One other fun thing that happened this week was that Laura and I hosted seminar at our apartment because our professor was at a conference in Singapore. We had a guest speaker from Australia who talked about video games as industrial temporal objects. It was really nice to have enough space for everyone to be comfortable. Sam’s office gets far too crowded. He talks about the charm of the space, but almost everyone said we should just start having seminar at our place. I certainly wouldn’t mind. I really started to like everyone in seminar this week, because now I kind of know their personalities and how to expect them to behave in class. I was sitting between Josh and B, and they got into an impassioned discussion. B was making this point and he kept saying over and over, “It’s like the Beastmaster and the ferrets.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded important. So I wrote down “Beastmaster and ferrets,” which Josh clearly found amusing. Afterward I learned that ferrets are central to the plot of Beastmaster, but I have never seen that film. (Now that Rashida and Emily know that ferrets play a central role in it, I’m sure neither of them will be seeing Beastmaster anytime soon.)

On Sunday I went to Versailles with P. and K. We had heard that it was our last chance to see Marie-Antoinette’s private theatre before the end of the season on October 31. When we got to Versailles, the line for tickets was ghastly. Then this woman pointed us to a different entrance, so we waited in that line. While we were waiting in line we decided that we just wanted tickets for the “Domaine de Marie-Antoinette.” We finally got our tickets and figured out that we could have just walked across the grounds to the Petit Trianon and bought the Marie-Antoinette tickets there. But K. and I reasoned that if we had walked half an hour to get there and then weren’t able to buy tickets, we would have been annoyed.

Anyway, K. was reading Proust in line, because that’s how she rolls. (Clearly we were destined to be friends.) And I was explaining that my favorite thing about Proust is that always has these high expectations and no event ever lives up to them. So then we were joking about how we were just like Proust, because we had these high expectations of Versailles, and we were doomed to be disappointed. Fortunately, when we got to the little theatre of Marie-Antoinette, we were not disappointed at all. The building didn’t look like much from the outside, but the theatre inside was gorgeous. It was so great to get a sense of the scale of it. Except that I estimated that it would seat 60-80 people, and the website is telling me that it seated 200. The upholstery was all blue, and there was ostentatious gold detailing on the ceiling, with the queen’s monogram above the stage.

After seeing the theatre, we wandered some, and came across the “Queen’s Hamlet,” which one of my witty friends dubbed the Disney World of the Eighteenth Century. Marie-Antoinette had an architect named Richard Mique construct a peasant village for her entertainment. In Peasantland she could pretend to tend sheep by day and play cards with friends at night. Katie’s initial reaction was, “Is this real?” Clearly this is crying out for a historical performance studies analysis.

We took the RER back to Paris. P. likes to watch NFL football on Sundays at a bar called The Moose, which is of Canadian extraction. So we went there for post-Versailles drinking of beer and eating of chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, onion rings, and French fries. There was this crazy woman there wearing a Chicago Bears jersey and screaming her head off every time there was a big play. She recognized us as Americans and kept asking us where different cities were in the U.S., specifically Jacksonville and Baltimore. (I don’t think she knew where Philadelphia was either, because she was telling these other guys that she prefers the East Coast to the South, but she was rooting for Jacksonville over Philadelphia the entire time.) I’m fairly certain she was from somewhere in Europe. She made a comment about the bartender being a “French fag” (which she clearly meant as an insult). So if she was French there was some self-loathing going on about her Frenchness. Anyway, her performance of Americanness was fascinating to watch. I have to say that I found The Moose to be a little overwhelming. I’m glad to know it’s there, but I think it will be quite some time before I go back.