Stagefright

Today, Francois # 1 had me join him at Cinémathèque Québécoise, the trendy theater/bar combo where we're hosting a welcome party and showing a film tomorrow night. We went into the big movie theater with the beautiful, plush, red velvet seats to test the sound on the microphone. Classy place. My job is to stand in the back of the theater and tell him whether the volume of the microphone is too loud/too quiet/just right. There are other people in the room with us. French Quebecois people. Francois decides he wants to hear the sound from the back of the room, so he says, "Sarah, can you come up here and keep talking into the microphone until I tell you to stop?" Mind you, this is all in French -- and suddenly, I have a French audience while I'm on stage with a microphone. ("Please, Lord, let me conjugate correctly.") I say the first thing that comes to mind: "Voulez-vous que je chante quelque chose?" That means, "Do you want me to sing something?" Unexpectedly (for me), the audience's answer is "OUI!" Ummmm....great! Note to self: think before speaking, in any language. Not only have I been volunteered to talk incessantly to native speakers of a language that is not my own, but I've now offered to sing to them. Fine plan I had, don't you think? Much to my dismay (and fortunately for them), I could not think of a single song other than my college sorority song: "First, you take a Pi Phi and then you compare the way she wears her clothes and the way she does her hair..." I had the good sense to refrain from singing it, but I wonder why it -- and nothing else -- popped into my head. In hindsight, I should have done my girl version of Bruce Springsteen's I'm on Fire. The minute I got home tonight, I started belting it out...pretty well, if I do say so, myself. Apparently it just needed time to "cook." If they ask me again, I'm totally doing that song. You know, next time I'm on stage in a theater full of French people and I'm asked to be the entertainment.

Other than that, we spent the day moving furniture up a fire escape to a vacant 3rd floor apartment that will serve as the editing studio/beer drinking venue/creative brainstorming space for the filmmakers over the next week and a half. Surgeon General's Warning: Moving excessively heavy furniture up three flights on a rusty, skinny, rickety fire escape does not contribute to one's longevity. Here's a picture of Francois #1 crawling back under a sofa that got stuck and would not make it between floors 2 and 3.