Joyeux Anniversaire

So yesterday was my birthday. We called my mother's latest the Unspeakable Birthday, and I'm calling mine the Inadmissible Birthday. The number is far too large, far too different from those that have gone before. I am far too large, far too different from what has gone before. Some time this year my good looks, whatever there were of them, left me, and I am no longer a person to whom people say You don't look that old! and I'd never have guessed! I have begun to look my age and I know it, can see it when I wake up in the morning and when a really artful application of makeup results in looking not good, but merely not bad.

So this is not a happy birthday, even in Paris, France, and I was not pleased to greet it. Though I also did not anticipate how very unhappy it would make me.

I wake up late in London. Bother! I actually think, wondering again why London makes my brain extemporize as Winnie-the-Pooh. No time to shower so I throw two days' clothes into a bag and run to St. Pancras to catch my train.

I am early enough to allow time for a cup of tea-to-go and, though it is hard to juggle together with my purse, my 20-pound computer/briefcase and an overnight bag while also fishing for tickets and passport, today it seems worth it. But as I try to manhandle the whole mess through the ticket stile I am told by Security that I can't take the tea. There are no trashcans in sight and I am given to understand that England does not do the trashcan thing for security reasons. This is the stupidest thing I have ever heard, but with no other option I leave the cup of tea in the middle of the floor, incensed already and feeling grimier by the moment.

I arrive in Paris to discover temperatures 20 degrees warmer and hot sunshine spilling over the city. Now I am sweaty as well as incensed and grimy and proceed to the Intercontinental Le Grand Hotel, which is what I suppose the culturally sensitive would call "venerable" and what I'll simply say is old. In typical French fashion lots of energy has been expended upon appearance and very little upon convenience. The air conditioning is sluggish, the bathroom Motel 6-sized, the bedroom small and oppressive, and I'd cheerfully trade the Degas prints in their gilded frames for a working chest of drawers.

I sit down to check my e-mail for something from the actress I'm here to work with and come across a birthday card from a dear friend. It is one of those funny commentaries on aging and it makes me burst into tears, which is not good because the desk sits in front of a large mirror and all I can see is that I am old, sweaty, grimy, greasy, and incensed, plus now blotchy, swollen, red and gimlet-eyed.

There is only one thing to do and I go do it: Walk up the street to Galleries Lafayette -- enormous designer department store -- and search for the hair salon I know must be there somewhere, which it is. I ascertain they can find someone to see me today and perch in a chair before a mirror, wishing I had some mascara with me. A person comes by and asks what it is I think I'd like. In my inadequate schoolgirl French I blurt out what I think at the time is "I am 50 today and old," (and what further reflection will tell me was actually "I am 15 today and pregnant") and, upon being offered a cautious, "Joyeux Anniversaire?" promptly burst into tears again. For a wonder, they find a stylist who will consent to see me anyway after about 20 minutes (no doubt passing the buck amongst themselves desperately in corners -- I'm not doing the nutcase! You do her!).

I tell Philippe, the stylist, to change my hair, and I say nothing else for the next 5 hours and $400. I cry again once, and twice I fall asleep, but I offer no direction of any kind. They cut, razor, color, highlight, cut again . . . I say nothing. This is a curiously restful fatalism, I find, and while it makes the staff rather nervous, I enjoy the novel experience of totally sincere passivity.

Finally, they are finished -- or maybe it is just that the store is closing -- and I leave with a lot less hair and money and repair to a sidewalk cafe for indifferent chicken and good wine, followed by an evening of "Entourage" reruns on my computer.

That was my 50th.

Many things have happened between yesterday and last time I blogged, all of which are more interesting and more entertaining than this account of my birthday, but, you know, I figure it's my birthday and my blog, and if you can't have a senseless, indulgent self-pity party here, where can you?

. . . Well, apparently at the Galleries Lafayette, but that's neither here nor there.