've got a couple of fashion shoots, a trip to Mexico City, and the Grand Canyon trip photos to get to. Someday I will catch up with myself. 

Day le first, continued.

In a Banana first, I've managed to get quite a few photos edited and uploaded in the first two days after coming home from Paris.  Now, keep in mind that I took roughly a squillion photos during the trip.  Having "quite a few" done means got about an eighth of the photos done.  For me, that's a lot.

The first of very, very many cafe cremes that we had in Paris.

This was the very first thing we saw.  We took the metro from the airport and our stop was just outside of the Notre Dame. 

Pretty spectacular, right?  No photos we took did justice to the beauty and awe-inspiring majesty of the place.  Also, J almost knocked down a wall dividing the tourists from the people worshiping in the rows.

This guy is pretty gruesome.  I think it might be Saint Denis.  I bought a book (at Shakespeare and Company!  I was there!  I shopped !) called Paris: A Secret History.  Pretty fascinating read, lots of weird and cool stories about the history of the City Of Lights.   The point being that's where I read the story of Saint Denis.  Which is also on Wikepedia.  Ah- when I went to the Wiki page, I saw a photo of this statue.  So there.  It's confirmed.  St. Denis.

The aforementioned Shakespeare and Company.  AKA The Awesomest Place In The History Of Ever. 

This was the spectacular view from our hotel balcony.  We stayed at the Hotel Cardinal and it was pretty great.  There were a couple of things that went wrong during our stay (the wallpaper peeled off in a massive piece near the window, the window in the shower broke right off the hinges, The Kid slept in a red sweater and now his sheets, they are pink) but they seemed to be cool about it.  Kind of hard to tell, really.  My French is not so good.   I'm just going to assume that they're used to problems with the buildings.  After all, most of them (the buildings, not the people) are well over a hundred years old.   Also, there was a bidet (not pictured).

And that's the first day.  Odds are good, given my bloggy history, that I won't mention the trip anymore after this.  Hopefully, though, I'll get more in here.  There are some great stories from Paris.

Day le first.

Jet lag has struck and I'm lying in a hotel bed in Paris at two in the morning listening to the sound of a night winding down. There's a cafe across the street from the hotel and it's been a good evening for them.
We got in at 8 in the morning and instead of sleeping on the plane, I thought it would be fun to watch 3 movies. We got to our hotel at 9am, we'd been awake for roughly twenty hours, and we were told that we couldn't check in until two. Five hours of more not sleeping. I was fine with this. I've got YEARS of not getting any sleep, what with nighttime jobs and daytime relationships. I dragged an exhausted husband and a nearly comatose child out into the streets and we went to Notre Dame and then Shakespeare and Co. That bookstore was a dream come true. I hadn't seen it when I'd been to Paris before and that's a good thing - without a family to answer to, I would have just moved right in. The bookstore is large but you'd never know it because there are so many twists and turns and little nooks to explore. The Kid wedged himself into a kind of cabinet with two typewriters inside and as I browsed upstairs, I could hear him clacking away on the typewriter keys. ALL the new books downstairs, lovely, dusty old books upstairs, with little cots scattered here and there. I met someone once who said they'd lived in the children's book section for a little while. That must have been amazing. It's my idea of a perfect world. If anything ever happens to J, I'm going to pack right up and move into the bookstore.