by Mamrie Hart
As the weeks passed, my excitement built, which helped push any other feelings of sadness or weirdness onto the back burner. I daydreamed about my adventures there, dining alfresco at one of those tiny cafés, observing the beautiful people around me sharing midday bottles of wine, munching on baguettes. I imagined myself skipping down the streets, wearing striped shirts and a little red scarf around my neck, saying, “Bonjour! Bonjour!” like the heroine of my own indie movie.
And deep down, I had to admit: I didn’t just want to feel French on my trip . . . I wanted to be frenched.
While I had come out of my breakup assuming that I’d be a wild woman, months later, I still hadn’t kissed anyone. If I was being honest, this urge to put my mouth on a new person scared me. What if my first first kiss in a decade was bad? I was pretty out of practice. But I had to start somewhere, I decided, and what better place to do that than Paris? My thoughts swirled. Hooking up with some handsome international businessman along the French Riviera wouldn’t just be getting back on the horse; it would be straight-up sprinting like a USA gymnast, ricocheting off the catapult, and doing a 720-degree spin only to stick the landing on that diiiiick.* If I couldn’t get kissed in a week in France, then I might as well join a convent and take a vow of celibacy.
I immediately went shopping for my France wardrobe (bye-bye, acid-washed jorts) and asked who else would be coming on the trip. First, there was Jarrett. Jarrett is a handsome, hilarious, sweet, and sensitive jujitsu-loving actor/creator. The kind of person who is as down to do a forty-minute bit in a fake British accent as he is to have a deep, hours-long conversation about how the brain processes love. We had been around each other in small doses and always enjoyed each other’s company, but we’d never hung out in a long stretch like this. Then there was Tony. Tony was Jarrett’s creative partner and just a magical elf of a human. Not because he was small or anything; he was a normal-size man with bleached-blond hair and a big smile, but he had a Seuss-ish way with words that made him a delight to be around. Rounding out the crew was Cyrina. Now, I had never met Cyrina before, but we did have mutual friends in common, and once we had spoken for five minutes, it felt like I had known her forever. Cyrina is whip-smart and not afraid to make fun of herself, and she goes into a hilarious fake Bronx accent once she’s had a few drinks. It was the perfect mishmash of different personalities who shared the same level of silliness. It was also the perfect mix of people I was comfortable with but not super close to, which was crucial. No one was going to try to do an hour-long interview with me about my breakup, which had been happening left and right with other friends. I mean, I get it. People are always curious as to why couples call it off, especially after so many years, but hot damn! With some friends, it felt like there was a single lightbulb swinging over my head as they interrogated me about the details, as if they were going to crack the case and find out that I cheated or something. I was over talking about it.
I landed in Cannes with a suitcase of outfits that said, “Oui oui, I’m French,” and an inflated ego from flying first class. We were staying at the Carlton, where all the stars stay during the film festival. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman than when I rolled up in there. My room was beautiful. The ceilings were high, and the prices on the minibar were even higher. But they didn’t have my credit card on file, so I sat on my grandiose bed and took those fifteen-euro cashews to the face. A few snacks later, and I heard the sound of a WhatsApp message coming through on my phone. It was from Jarrett.
“Anybody down for a drink in the lobby bar? I could use a MIP or two.”
And so began the constant punning up of the conventions’ name as we sat in that fancy-ass lobby, drinking negronis. For example:
Man, this really is the MIP of a lifetime.
You guys, please don’t drink too much and fall tonight. We don’t need anyone to have a MIP slip.
I came to this convention before it was popular; one could say I’m a MIPster.
Are we actually in the South of France right now, or am I MIPpin’ my balls off?
I just want to make sure we do this thing right. One might say I want to MIP it, MIP it good.
What a long, strange MIP it’s been.
Cyrina, we already used the trip/MIP pun. Wake up, MIP Van Winkle.
Yeah, Mamrie, MIP her a new one!
