Paris Scandal: Bree No Angel

It has been about fifteen years since Melissa and I traveled to Paris...I think we made our trip in June 2002, maybe six months after I dumped MoneyPenny. We planned our trip long before Al Gore invented the Internet, so instead of searching online in our pajamas, I remember going with Melissa to see a travel agent with the unlikely name of Marsha Orlando to find out about our choices in Paris hotels. I still can't explain how it happened, but we twentysomething single girls booked ourselves on a "granny tour," a busload of elderly tourists taking a doubledecker bus around Paris: "on your left, you'll see the Left Bank, careful now we don't want to crash into the Arc de Triomphe Paris." Our granny tour experience of the Eiffel Tower Paris was nothing like Before Sunrise....but that movie didn't come out until 1995 so while I did have high hopes of finding a hot Parisian guy I didn't have my unrealistic expectations painted quite so vividly in my mind.

Even back then, I fancied myself a writer and carried a tiny notebook with me everywhere, writing haiku in bars and cafes. I would love to track down some of those old notebooks (buried deep in my closet) and publish them on my Roxiticus Desperate Housewives blog. Walking with Melissa near Notre Dame, a dirty street artist called Melissa an angel, wanting to sketch or paint her picture for money. In my journal as well as in all of the postcards I sent to friends back home, I wrote "vagabond artists call me an angel," since it sounded more poetic, but Melissa has threatened ever since to reveal me to the public as no angel. Up until the Eliot Spitzer call girl scandal, I actually believed that one little exaggeration could hurt my chances as a politician....well, maybe it is the rest of the stuff Melissa knows about me that I wouldn't want to see on the front page of the New York Times.