by Mamrie Hart
I was greeted with smiles and hugs and, goddamnit, I was so lucky to have been there in that moment with these two. I thought about what an incredibly important trip it had been. In fact, that rom-com poster that I loved so much and thought had made zero sense was almost a prediction for the entire trip.
Sometimes love is sweet like a salty rose,
In our case, it was definitely salty like fries and rosé.
Sometimes it’s sweet like candies.
Lucky for me, I had those two sweeties with me to lean on.
And sometimes it’s so spicy that it makes your eyes watery.
Seeing as that was the hardest I’ve ever cried, them eyes were watery, all right. This was not how I had pictured my Paris trip, crying on two guys instead of falling in love with some hunky French dude. Based on my emotional breakdown, I was clearly not even ready to have kissed someone on that trip. But that was okay.
Months later, Cyrina came over to film a video for my YouTube channel and I told her how I had finally ripped off the Band-Aid and gotten some action. “It was time. I hadn’t kissed anyone since my ex,” I said as I set up the tripod.
“Mamrie, what the hell are you talking about?” I looked up at her, confused. “Do you not remember that night at the bar where you flipped off the DJ?”
I looked at her, concerned, as she continued, “I literally had to pull you off some local. You were making out with him in front of everyone!”
I burst out laughing. “Why didn’t you bring it up the next day?!”
“Eh, you had had a rough night. You deserved to have a random makeout in Cannes. So, Jarrett and I decided that our MIPs were sealed. . . .” Her eyes went wider than turtle eggs. “I did it! I finally did it!” she exclaimed with such innocent pride, you would’ve thought she was a five-year-old who’d just hit a home run in T-ball.
It only took a few months, but she had actually nailed a pun. I was proud of Cyrina but even prouder of myself. There I was thinking that I hadn’t reached the goal I’d set for myself in France, but I had crushed it all along. Was it with a hot, mysterious businessman or some toothless degenerate who didn’t speak a lick of English? Maybe it was the DJ! Some men are turned on by an extremely rude woman who flips them the bird. We may never ask know.
All I needed to know was that I’d done it! I had officially kissed someone else and didn’t have to worry about if it was good or not, or if I was out of practice, because I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I had ripped off the Band-Aid! Or, dare I say, the Band-Aid had been MIPped off? Pee hee hee.
Jarrett is the brunette. Tony is the blond. Yes, I was in Paris with men this handsome and still only laid lips on a weird local. Face, meet palm.
Moulin Rouge
YOU KNOW HOW when you get into binge-watching a show on Netflix, you hit Next Episode immediately as soon as it gets to the credit sequence? I did this when I watched Breaking Bad to the point where I found myself in the same sweatpants and no shower for days, feeling like I was the one doing meth. Well, consider this chapter one where you just hit Next Episode because just as soon as that night in Paris ended, I was on to another adventure!
The day after my meltdown, I decided to get some fresh air and give those boys a break from my estrogen parade. Everything was even prettier in daylight: cobblestone streets lined with tables of beautiful produce, storefront after storefront of bouquets and baked goods. At any point, I expected an animated Belle to swing out of a store, running her trap about the latest book she read. But instead, I was stopped in my tracks by another sight:
My friend Sarah, looking down at her phone and talking to herself, trying to figure out directions.
“Sarah?!” She looked up. It was so nice to see her familiar eyes and shocked face.
“What the fuck!” she said, almost dropping her phone.
“I can’t believe out of a city of two and a half million people, I run into someone I know on day two. And not just someone, but you! What are you doing here?”
“It’s Lorraine’s birthday!” she exclaimed. I had met Lorraine back on a trip to Costa Rica for Sarah’s fortieth. Okay, before I go any further, allow me to give you a little backstory on these friendships so you can see just how kismet and perfect it was to run into Sarah on this trip.
Sarah was the drummer in the band I was in for seven years back when I lived in Brooklyn. We were called Cudzoo & the Faggettes and were a typical party band. We wore matching outfits and performed choreography and did antics onstage like burst balloons full of glitter as we screamed, “Pussy farts!”* This level of classy spectacle also made its way over to our song names, such as:
“Oops . . . I Fucked Your Brothers”
“14K Fetus”
“Machine-Gun My Poon”
“Daddy Issues”
We even had a song called “French Braid” about moving to France because no one in America appreciated the classic hairdo and wearing it in France somehow made you irresistible. We would count in the song by counting down in French, except (since it was Cudzoo) instead of “un, deux, trois, quatre,” it was “un, deux, twat, cock.”
