A strange man approached me when I was nodding off in the foyer to the Louvre Museum’s Decorative Arts Library. I thought it was a place exclusively frequented by gay men and the girls who carry their purses, but I was wrong.
I was too tired to ignore the semi-charming stranger, and he somehow obtained my [...]

As an expatriate lurking in the snowy streets of Moscow and sporting ridiculous fur hats, my friend recently met an older Russian man who was selling his book of poems on the sidewalk. She apologized to the poet for not being able to buy his book, saying that she did not understand enough Russian. But [...]

The Children’s Hour is an old-school Audrey Hepburn film with Shirley MacLaine, based on a classic Lillian Hellman play. I was naturally inclined to attend a midday screening of it, because the story takes place at an all-girls New England boarding school in the 1950s and takes the central theme of The Crucible (vicious gossip) [...]

In a surprise birthday party for a ravishing French-Italian woman, the sangria and champagne cocktails flowed, her husband presented her with some lovely diamond-sapphire jewels, and her two pretty pre-pubescent children looked on at the spectacle. For the Spanish-themed soirée I wore a bolero-inspired sweater and red tights, so it was a bit of Almodovar [...]

In a dinner party of diplomats from Delhi, aristocrats from Paris, and me (a wayward semi-’student’ lurking from Boston), a French expert in the global water system told me an apocalyptic statement: in 2043 there will be a melting of the glacier ice caps, and our world will be submerged in water.
I suddenly recalled the [...]

My friend recently had an unfortunate evening in Moscow that involved “a charming cocktail of vodka beer rum wine baiileys rum and our old friend jager” (according to her latest email). And at that point she left her purse in the “cab” (which was actually a civilian car, since proper taxis don’t really exist in [...]

In New York City there is a well-kept secret for young women in need of low-rent accommodations. At The Webster Apartments you can have a single room, two hot meals a day, and maid’s service for a mere 250 dollars a week. The only catch: no males allowed.
There is a night watchwoman who patrols the [...]

One of the most endearing ways to pass a Sunday afternoon is at the guignol theatre in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Parisian children become entranced by tranny-looking marionettes beating each other on the heads with sticks, brooms, feather dusters, and other phallic objects.
On this particular Sunday there was a brawl between a woman and the [...]

I recently went to the cinema at noon, because it is cheap at that time of day, and because Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience was only showing once a week in one movie theatre in all of Paris. Sasha Grey, an award-winning 21-year-old porn star, plays Chelsea, a high-class Manhattan call girl who manages to [...]

Through an anonymous exchange of phone numbers at a classic Parisian club, I recently met a minor French TV celebrity. That is to say, he intrigued me, so I scribbled my cell phone number onto a slip of paper and ‘dropped’ it into his hand while leaving the lounge. This sort of behavior is typically [...]