Tranquil Again

Views at Hameau de la Brousse



It feels like the end of summer camp; all the Le Printemps sans Chapiteau actors, technicians, musicians, and organizers packed up with our help, kissed us all on both cheeks, and left yesterday after a very successful, well-attended performance of La Mouette on Friday night. La Mouette means The Seagull, it is one of Chekhov's most famous pieces, I think, full of people who are in love with the wrong person. The show started around 9 pm on Friday night and I helped take tickets. Fortunately it didn't rain, but it did get pretty chilly by the time the show was over around 11 pm. Everyone was wrapped in the blankets that Michel and Helene keep just for this purpose. But nobody minded; the play was riveting, the actors were funny, tragic, and compelling, and the setting was absolutely magical. The director used the entire park surrounding the stage for some of the action and it was very dramatic to have lights out in the trees and on the limestone cliff walls below the hameau where the amphitheatre is set. They had 3 curtain calls to a standing ovation.

Reed stayed up to watch the play too, and although he was cold and thirsty and couldn't understand a word he wouldn't leave or let one of us take him back to the room, because he wanted to see it. After watching the rehearsals on Thursday from his little rock platform on stage right, he was tickled when he recognized bits of the action and he especially wanted to see them use the big spot lights on the metal towers behind the bleacher seating. I think it was pretty magical, too, to see the people we had been eating with all week transformed into their characters. There was also a neat technical feat of making it rain outside the big French door type windows at the back of the stage which Reed was pretty excited about. Afterwards, we all hurried back to the main building where Helene had a huge pot of hot borscht waiting for us, followed by cheesecake, which we were eating at 1 a.m. with everyone, basking in the post-performance glow and the expansive good moods of all the actors. Fortunately Reed was quite happy to climb into bed as soon as the play was over.

We were nearly at the capacity of the kitchen, dining room and the dishes and silverware and so on, feeding this group lunch and dinner on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; the dishwasher was running constantly to keep up and all of us were peeling and chopping veggies for hours before each meal, it seemed. Fortunately Reed discovered on Tuesday that he loves loading and unloading the dishwasher so he was always checking the machine to see if one load was done so he could put all the dishes on the shelves, add the soap, and then push the buttons. Sometimes there is something like this that he'll take to wherever we're WWOOFing which kind of makes up for the extra work he creates at times. He's also been helping Walt with some of the landscaping and gardening which always perks up the exterior of wherever we're WWOOFing. And again, I'm amazed at what he'll eat when I haven't cooked it, there's nothing else, and when he's really hungry from the lack of snacks: Waldorf salad heavy on the celery, lentils, squid in cardamom sauce, anchovy spread, spicy merguez sausage, fig crisp, curry etc. Of course there was lots of stuff he loves anyway like quiche, spaghetti bolognaise, cheesecake, rillettes, stewed peaches with honey, and walnut cake.

This afternoon Eric took a group in his yellow Kangoo to some place on the river to swim and Walt and Reed went with him; it's just now starting to rain so hopefully they got a chance to get in the water before the weather got wet. We're tired from all the work this week and also from the hard work we've been doing to learn French. But we've made progress - last night Eric was talking for several minutes at his normal speed to other French people about bicycles in various cities like Paris, Lille, and Amsterdam, and I understood almost everything he said. And I've learned the difference in pronunciation for "vu," "vous," and "veux"!!

It's all highbrow in France...

Walt stayed at the hameau with Reed the other night and ate with the technicians while the rest of us piled in some cars and drove to a nearby town where there was a kind of potluck buffet meal (repas) of mediocre quiches and pizza and then a poetry reading of two poems that had to do with bulls and maybe Picasso written by one of France's most famous poets. Of course I can't remember his name but one of the poems was called La Corrida. I didn't understand much but I enjoyed the setting - in the garden of a beautiful little chateau - and the performance; it was more of a dramatic reading than just a poetry reading. For La Corrida, they passed around glasses of red wine before they started. Since the performers were wearing red and black and had red cloths to drape on the chairs and the candleabras were full of red candles burning brightly, it was all very dramatic. Even better were when the bats started flying around because of all the insects attracted to the lights. Afterwards the twilight view over the hills dotted with lights from hamlets and villages was really beautiful, I could see how a nobleman surveying his territory would have felt like a king in that chateau in the evenings.

This is all part of a Open Skies (Ciel Ouvert) series of summer artistic events in this region held in unusual outdoor spaces that Michel and Helene have helped facilitate. The next night we quickly washed up the dishes after dinner and piled in the cars again, this time for a film being shown inside an actual old quarry, or carriere. It was immense, and once we got inside, a little chilly; cave temperature of course. If I'd realized I would have worn socks. The film was a collection of 5 short films made by one director; a couple of them it was easy to understand the gist of it but a couple of them were absolutely inscrutable unless you understood French well. The funniest one was a couple about to get married, who suddenly were confessing to each other all the things the other person didn't know. The man doesn't like meat, he broke a vase on purpose, etc. etc. Then the woman admitted - and in this part I was so excited because I could understand it all and I could even laugh - that everything she had ever served him to eat she had bought at the deli or traiteur; the worst part was getting rid of all the packaging. And the final blow - she was brunette, not blond. Completely brunette. The look on his face was priceless.

Eric, the WWOOFer from Lille, told me he was looking forward to seeing the film because he hadn't been to the cinema for a long time; he also said he hoped it wasn't too highbrow, although he didn't use that word because there isn't a translation for highbrow in French. Then, just as I was about to say facetiously, but isn't everything in France highbrow? he said but of course, everything in France is like that!

The actors and musicians are pretty pleasant to have around, many of them are downright friendly and will in good spirits correct your French nicely and others are simply pleasant. Last night their dress rehearsal was delayed by the rain and everyone was gathered in the big room downstairs where a few of us were playing a dice game called Yams and Reed was painting with watercolors and loading dirty dishes into the dishwasher and putting away the clean ones. Tonight is the big spectacle, a piece called La Mouette based on something by Chekhov. I'm very curious to see everyone in their parts. We will eat dinner early tonight and then have borscht afterwards. Today the person who seems to be the person in charge of all the paperwork, Cecille, presented Helene with a big bouquet of flowers and she gave us WWOOFers a couple of chocolate toolboxes. Everything in finest chocolate, the box, the wrenches, the tape measure, bolts, etc. These are tucked safely away in the pantry for us to share later.