It was 2015. I needed a job and wanted out of Seattle after growing up and going to college in the same six-mile bubble. The solution came via a post on a neighborhood blog: FRENCH FAMILY SEEKS AU PAIR. A woman named Val\u00e9rie needed someone to watch her seven-year-old twins in Paris. The au pair would take French classes at the Sorbonne and live in a separate dorm-style room in the family\u2019s apartment building in the heart of the city. Food, a cell phone plan, health insurance and a metro card would be provided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A brand new life without having to do any<\/em> of the boring parts of setting up a new life?! I was sold! After a couple of Skype calls to be reasonably sure it wasn\u2019t an elaborate human trafficking scheme, I applied for my visa and booked a one-way flight to Charles de Gaulle. For the next 15 months, I forged a new life against the backdrop of my old one, mingling the lessons conferred by each and adjusting their ratios to create a cocktail of my own design. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This process began in the apartment where I now lived and worked. Val\u00e9rie and her partner Yann were younger than my parents and in a committed civil union, but unmarried. (Umm, romantic much??) I was mesmerized by Val\u00e9rie\u2019s collections of work-appropriate jumpsuits, books from a past life in publishing, pastel bottles of creams and lotions jostling for space on the bathroom counter. She thought pansexuality was beautiful and that an apartment without music was \u201csad.\u201d She gave toasts! On Sundays, Yann closed the kitchen door, turned the radio up and made soups, quiche or cr\u00e8me caramel<\/em>. He disapproved of the way I said \u201cmmhmm\u201d instead of opening my mouth to say yes. We bonded over Saturday Night Live<\/em> and at Christmas dinner, he made his teenage nieces and nephew laugh till they cried at the far end of the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The twins, Ad\u00e8le and H\u00e9lo\u00efse, were climbing all over me within minutes of my arrival. They were identical, with big brown eyes, the kind of full brows Glossier claims it can give you, and wavy, walnut-colored hair that formed rats\u2019 nests if you looked away for too long. Big emotions bubbled out of their compact, wiry bodies: giddiness when we counted cars in a traffic jam, indignance when I confiscated a ball of Silly Putty they\u2019d decorated with shards of broken glass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ad\u00e8le once explained with a world-weary sigh that she had wanted to be a stylist when she grew up\u2014until she realized her sister would be \u201csaving the world\u201d as a veterinarian. H\u00e9lo\u00efse so ardently believed Peaches the woolly mammoth should have married Ethan instead of Julian in Ice Age 5<\/em> that she wrote a letter to Pixar about it. They had already had American au pairs for years and sounded like native English speakers. With each other though, they broke into high-speed French, entering a universe all their own that was impervious to interruption by adults or oncoming traffic. They required hawk-like supervision on sidewalks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was in elementary school, I achieved autonomy over my homework by proactively doing it before getting back to whichever YA fantasy novel I was sure to finish by bedtime. I was also really unpleasant to anyone who tried to help. Thus, it was generally from a safe distance that my parents encouraged me to do my best. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ad\u00e8le and H\u00e9lo\u00efse were as obsessed with books as I\u2019d been, but firmly eschewed the work-before-play model. They had to be coaxed from the toilet, where they\u2019d linger reading as long as they could, to the coffee table to do their homework. Once they were there, it was an interactive\u2014and even physical!\u2014activity. One time I was reading Ad\u00e8le vocabulary words to spell while she did a headstand facing the couch. A few words in she lost her balance and fell backwards, screaming as her nose crunched up against the base and started pouring blood. Val\u00e9rie and Yann reviewed the kids\u2019 homework every night and chided them for misspellings and messy handwriting. Val\u00e9rie\u2019s mom, a retired lawyer who visited from Normandy every month or so, devised additional exercises for them to do as she whipped up cr\u00eapes<\/em> and financiers<\/em> for their snack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond my commitments to the twins, I constructed a social life and strove to improve my deficient French. When I spoke to locals in the beginning, they mostly responded in English. Maybe they were just excited to practice with a native speaker, but they might as well have said, \u201cYou sound terrible and I can barely understand you.\u201d At my friend Marion\u2019s game nights, I\u2019d move around a lot so that no single person had to spend their entire evening talking about things I had the vocabulary to discuss: hometowns, food, siblings. There was definitely a time where I didn\u2019t understand we were in the middle of a serious geopolitical discussion and piped up to ask Baptiste what his favorite color was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was a hectic time. I thought back on high school and college when I was juggling school, work, extracurriculars, dating and friendship\u2014how my parents often told me I was doing too much and needed to slow down. That\u2019s one of my family\u2019s values: not being too busy. We always relished days with no time constraints, where a garage sale would lure neighbors to our garden for coffee and donuts, which would turn into afternoon drinks, which would turn into dinner. Any obligation that cut the flow short was a nuisance. Yet the further into adolescence I got, the more compartmentalized my days became. I developed a reputation for \u201calways rushing off somewhere.