8/27/2011 Dames at the Duchess

Just when I thought I had folded up my split-screen for the night, Wendy mentioned how Barbel tried “to pull a Pygmalion” on her, seeing if she couldn’t mold Wendy into a Bay Area businesswoman.

“Barbel wasn’t that much younger than my mom,” Wendy said, “so she had that mom power.  Plus she was rich.  I was this Wisconsin girl who just landed in the gay capitol of the world and she had keys to the kingdom.  To be a success, I had to do things her way.  She was very disciplined.  So my workouts, my volleyball, she got me into the best fitness center, and I played pickup games with Stanford women.  But I also wanted to be an actress,” Wendy sighed, “and that’s where everything started to fall apart.”

This account had me flashing back to Maureen, an actress I had known in New York.  At a similar age as Wendy when she was being taken care of by Barbel, Maureen had met a woman at a French class she had enrolled in at the New School in Manhattan.  “You wouldn’t believe it, Grubb,” Maureen had said to me over the phone, “first day of class and this woman sits down next to me and she’s got a snake coiled around her neck.”

“Rubber snake?”

“Live snake flicking its little forked tongue at me!”

I can’t recall why Maureen had signed up to take the French class.  She was fairly fluent in Italian, so maybe she was expanding her European reach hoping, perhaps, to work with a French director. 

“Serenity.”

“Always good to have when you’re around snakes,” I agreed.

“No, that’s this woman’s name.  Perfectly cut blond hair, blue eyes, jade nail polish, she’s stunning.”

“What kind of snake was this?”

“I don’t know—black and green and slimy.  How am I supposed to learn anything?”

“What did your teacher do?”

“Christine?  She was great.  Made Serenity introduce herself and asked if the snake had a name.  “Edgar,” she says, and Christine tells her that Edgar, “Il est un beau serpent.  But next time leave Edgar at home because he is distracting the belle jeune fille sitting nest to you.”

“Belle jeune fille?”

“Those were her words.”

“Your French teacher’s flirting with you?”

“It’s a new language—hard to tell.”

“Do you want me to lend you some Colette?”

“What’s that?  Some kind of perfume?”

In lieu of high school Maureen had gone to a dramatic academy.  Outside of plays, French lit was a foreign country for her.  “Colette the author,” I told her, “actress who wrote novels, notorious for her love affairs.  You should read “The Vagabond.”’

“Where can I find it?”

“On my bookshelf.”

Maureen devoured my collection of Colette.  Knowing that she had a brief fling with the actor I had seen her with in the play I covered for the Public Theater, I assumed she was hetero.  My turning her on to Colette was, upon hearing about Serenity and Christine, a lighthearted gesture that was meant to shed light on the gay affairs of French women.  I wasn’t prepared for Maureen to major in the subject.  When I wasn’t getting book reports, I was getting updates on the art of learning French by trading double entendres with Christine, or going out with Serenity after class a couple of times to have drinks at a lesbian bar in the Village called The Duchess.  “Wild place,” she commented, “but I don’t know if it’s quite my style.” 

And Serenity?  “She has a following,” Maureen pointed out.  “All these butch dames.”

After taking the final exam, Maureen said that a number of women in class were going over to The Duchess to celebrate.  It then occurred to me that if she were finished acting French, the next step in her education, with Colette as her primer, might involve acting gay.  I was bemused, to say the least, but I wasn’t Oscar Wilde playing Henry Higgins; I was just a friend supplying some literary background.  When it came to Pygmalion, I left that to the dames descending upon The Duchess.