There’s something special about a group getting to know one another so far removed from their normal lives. It takes everyone out of their element, out of talking about the minutiae of their own lives, and instead just lets them focus on what’s happening in the present. By the end of that first day, we had a million inside jokes and callbacks between us . . . mainly of MIP puns and how bad Cyrina was at them.
When it came time to actually go to the convention, the laughing hit an all-time peak, thanks to some of the other projects there that were trying to be sold. Things like Police Beauties and Police Dogs out of Japan. You know, just your classic show of beautiful policewomen and their, in my opinion, equally beautiful dogs. But my overall favorite was a romantic film out of China. I can’t remember the title, but the log line will forever be emblazoned in my brain and heart. Here goes . . . ahem . . .
Sometimes love is sweet like a salty rose,
Sometimes it’s sweet like candies.
And sometimes it’s so spicy that it makes your eyes watery.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes me laugh harder than bad translations. In my early Brooklyn days, I would scour dollar stores to try to find the best birthday cards with nonsensical translations. Things like “Birthday Happy Times Party Kitties!” and “Hope Your Birthday Is Smile Trees and Sunshine Hugs.” But this poem? This was art. I immediately memorized it and said it over and over again throughout the day.
The panel was as expected: a roomful of suits staring at us as we gushed about how great it was to work with the production company. I’m pretty sure I only used the word “authenticity” twice! But to be fair, I was only onstage for four minutes. Yes, these people flew us out to be onstage for four minutes. Hollywood is insane.
That night I got so blackout drunk (hi, recently single girl!) that I kept repeating my new favorite salty rose poem like a broken record at the bar we closed down.* I was in bad shape, guys. Every five minutes I fell down like a five-minute-old deer. Flats or sneakers couldn’t be a part of my classy French wardrobe, no no! I insisted on bringing the tallest heels to Cannes, which means my drunk ass was racking up new bruises left and right. Cyrina, bless her heart, tried to get me to just relinquish control and let her and Jarrett carry me home like the town drunk.
“Mamrie, just get in between us and put your arms on our shoulders,” Cyrina said. “You can be the cream to our Oreo!”
Pretty sweet, don’t ya think? Well, I didn’t! According to Cyrina when she recounted this the next day, as soon as she dropped the Oreo analogy, I whipped around, looked her dead in the eyes, and said, “Stop being condescending to me.” Somehow, we are still friends!
The next morning, my head felt like I had pulled a Mario Bros. and just spent the evening breaking bricks with my head. I was embarrassed, and not even quite sure of my actions from the night before, so I did what anyone would do: I blocked it out and pretended nothing weird happened, so as not to ruin the vibe of the trip.
“I can’t believe we just have one more day here,” Jarrett said as we waited for our round of double espressos in the lobby.
“I know!” Tony chimed in, chipper as fuck, because he’s one of those rare creatures that doesn’t have to drink to have a good time. “I don’t want to go back yet.”
“Then don’t,” I said with a smirk on my face. These were my kind of people. People who weren’t calling out my drunk-ass shenanigans in the harsh daylight. And I knew they would be up for more adventures.
“Come to Paris with me. I’ll bet they’ll change your flight and then we ca
n all get an Airbnb together. . . .” I didn’t even have to look up from my coffee; I knew the guys were in. Sadly, Cyrina had to get back to LA and couldn’t join us.
Twenty-four hours later and we were riding a train to Paris, hugging the coastline for the first few hours and then weaving our way through the French countryside. We couldn’t get our seats together, but that was fine because my seatmate was a tiny old lady who was already asleep, her eyes shaded by Chanel sunglasses rimmed in pearls. As someone who once took an overnight Greyhound trip sitting beside a woman who used her stomach as a TV tray to eat a giant container of General Tso’s chicken, I was happy as a clam. Specifically a geoduck clam, which basically looks like a MASSIVE penis, but you can save that Google image search until after this chapter.
