Oddities, Curiosities, Louvuhs, Lady Enjoy…
****Louvah (loov-uh), n. – an American undergrad studying art and polyperversity in Paris, predominately stationed in the Louvre Museum and bars with Anglo-Saxon names.
Late June. We left Paris giggling. It wasn’t the news former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was in garde à vue — detained by the police at the commissariat — that tickled us but our surmising he had no underwear on. Why did we suspect this? Let’s just say I learned a thing or two from my former job in Louvah Maintenance (aka Directorship of an American study-abroad program). You see, when suspects are locked up in garde à vue, the French police take their underwear away for safety reasons. Safety, you ask? Apparently, it is not impossible to hang yourself with them. Think about it.
A Louvah under my jurisdiction once stumbled home at three a.m. drunk as a skunk and was picked up by the police at Châtelet, ready to topple over into the Fontaine du Palmier. They locked her up in a cell, demanded she hand over her dessous – for her own protection. She watched mortified as her panties were chauffeured in a Ziplock bag to different quarters. When you consider Joan of Arc was allowed to keep her breeches on in prison, you begin to fathom the barbaric depths to which modern carceral policy has sunk. 
Oddities. Curiosities. Louvuhs. Lady Enjoy? Later this summer, driving to the High Sierras through the broiling, rattlesnake infested foothills we passed by a Jehovah Witness venue called Kingdom Hall, advertising its GPS services on a billboard: “Free to trip to Heaven. Directions Inside.” Perhaps a good place to deposit Louvuhs?
At the Fresno zoo, a strip mall developer was transmogrified into a meditating goat; as such, I felt I could fan him with my fascinator.
In Paris, a flyer tucked into my street-facing window advertises a gym with a training circuit called “Lady Enjoy”. The damsels in the picture below are at it – looks gruelling and if your butterfly henin falls off you have to start over at the ergometer.
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Wearing a saucy quinceañera dress on my 50th; 
And now, time to return to the aprons and call on my muses! Bonne rentrée à tous et à toutes!