Clown Lady

Since I moved to France eight years ago, I have lived in the same neighborhood. Prior to that, I moved every few years. It's good to settle down and get to know where you live and get to know your neighbors: people in the same apartment building, shop keepers, fellow mothers at the square and .... Clown Lady.

Clown Lady has been in my neighborhood as long as I have and then some. No one knows who she is, where precisely she lives or whether she is a man or a woman. She has the most incredible wardrobe--dozens of purses, shoes, hats, umbrellas, cloaks, coats, scarves--ahhhh, it's enough to make your head spin!

The neighborhood is her stage, the inhabitants her audience and she never fails to put on a good show. She dresses a part and either strolls around as if she hadn't a care in the world or she picks a place and poses; lifting a hem just enough so we may admire her stockings and shoes, titling her head coquettishly so we may note the complex design of her hat, sashaying down the sidewalk so we may see exactly how her nineteen-fifties purse is coordinated to match her nineteen-sixties swing coat.

Clown Lady, reminiscent of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, goes a little heavy on the make up. She does a couple centimeters of white on her face, gigantic red lips and loads of eyeliner .... hence the moniker.

Gros bisous et a demain!

Love, Charley