Bonjour Tweétaire

I wanted all of you to meet my French foreign exchange student for the summer. We’re going through a rough patch, and I’m not sure she’s going to last. Say something, Françoise. I guess she went out for un petit café break. If they get Twitter in France, it's going to have to be 360 characters. No way the French can hold it to 140.

Françoise wrote this novel that is considered groundbreaking for a teenager, and it’s all about ballerina flats with French sailor tops and smoking cigarettes like Jean-Paul Belmondo and racing her sports car down to the Riviera while swigging straight from the Dom Pérignon bottle , sorta like Spring Break, French style, shattering the empties against olive trees and scaring the sheep. In other words, thinking she’s pretty merde chaude (vulgaire.)

I need to talk to her about those ballerina flats. She gets them off Repetto’s in Paris cause they made them for Bebe (Brigitte Bardot,) plus they make real ballet shoes, but it was the flats and toe cleavage and Brigitte doing her mambo dance in And God Created Woman.

Françoise’s gone and whacked off her hair in some kind of screwy homage to Arthur Rimbaud, that little disaffected punk from Charleville who went to Paris and spent the bulk of his time having sex with Verlaine, staying drunk off absinthe and writing some bad poetry, then running home to Mama, when not playing games with knives and guns and disappearing into London to teach French when he couldn’t even speak English.

Françoise needs to realize this is D.C. where where we’ve got wars to deal with and a recession and Au Pied de Chochon flu. Anyway, she thought she was coming here to work for Cubism, an art movement, and instead she got me trying to teach her how a stapler works, for Christ's sake, so now she’s been slouching around a lot, sneering at everyone that crosses her path (that Rimbaud thing again,) and going around to Lauriol Plaza telling the al fresco group she’s leaving for Africa to become a gun runner and live the dissipated life of a downtrodden Colonial, talking about saints and paradise (her Patti Smith drone,) and how “Life is a farce. My innocence is enough to weep over,” and D.C. is hell and this is her season in it, and she keeps seeing fire and pitchforks in Penn Quarter. I mean, get a grip, girl. It's just an open kitchen.

She’s also given to those highfalutin’, verbose statements that aren’t working too well with Twitter, so the second she tears off with “My day is over, I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. I will swim and be bronzed by the sun and smoke and drink liqueurs strong as boiling metal. I will have gold. I will be lazy and brutual.” On Twitter, that will cut her right off at "stron," and she’s got the lazy part down, I can attest to that. Her "bronzed by the sun" is turning into me running across the street to CVS to get her some Noxema and a bottle of Bayer’s.

I ought to remind her that Verlaine went so off his rocker hanging with Rimbaud that his penis and anus were examined to see if he was a “habitual” or “recent” pederast, so subsequently, we know more about his penis and anus than the intimate anatomy of any other major poet of the past. Chew on that with your croissant, Françoise. Study your croissant. Do you not note the shape, the flakiness, the pure symbolism of diseased passion?

The other day I saw “What hard angel stuffs me full/Between the shoulders, while/I fly off for Paradise?” on her computer screen. I wonder if I could find her work as a French teacher to some St. Alban’s kid needing a tutor?