December 6, 2023 First Person C’est la Vie!: A French Cancer Diary By Lisa Carver Margot Bergman, Untitled (Cup), 1985–1992, from a portfolio in issue no. 244. July 20 After a day of spewing blood, I am in a French hospital. Since I’ve never been sick in my life, I had no comprehension of how serious it is to puke red. By the afternoon, I’d lost so much blood my skin changed color and I couldn’t stand up or feel my hands. I was in the bathroom and my phone was in the bedroom and I couldn’t even crawl to it. I thought I was going to die there. I was thinking mainly of the book I want to finish, which is probably vain or inhumane, but that’s me. I did think of my daughter Sadie, who has really been kicked around by life in the three years since high school, but I have confidence that she will work it all out—she has a core that’s solid and true. I also thought of Bruno, my groom of a mere five months, who is so happy with me and was looking forward to the next thirty years together. But mostly it was the unfinished book that stuck in my craw. Neighbor Florence interrupted my lugubriousness when she came in with the spare key she uses to feed the animals when we’re away—Bruno, who is with the kids in Bordeaux at the moment, called her when I stopped answering the phone. She found me in the bathroom. The pompiers came. They were very gruff with me for not calling sooner. I only threw up blood twice, but they explained that all that black diarrhea was blood, too. I felt proud of myself that I can speak French even when drained of blood. Read More
September 13, 2023 First Person Two Strip Clubs, Paris and New Hampshire By Lisa Carver Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, La danse au Moulin Rouge, 1890. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Every summer, my mother would take me and a friend to Salisbury Amusement Park to eat fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar and go on the roller coaster until we were sick and then get our minds blown by the 2001 Space Oddity dome, which spun us around in complete darkness while a narrator intoned about galaxies and time warps. But best of all: every hour, on the hour, the Solid Gold Dancers jogged out of a pit in the center of the fairgrounds and, sweating under the August sun in full gold lamé, would kick, spin, leap, and boogie for fifteen minutes while disco music boomed (those loudspeakers carried barely any treble, which made for a peculiar version of disco). Sunrays glinted off the sequins and I was hypnotized. It all jumbled together in my mind, the sensations, the nausea, the ecstasy. That gold-flecked feeling of 1979 faded away until thirty-five years later, when my French husband, Bruno, took me to the nightclub in Montmartre that started it all: the Moulin Rouge. I walked through red velvet curtains into the past and straight onto the set of the sweetest magical movie flop of my youth, Xanadu! Roller skates, a swimming pool rising up out of the stage where we could see women dancing underwater. In costumes made of diamonds and skin. I was in heaven. The show lasted two hours. It had everything: a fantastic light show and sound system, constantly changing sets—a castle, a pirate ship, a circus, a London street corner at the turn of the century, a … a Chinese opium den? Even though the women had naked boobies, they still looked like angels. I think angels do have naked boobies, now that I’ve seen this show. And there were so many of them! A teeming flock or herd. Singing and kicking and dancing. Costume changes for every act. A personal favorite was the giant red-feather puffballs with legs sticking out. No arms, no head, just a big red puffball on legs. One act featured good-natured Siamese twins, another strongmen who balanced whole humans on a single elbow, wow! At the Moulin Rouge, clowns are bare-breasted along with the angels. And I shouldn’t have been surprised that in France, one clown act per nightclub experience was not enough … there had to be two. Read More