There was a girl at a discotheque in Paris who looked like a combination of a young Nicole Kidman and Evan Rachel Wood in the gritty-girly-teen-angst film, Thirteen. She was wearing a violet skintight bandeau dress and dancing provocatively, semi-suspended from the system of netting above the dance floor. This 17-year-old (though she could have passed for 27) Parisian girl had a certain extroverted-unabashed American aura about her. Unfortunately, when I attempted to lure her toward my side of the dance floor, my friend intercepted and said, “Yes, she’s very pretty, but we say in French, ‘un peu vulgaire.’”

And that was that. So it turns out that even when you are in a venue with netting hanging from the ceiling, dry ice floating through the air, and gay men draped in fur stoles … a vibrant, fully-clothed girl on a dance floor can still manage to be “ordinary/coarse/indelicate/without distinction.” Talk about gauche.

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