There was still over an hour until our next event, so we strolled into Central Park, enjoying the beautiful early fall weather. We skirted Sheep Meadow, where there were lots of people, but no sheep, unlike at Falstaff the night before. Eventually we got to the Central Park Zoo, or whatever they're calling it these days. We did manage to catch the end of the 4 o'clock performance of the Delacorte Clock, and then proceeded to the Children's Zoo. We saw turtles and ducks and goats and (yes) sheep--and lots of kids watching the turtles and ducks and goats and sheep. We watched some of the kids feeding the goats and the sheep, and we read the sign about the spitting alpaca (if it spits on you, contact any zoo employee). Then we went back to the main zoo area. There we saw sea lions sunning and swimming, viewed penguins mostly just standing, and traversed an obstacle course of empty strollers parked in front of the puffin exhibit, the view of which was obscured by the former occupants of said strollers.
Time was running out, so we left the park and went to Florence Gould Hall of the French Institute/Alliance Française (FIAF) on E. 59th St. We settled into our seats for Liaison Transatlantique: Letters of Simone de Beauvoir to Nelson Algren. This is a one-woman show based on Fabrice Rozié's play Transatlantic Liaison.
I can't say I was really looking forward to this. It is a reading of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's love letters to American author Nelson Algren, whom she met while on a trip to America in 1947. She was having a long-distance affair with Algren, who wrote The Man With the Golden Arm. This affair was concurrent with her life-long relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. De Beauvoir would not marry Algren out of respect to her relationship with Sartre. She ended up being buried next to Sartre--wearing Algren's ring.
In and of themselves, the letters are not particularly interesting, at least to me. De Beauvoir wrote them in English, and this was clearly not her mother tongue. What is interesting, though, is that at the same time she was pouring her heart out in these love letters, she was also writing The Second Sex, the book that basically founded modern feminism. The contrast of the conventional love letters with the revolutionary book is jarring.
Nevertheless, the reading of the letters by themselves quickly put me to sleep. I awoke just in time to hear the one line in particular that I remember. De Beauvoir explained that she was calling her book "The Second Sex" because "pansies" were called "the third sex" in France, but no one ever referred to the second (or to the first, I presume).
The performance was by Marie-France Pisier (left), who seemed very under-rehearsed. I can't believe she's 61 years old, though. I'd sure like to know the name of her plastic surgeon.The Q&A afterwards was not terribly illuminating, other than Pisier saying that she knew de Beauvoir. We left in the middle, and went and had a nice dinner at Fig & Olive.
It was the end of a very busy week. I was out 7 days in a row. I need a rest.
1 comment:
there are definitely sections of the second sex that would have kept you awake.
i recently saw a biography/documentary about emma goldman that was mostly about who she was in love with, too, & sometimes, you know, this really aggravates me. okay, it aggravates me all the time: biographies of men are "he got married to eleanor rothchild at age 23" and that's that - & then it's all about what they accomplished in politics, literature, science - whatever their field.
but with women, of course not. that has to be about who they were in love with, & what longing they had, & all that other crap, even if those women 1) knew most of the world's leaders during her lifetime, and 2) helped make huge advantages not just for women's rights but in human rights, and 3) wrote tremendous, intelligent book and inspired other leaders and revolutionaries - which is, of course, true of both goldman and debeauvoir.
someday.
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