All posts tagged: French

The Reason for the Season

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Though I loathe the culture war centered around “putting the ‘Christ’ back into ‘Christmas’”, I’m definitely one who wants my children to know the reason behind every season, or in most cases…holiday. This applies most especially to holidays as “abstract” as Veteran’s Day. Yesterday my older kid jumped with joy as she celebrated having THREE DAYS OF MORNING TELEVISION this weekend. Uncharacteristically, I held my tongue so as not to deflate her joy. I’ll save the posturing about Veteran’s Day for the actual day. I’m feeling particularly attached to Veteran’s Day, this year, because of the 100th anniversary of the WWI armistice. I’ve always been masochistically fascinated by WWI. It never fails to send a sobering chill down my spine to reflect on the first war in which men were able to massacre acres of men without catching sight of each other. The wide-scale use of machine guns, tanks, airplanes and trench warfare that wasted a generation all because of agreements between insecure, rich white men trying to keep their place in the upper-class mastering the …

Well…It Finally Happened

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It finally happened. My son was publicly shamed for wearing a dress. And my fatherly instincts screamed with leonine ferocity inside my head, but the diplomacy of a damn Israeli-Palestinian negotiator without. I took my kids to France, again, for a few weeks, this summer. I figured the cost of the trip was less than paying for 2 kids’ camp in New York City; plus, I used the last of my AmEx miles to pay for the flights. Anyway. My gender non-conforming son wore a dress every single day, except when he squeezed himself into his 4yo cousin’s pink bathing-suit-with-attached-tutu. And it was all fine. His new short haircut (see here) drew some double-takes, but, overall, it was fine. Until one night toward the end of our trip. I went to a restaurant with another dad and his son, and my kiddo was decked out in his Trolls “t-shirt-attached-to-flouncy-dress”. We were along the banks of a EuroDisney movie set replete with medieval castle backdrop and window boxes exploding with flowers. My kid saw the quai …

Dressed from the Future

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It was my French surrogate mother’s 70th birthday party. (Not the same kind of surrogate carrier who gave birth to my sons. Since my parents are gone, she’s an adoptive kind of mother.) She’d planned this bash for two years: an all-day garden party in the rolling hills of Normandy with everyone dressed in 70’s clothes. I don’t do costumes. I’m an actor. I dress up all the time for my job. I bah-humbug Halloween and I don’t do costume parties. I don’t like wearing vintage clothes because they’re always too tight on me (apparently I’m bigger than anyone who ever lived in the 60’s or 70’s) and they smell. But a 70’s costume party in France? Americans invented the 70’s. Everything cool about the 70’s – bell-bottoms, BeeGees, “the Bump”. Nineteen-month-old Ellison and I had to be the best-dressed, there. (Because Colton was only two months old (and a preemie), my partner elected to stay home with him.) I really wanted to be a white-jumpsuit-Elvis. I was informed such costumes don’t exist anymore, don’t …