“Why are you wearing a beret standing next to the Eiffel tower?”
…more than one boyfriend asked.
For many years, in my Mom’s kitchen, a photo montage of my collected photographs of Paris decorated the wall. I had brought my camera, my tripod, and my, um, yeah. My Beret. I’d been wearing it for years, it was my shtick, my “I’m an artist! Can you not see that I am a serious artist!” proclamation. Most people in college have something like this. For men it’s the hairy beard/thick glasses/tight pants sort of thing. Or it’s the Che shirt/revolutionary bag/ Birkenstock-patchouli sort of thing. You get the idea. I even have an outfit to wear these days if I need a good statement outfit… It’s a tight tunic-like shirt that has lots of intertwining threads and colours. It lets people know immediately “I’m an artist” and therefore they might want to cross the room and find someone more reasonable to talk to.
“I have nothing in common with that person,” is the thought that might cross your mind if you see it.
That’s ok, I think this is just a form of honesty, like pulling up your pants beneath your boobs or wearing socks with sandals. It’s putting it out there, letting others know, that your mental stability might come and go with the wavering winds, or that you truly don’t give a shit and others should just deal with all that a sock/sandal combo implies.
In my beret wearing years, it never occurred to me to be self-conscious. I was too busy doing my thing, trying my best to not really fit in. I have another picture of me in a beret in its earlier manifestation…the counter-revolutionary, possibly Russian one bought from the thrift store, to perfectly accent a lots of eyeliner, a Cure t-shirt, and an annoyed look at Disneyland. I am giving the look that I know will come my way with a soon-to-be teenager.
WHAT, Omigod, this is so lame, stop looking at me, if you’re looking at me can you at least see how ironic and bored I am, but possibly also interestingly alternative, right? I’m having fun but you can’t know that. Whatreyouolookingat? Etc…
The fact that this can all be implied by one look shows the complexity and near schizophrenia that the teenage mind teeters on at all times. But case in point, I wore a beret, not even the least bit ironically, more than once out in public.
Cue the Griswalds. I’m sure at some point I had seen European Vacation. Had I not noted the part about the mom passing out berets so they would all fit in with the Parisians? Had I not noted this ploy didn’t really work out for them? Was I trying to fly in the face of common sense?
I found out in the Louvre, standing before Monet’s masterpiece Waterlily Pond.
An Italian boy and his buddy were staring at me. I noticed. My Mom noticed. My brother was probably pretending not to be with us, if he was smart. The boy asked me in French where I was from. I somehow gleaned this, and told him my French was awful, and that I was from the States. So I sort of answered his question, at which point he said okay, okay…and slowly backed away with his friend, who was giggling like a school girl. My Mom said, “I think that boy thinks you are cute.”
In my mind, this seemed like a fair assessment, because why else would you go up to a complete stranger and talk to them?
…So the other say, I was sitting on the toilet (sometimes things hit you when you have the only quiet moment of your day, introspection as a form of multi-tasking, as you’re taking care of business) and out of the blue, out of nowhere, I had this time-portal moment that flashed me back to Paris, 1992.
Holy shit they were laughing at me! Huh! God, were you that stupid?
Yes. If I don’t want to acknowledge the basic in-your-face truth, I really can be that stupid. And it will only take me, oh, twenty-four years to figure it out.
But I had a good laugh.And to those various boyfriends, the last of which I married?
I always said, “I dunno. I was in Paris! Why not wear a beret?!”