\u201d I felt guilty about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as I got to know Val\u00e9rie, I noticed she moved at my speed. She\u2019d breeze in from work around seven, pour us each an Ap\u00e9rol spritz and give me her undivided attention while we caught up at the kitchen table. Twenty minutes later she\u2019d unapologetically move on to something else, but the duration of our bonding sessions had no bearing on their value. When I was overwhelmed by how many things the girls and I had to do after school\u2014homework, piano, English, bath, dinner\u2014she offered tips for doing them more efficiently. Wash Ad\u00e8le and H\u00e9lo\u00efse\u2019s hair every three days instead of two. Use the steamer baskets to cook fish and broccoli at the same time. One evening I was heading off to an open mic and told her I hadn\u2019t had time to practice. Instead of saying, \u201cWell, you pack your days too full, honey!\u201d she waved her hand as if to say not to worry and assured me I would practice on the way there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It wasn\u2019t the first time someone taught me how to wrangle a part of my life that had been vexing me. In ninth grade, I met my best friend Greta in sixth period choir. As we caught each other up on our entire lives that year (once, famously, behind a music stand that Ms. Burton furiously slammed down, revealing our chattering faces and firmly shutting us up, before continuing her lecture), I was struck by\u2014and studied\u2014the way Greta told stories. She made fun of herself constantly and cackled right along with me and whoever else was listening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n She also laughed a lot at other people\u2019s stories, asking questions to underscore the funniest details and teasing the storytellers in this benevolent way that made it impossible for them to take themselves too seriously. Once I let it slip that I didn\u2019t like showering and definitely didn\u2019t do it every day. She called me Cavewoman for the rest of high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I used to get really embarrassed as a kid. Forgetting my clarinet on orchestra day made me burst into tears, and I wished I could sleep for a week after peeing my pants in front of my friend Tim. (Note: I actually peed next to him, but effectively on him. It happened in my family\u2019s Volvo and the pee rolled right across the pleather backseat, soaking his jeans and probably his socks. Tim, a literal angel, had the good instincts to ignore reality and make pleasant nine-year-old small talk while my mom mopped him up with a sweatshirt.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n I even felt outsized secondhand embarrassment for others. There\u2019s a German word for that: fremdsch\u00e4men<\/em>. One afternoon when I was six, I was playing with a friend on the sidewalk outside my house. Partway through our game, we noticed a girl our age walking across the street with her parents. When the girl saw me, she waved enthusiastically and shouted, \u201cHi, Rachel!\u201d After a moment she realized her mistake and said, \u201cOops, you\u2019re not Rachel. Sorry!\u201d then skipped off down the block, probably never to think of it again. I spent the rest of the day sobbing on her behalf. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But in high school, I discovered that telling Greta about an embarrassing moment transformed it into a funny story. It not only inoculated me against all future embarrassment or fremdsch\u00e4men<\/em> associated with that moment, it crystallized a conversational centerpiece I could wield proactively! I controlled the narrative!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s how, as high school went on, I became invincible. Getting pantsed in the hall, sneezing a huge snot bubble onto my arm, walking into a pole while casually chatting with an ex: these were stories for the story bank. I paid a lot of attention to funny women, mainly accessible to me via SNL since I didn\u2019t have a computer. Kristen Wiig was my favorite. To be able to so fully inhabit characters as wide-ranging as the Target lady and an A-Hole buying a Christmas tree is simply unjust. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I eventually learned that the women of SNL had all done improv. So, though I had never seen an improv show or so much as watched Whose Line Is It Anyway<\/em>, I joined an improv team in college. In the beginning it was terrifying. I was used to memorizing lines, not making them up on the spot! I hated miming objects! Why couldn\u2019t we have real props?! I felt like I had a finite number of characters: condescending English lady, nasally woman who pushes her glasses up her nose for emphasis, Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist<\/em>. I burned through all of them in the first few weeks. I didn\u2019t know how to track my own improvement, so instead I shouldered the anxiety that comes with taking perpetual shots in the dark. I had a hard time responding to the last thing said because I was trying to think ahead, or because I was distracted by roommate drama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When improv is good, it\u2019s magical. At its best, it feels like making eye contact with someone across the room and knowing you\u2019re thinking the same thing, and wanting to laugh but having to hold it in because you\u2019re in church or class, which makes the whole thing ten times funnier. At its worst, it can be excruciating. But regardless of how your scene is going, you have to maintain strict control over your brain. You are allowed to think about 1) what your scene partner just said\/did and 2) what you\u2019re going to say\/do next. You are NOT allowed to think about how the audience feels about your \u201czombie crow\u201d character or the way you mime grating cheese. It\u2019s kind of like a chaotic version of meditation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d arrived in Paris wanting to take improv classes, but didn\u2019t like the show I saw at the only school with classes in English. So I found an open mic on Meetup.com and decided to become a stand-up comic. I started spending Thursday evenings in a tiny, cave-like smoking room in the basement of an Irish bar near Les Halles. The audience, mostly comics, sat on stools. There was the requisite creepy guy who joked about cheating on his wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the improv team, I\u2019d learned that \u201cthe specific is universal.