I'm On Fire! (No, Really)

We have friends from San Francsico visiting Paris this week, and we meet up with them to go up the Notre Dame towers. We are there around noon, and it's pretty awe-inspiring to be up there when the famous bells of Notre Dame are ringing.



In the afternoon, we go to the home of a boy in G's class to celebrate with friends. The hosts are originally German, and one of the families is French, another one is part-French/part-Colombian, and with us there as the Americans, it's a very international crowd. It's also a crowd that loves the spotlight, and among the six children that are there, there are at least three who are professional actors/models, and five who are in a variety of performing groups. The one excepted is only three years old, and she may be the biggest attention-hound of all. There are songs in many languages, a cello performance, chopsticks on the piano, and it turns out one of the men there is a noted concert pianist (Jonas Vitaud, whose most recent album just came out last month), and he plays us a Brahms tune. That's the kind of gathering that makes you really feel like you're living in Paris!

After the party, we cross the Seine, walking by Notre Dame, where barriers and an exterior video screen have been set up to accommodate the expected influx for Christmas Eve mass. We bypass the madness (and late hour) to go instead to a 6pm mass at Eglise St. Severin, a 13th century church on the Rive Gauche side. Since I have the camera with me anyway, I absolutely cannot resist snapping photos of the candelight service, especially since they have the first live nativity play I've ever seen. It turns out that one of G's classmates is Mary and another a shepard. The baby Jesus is played by a real live baby, a very calm little black girl in a white tutu. 

During the service, the priests hand out votive candles to all the children for a parade through the aisles of the church -- not just the nativity scene children, but all children attending. By this point, Anthony has taken P home, but G and I are sticking it out and enjoying it. Some of the parents are accompanying the children, and of course I want to be one of them so I can get photos from different angles, so I walk amongst them. As they start handing out real, lit candles to four-year olds in a very crowded parade of children and a packed church, I think, "They would never do this in the States. It's got to be too dangerous. I just hope G doesn't catch her long hair on fire." As a reader, with the benefit of foreshadowing, you see what's coming, of course. But in the church, I don't. Twenty seconds after I have this thought, I simultaneously smell the unmistakable stink of burning hair and feel the boy behind me swatting at my head.

A sizeable chunk of my hair is burnt, to about 7 or 8 inches up from the bottom. My friends assure me it is not noticeable at all, however. I'm not sure which is worse: having my hair incinerated or finding out that my hair always looks like it's been incinerated. I mean, what does that say about my normal hairstyle -- that literally lighting it afire makes no discernable difference? Other than the smell, that is: My friend Fabrice calls the new scent "Eau d'Enfer No. 5." ("Enfer" meaning "hell.")

My friends and I originally decide that it may be God punishing me either for being Jewish attending mass or, more likely, for being Jewish attending mass and taking photos throughout the ceremony. However, upon reflection, I decide that it cannot be that: if God really wanted to punish me, he would corrupt all my digital photo files. Instead, I think it must mean that God is a huge fan of my blog. And he just wants to contribute his own little joke.