Once our train arrived, we hopped in an Uber* to go check out our apartment. The car pulled up to a beautiful building with a metal gate, and after a few minutes of figuring out the lock, the three of us crammed into the teensy-tiny elevator heading up to the fifth floor. When I say “teensy,” I mean it; this felt more like one of those chutes at a drive-through bank teller than a real ’vator. The apartment itself was massive and old and gorgeous, with its Louis-the-some-numerical-number-remake furniture and Juliet “balconies” at every window. I put that in quotation marks because it’s a stretch calling those things balconies. I don’t know how skinny Juliet was, but I could barely get half of myself out there.
“Anybody else want to just sit in cafés all day and drink rosé and eat pommes frites?” Jarrett asked.
“Oh, you mean some French fries and pink wine?” I asked in my thickest Yadkin County, North Carolina, accent. It almost felt blasphemous in such a beautiful space.
“Actually, I think I’m going to go explore the city. See le sights,” Tony said in a thick French accent while lounging on a gaudy gold couch. Tony, God love him, is one of those people who immediately assumes the accent of wherever he is. I know this well. It’s very common among actors or, more embarrassingly, my mom. A theater grad herself, and a wonderful actress, the second my mom hears a foreign accent, I can see her eyes go big and her lips start to move, practicing the dialect in her head. She can’t help it. When I was in high school and she was working two jobs to keep us afloat (teaching high school English and theater by day and bartending at night), she told me that she would sometimes speak to her customers in a Scottish accent just because she was bored, and it always got her better tips.
While Tony set off to hit up le landmarks, Jarrett and I started walking through the neighborhoods to double down on that café culture. We couldn’t believe our eyes. It was like we were walking through a set, like at any moment we could push on one of the baguette-and-bouquet-filled storefronts, only for it to fall over and reveal some stagehands on a smoke break.
We skipped through the streets, popping into tiny café after tiny café to have a little wine and watch the passersby. It started raining, which is normally a downer when you’re exploring, but somehow it only made the city more charming. Whenever the rain would let up, we’d gallivant to another hole-in-the-wall, relishing in the insanely good wine and perfectly crisp pommes frites. It was the most picturesque, classy bar crawl imaginable. After a few burgundies, we became a teensy bit less self-aware and were no longer whispering but exclaiming, “That’s so French!” whenever we saw something . . . well . . . super fucking French.
By our fifth café, we were both pretty lit. Conversations started to turn from light stuff to deep, real-life talk—everything from career choices to family to past relationships and, wouldn’t you know it, the circumstances surrounding my breakup. Truth be told, I hadn’t had a real conversation about the breakup with anyone except my super close girlfriends. It was the first time I was explaining the situation to someone who didn’t know the history of our relationship.
As I sipped my five-dollar glass of Bordeaux that would’ve been twenty dollars back home, I started to really open up.
“The thing is, no one fucked up. There wasn’t any drama. Sometimes life needs a little drama. We had just become passing ships,” I said, tears starting to well up in my eyes. “I genuinely, truly, honestly just want him to be happy, and I don’t think I was that person for him in the long run.”
Luckily, before I could have a full-on breakdown over our baguette, a man smoking a cigarette while walking a French bulldog walked by. . . .
“THAT’S SO FRENCH!”
We screamed in unison, much to the chagrin of every couple there trying to get their romance on. “Do you think they just call French bulldogs ‘bulldogs’ since we are in France?” Jarrett asked. I was happy he had changed the subject. We settled our check and continued on our path down the moonlit streets, yelling, “That’s so French!”
Were we being obnoxious Americans? Absolutely. Would we have maybe run through a brick wall, Kool-Aid Man–style, if we had seen a mime? Lord yes. But we were having a fun and magical night. One that I really needed.
I had kept myself so busy in my own Mamrie universe that it wasn’t until that night when I realized how much I hadn’t dealt with my breakup. This was obvious by how much the conversation bounced around to every topic like a pinball game but always ended up with me talking about it. To be honest, it was making me manic. One minute we’d be laughing fools, the next, I’d be taking deep breaths and pushing down the emotions.