\u201d You could get a laugh at campus shows just by moisturizing with Jergens Natural Glow instead of lotion, or by setting a scene in Lois McDermott\u2019s Psych 101 class. But in front of a largely French audience, most of my go-to specifics were useless. French people hadn\u2019t gone through stereotypically American rites of passage like prom. \u201cJello salad\u201d meant nothing to them. They had interacted with both children and Americans, however, so material about the kids I nannied or cultural differences between France and the United States was a safe bet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I liked responding to things the kids did as if adults had done them. Ad\u00e8le used the mixed drink emoji in a text I let her send from my phone, which was clearly \u201ca cry for help.\u201d I compared making dinner for her and her sister to being a chef in a restaurant where you also had to bathe guests and then beg them to put underwear on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The formality of the French became a recurring theme in my shows. When you enter a group situation in France, you can\u2019t just wave hello to everyone\u2014that\u2019s considered lazy. You\u2019re supposed to cheek-kiss and say \u201cHello, [NAME],\u201d to each person, which can really eat up a lot of time and derail whatever conversation was going on before you got there. Initially I found this ridiculous, I\u2019d tell audiences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But then I imagined trying to explain the rules for American-style group greetings. \u201cOkay, so you hug the people you know really well, shake hands with the people you\u2019ve never met and wave to everyone else. But if you\u2019re good friends with everyone except one person, just hug that person too so they don\u2019t feel left out. Unless they seem like they\u2019re not a hugger, in which case you can wave to them. Though you could just wave to everyone at once if that seems like that\u2019s more the vibe\u2026\u201d<\/em> We\u2019re a mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The formality of the French language<\/em> was fertile ground as well. When you translate French directly into English, it sounds pretentious. The way French people say \u201cI\u2019m looking at you\u201d literally means \u201cI regard you.\u201d I gawked when Parisians in their 20s talked about wanting to faire l\u2019amour<\/em> (translation: make sweet love) without a trace of irony. And it wasn\u2019t just their words that sounded flowery, but their rhetoric. While I\u2019d heard American guys push for unprotected sex based on pure sensation, one French guy took a more philosophical approach: \u201cYou know een life, we \u2018ave to take reesks\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Years of bombing onstage with my improv team had beaten most of the embarrassment out of my body, and my days in France took care of the rest. Bombing as a stand-up comic felt more personal because I couldn\u2019t chalk it up to an unlikeable character or something one of my teammates had done. If the audience didn\u2019t laugh, it was because they didn\u2019t think I was funny. Or more accurately, I learned to remind myself, they didn\u2019t think my jokes<\/em> were funny that night<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One afternoon toward the end of the year, I waited for the girls outside their school gates under bright gray skies. The usual crowd of parents and nannies spilled off the sidewalk into the alley, some catching up with each other, some on their phones. I greeted the parents I knew: In\u00e8s\u2019s mom, \u00c9va and Chlo\u00e9\u2019s mom, No\u00e9mie\u2019s dad. Then the front doors opened and dozens of laughing, shrieking children came pouring down the stairs. Parents waved and shouted names, trying to catch their kids\u2019 eyes before they descended into the throng. The twins\u2019 cartables<\/em>\u2014stiff, square-shaped backpacks that were almost like briefcases\u2014got stuck on people and things as they fought their way to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ad\u00e8le had forgotten her homework again, so as the crowd dispersed, we walked back up the steps to talk to her teacher. I always spoke English with the kids so they could practice, but I addressed Ad\u00e8le\u2019s teacher in French. She responded\u2014in French! We chatted for a couple minutes, confirming that I understood everything Ad\u00e8le was supposed to do that evening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But while we were talking, Ad\u00e8le tugged on my arm, muttering about my accent and how she wanted to go. I put myself in her shoes for a second. She usually repelled embarrassment with this classic French gesture where you shrug, blow a truncated raspberry and raise one eyebrow at the same time as if to say, \u201cSo?\u201d I liked the way things bounced off her. But here she was feeling embarrassed about being seen with someone who spoke French with an accent. She was probably also feeling fremdsch\u00e4men<\/em>. Her head retreated deeper into her faux fur hood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cJust a minute, Ad\u00e8le,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I turned back to her teacher and finished the conversation. Then Ad\u00e8le and I headed home with H\u00e9lo\u00efse to eat clementines and read The Magic Tree House<\/em>. A few months later, I relocated to New York, a city with world-class improv where everyone moves at my speed. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started spending Thursday evenings in a tiny, cave-like smoking room in the basement of an Irish bar near Les Halles. The audience, mostly comics, sat on stools. There was the requisite creepy guy who joked about cheating on his wife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4462,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[566,567,92,571,569,570,565],"contributors":[564],"seasons":[537],"class_list":["post-4413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-au-pair","tag-celia-gurney","tag-comedy","tag-embarassment","tag-french","tag-high-school","tag-paris","contributors-celia-gurney","seasons-537"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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