The Magic of Paris

Walk along the Paris plage (beach), which is when they block off trafffic, truck in a whole lotta sand, and make a fake beach along the Seine.  G begs for a balloon, but we refuse to cave, feeling like our children are going to be spoiled if they always get what they want.  Naturally, we then find a magician show for children, and G is called up onstage and given a little prize of, you guessed it, a balloon.  It is impossible to teach these girls a lesson.  Later, on our walk away from the Seine, a construction worker calls the girls over and hands them a bunny balloon on a stick.  Why he has a bunny balloon on a stick, in a hard-hat and on the job site, will forever remain a mystery.  I believe the whole thing was put there just to thwart our parenting attempts.

The magician is truly crap, by the way, but in a way that is oh so French.  One of his acts involves lighting up a cigarette, smoking it a for a while in front of all the children, then taking a scarf from a woman in the audience (and in France, you can always count on some woman in the audience having a scarf) and appearing to burn a hole in it.  Then of course he whips off the scarf and, sacre bleu!, it is not burned.  Afterwards, he drops the cigarette, still smoking, to the floor, and leaves it there to litter the ground and simultaneously pollute the children with second-hand smoke.  Another act involves him finding coins in various places and, in one such instance, finding one in his tobacco-stained, partially-toothless mouth and spitting it directly into a little girl's hand.  Thankfully, G was not on stage for that one.  If I were her mother, I would have sterilized the heck out of that.  When G was called up, it was for something moronic but harmless, and the most interesting part of her being up there was that he could not say her name, thought the French translation of her name made no sense as a name, and I finally had to scream out "Gigi" as a nickname the French could wrap their brains, and tongues, around.