The Teenage Girl Who Dreamed Of Living In Paris

When my mother was a teenage girl living in Brooklyn, she dreamed of growing up and living in Paris.

She was a teenager during the Roaring Twenties, when Paris was the epicenter of art, literature, and fashion.  Paris was the home of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Coco Chanel.

Yes, Coco Chanel.  My mother planned to move to France and become a fashion designer.  She knew she had an innate sense of design, and she knew she had the talent to draw --- she had the drawings to prove her skill.

My mother knew the first step in preparing for a fashion career in Paris was to learn French.  She asked to take French as an elective in high school, but there was a problem:  my mother was a twin.

Her father said that both his twin daughters must be treated equally.

My mother’s twin sister did not want to take French; so Mom was not allowed to take French.  Her future plans to live in Paris were squelched.

My mother used her design talents in other ways: she made lovely Christmas decorations for the house, her garden was the envy of the neighborhood, and she became a certified ikebana instructor.

Ikebana was a Japanese system of flower arranging, and it became popular in the US in the 1950’s.

Decorating, gardening, flower arranging.  But Mom kept her book of teenage drawings; she kept the book her entire life.

Mom did get to go to Paris.  I took Mom and Dad there when Mom was sixty-seven years old.  I was living in London at the time and knew of a delightful small Paris hotel, run by Madame and Monsieur.  The hotel had a resident dog.  A sidewalk café was right next door.

The hotel was modest: every room had a toilet and a sink, but the shared bathtub was down at the end of the hall.  You told Madame when you wanted to take a bath, and she would clean the bathtub for you.

My mother refused to use a bathtub like that.  I tried to point out that in America, people had used your bathtub before you rented your hotel room.  The only difference: in America, it would be 24 hours since a stranger used the bathtub; in our French hotel, it may be half an hour since a stranger used it.

So, my mother flew from Paris back to the US, unwashed.  Maybe, just maybe, that experience took a little bit of an edge off her disappointment, fifty-three years before, when her fate as a twin squelched her dream of living in Paris.

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Here is a 2-minute newsreel segment from the Roaring Twenties - if you are an artist, Paris is the only place to be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp3ZlKEb-YA

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  Send an email to ParadiseDouglas at gmail.com to find out how to purchase a copy by mail