By the time we got to the sixth or seventh café, and the subsequent number of glasses of wine, I couldn’t keep it down anymore. The emotions boiled over. “I love him. I love him so much. And it kills me to know how much he’s hurting right now,” I said, while stuffing potatoes in my face. Jarrett listened, with an empathetic “Mmmhmm” here or there. “It’s like this,” I continued, grabbing the tablecloth underneath our bounty of carbs and booze. “It’s like here was our life, and I just ripped it out from under him.” I considered attempting the “ripping the tablecloth out” trick but luckily resisted. The couple beside us looked like they could get engaged at any moment, and they didn’t need it ruined by some insane redheaded lady with a purple-wine mouth attempting to do a magic trick.
I pulled myself back together, taking a deep breath. “Enough of this cute shit. Let’s settle up and go find a dive bar,” I said, tossing the end of a baguette in my purse. I was back to skipping down the street with Jarrett. We ended up finding a rowdy little bar, tucked into a side street. Truth be told, in that part of Paris, there weren’t any dive bars per se, but this place was the perfect mix of grungy and quaint.
We started talking to the locals, and by that, I mean I started flirting with old men. This is my favorite sport. Not in a “This old man thinks he’s going to get laid” kind of way; that’s not my end game. Just a little harmless banter to remind them of some firecracker of a lady they knew back in their youth who was too much for them to handle and who they’ve always regretted letting go. I consider it my way of giving back.
It got rowdy. And by that, I mean we were doing shots of gin. Who does shots of gin?! At one point, after being my sassy self, a man of at least seventy-five said to me, “You scare me. I’ve never been scared of a woman before. . . . I like it.”
Many, many drinks later, Jarrett and I poured onto the street, the last ones to leave the bar. It was perfect out. The streets were empty, save for a few other drunkards here and there getting late-night street food. We had no idea how to get back to our place since we had just wandered around all day without paying attention. After about an hour of looking, we finally found our apartment.
“This is so goddamn French,” Jarrett said as we were once again squished into the tiniest elevator known to man. “It’s also a lot less scary when you’ve had four gallons of alcohol.”
To our surprise, Tony was still awake. For a man who doesn’t drink, he can stay up with the best of them. He started talking to us, in a slight accent, about all the places he had explored that day. He even bought us li
ttle light-up Eiffel Tower key chains because he’s thoughtful like that. He was halfway through telling us about an art exhibit that knocked his socks off when I went to go check my phone. I had left it in the apartment to really take a day to soak in Paris and not be constantly trying to figure out how to ask for the Wi-Fi password at each new stop.
I picked it up and saw I had a message in WhatsApp. I opened it up, and it was simply a pic of Beanz from my ex. And that, dear readers, is when I lost it.
All the emotions and guilt and sadness mixed together like the ingredients for a science fair volcano, and I erupted. Besides reacting to an actual death, I was bawling harder than I ever had before. It was the kind of crying where you can’t catch your breath; the type where you’re howling/hyperventilating/wiping snot from your face on repeat.
“Are you okay?” Jarrett and Tony stood in my doorway, looking concerned. I motioned them in and tried to get my breathing under control. But it was no use. I started WAILING.
Rather than tuck me in and go to sleep with earplugs in, you know what those two dudes did? They listened as I dove into what I was feeling. “I don’t have anyone waiting for a good-night text anymore, or to go back and forth with about what I want for dinner,” I ugly cried. “And I’m gonna be okay with that. But what if he’s not? How the hell is he going to figure out what he wants for dinner?” I was a blubbering mess, barely making sense, but that didn’t matter to Jarrett and Tony. They weren’t going anywhere.
Jarrett rubbed my back as Tony rubbed my feet. This was not how I pictured being touched by a man in Paris! But it was just what I needed. We stayed up all night, eventually falling asleep as the sun peeked through the Juliet balconies of our flat.
The next morning, I woke up dehydrated and a little embarrassed. But that quickly went away. Not the dehydration. That was staying. Mama needed some Pedialyte up in this pied-à-terre. But the embarrassment dissolved as soon as I met the guys in the living room, sprawled out on that gaudy gold couch.