This album cover was taken on my actual stoop in Brooklyn. The amount of times I sat on that stoop drunk and crying ’cause I couldn’t find my keys before going to the bodega to borrow a screwdriver to break into my own home, would astound you.
Clearly we were never asked to play at a wedding. Anyway! Sarah was our little Animal from The Muppets, rocking out behind the drum kit. But not only that, she’s a goddamn neuropsychologist who also looks like Lara Flynn Boyle circa Twin Peaks.
“Jess is here, too!” Sarah said.
I almost slapped myself across the face. “JESS IS HERE?!” Jess was another bandmate and one of my best friends. Nowadays, she’s a makeup artist and hair guru and owns her own eyebrow bar in Louisville, Kentucky. Honestly, the woman can somehow take pencil-thin, frown-emoji brows and shape them into baby Brooke Shields brows.
I was bugging out that this was happening.
“Wait, who else is here—you, Jess?” I was still in shock.
“Well, it’s me, Lorraine, Jess, and then a couple of more girls you met on the Costa Rica trip.”
This was amazing. Sarah and Jess are like family to me, and while I had only hung out with the Costa Rica crew once before, it was one of those trips that within the first few hours of meeting one another, we were running around the jungle naked and wasted and chopping open coconuts with machetes to fill with rum. These girls were hell on wheeling suitcases, and a wild night out with them was exactly what I needed after the previous night’s cry fest.
“I have to hang out with you girls tonight!! Do you have anything planned?” I just knew with these ladies’ track record that they were going to be up to something good. Or, ideally, no good.
Cut to four hours later and I am sitting in a tiny two-hundred-year-old church listening to a cello concert. Yep, that’s right. Seven women sitting in silence, as a Swedish man performed a solo cello concert to five sparsely filled wooden pews. It was beautiful. It was surreal. And I was surreal’y tired because a few glasses of Côtes du Rhône and slow classical music do not mix. I looked to my right and saw Sarah doing the ol’ falling asleep then as soon as your head is down, you pop it back up routine. Bitch was doing it to the beat. I nudged Jess, who immediately pursed her lips to try to seal off a laugh. That’s when what I call the Mamrie Mumbles started up. The Mamrie Mumbles are a classic move that happens when I want to laugh in a socially inappropriate setting, so I just laugh without opening my mouth. My lips may be closed, but you can still hear the laughing inside my mouth chamber, like how you walk past a club and can hear the faint pulse of a driving bass.
The other thing I do when I either laugh really hard or am trying really hard not to laugh is physically hurt others. I’m a big “grab someone’s wrist as hard as I can while I throw my head back laugh
ing” kind of gal, and if I’m trying not to laugh, you’re gonna want to get as far away from me as possible. I will end up gripping your thigh or pinching your elbow—whatever it takes to try to put my energy away from laughing and into something else.
There I was, trying not to piss my pants laughing in this beautiful, quiet, historic church. Not much had changed since the days of being a little girl sitting in the pews of Boonville Methodist back in the day. I’d see an old lady start to bob her head to sleep during the sermon or a dad a few rows up coyly try to pick a wedgie when the congregation stood for a hymnal and I’d turn into a four-foot-two giggle fest. My mom would give me death stares from the choir, and now I was getting those same old-lady death stares from a cotton-headed senior a row over. I gripped Jess’s elbow, and after what seemed like a lifetime of mumbles and eighty-four concertos later, homeboy stood up for a bow.
“That was incredible,” Sarah said, passing the pad see ew around the table of a teensy Thai restaurant across from the church.
“It was gorgeous,” Jess agreed.
“It was,” I chimed in, mouth full of piping-hot spring rolls. I held up a finger to denote these things were cabbage lava and did one of those chews where you are simultaneously blowing on the food as you eat it. You know, the kind of wide-mouth chomps that makes you look like a dog actor that’s been fed peanut butter so a C-list actor can dub their voice to your flapping dog gums.*
I swallowed and continued, “But let’s be real. I started counting how many times Sarah checked her program. Final tally? Thirty-eight. And, Jess, you straight slept through a whole song. I wanted to Snapchat it, but I was scared it would play back with volume.”
We all laughed and admitted how bored we were. I mean, we were talking about a group of women in which three of them used to be in a band that would force audience members to bong a beer out of a giant penis if it was their birthday.
They nodded in agreement. “Look, I know y’all have been doing a ton of cultural stuff, and that is super cool, but how would you feel about me planning what we do tomorrow night? Lorraine, do you care if I take over your birthday trip that I wasn’t invited to?”
Lorraine nodded her head. “I’d love nothing more.”
“I know exactly what we are going to do,” I said, a grin cracking across my face. Because I knew that the next day, so help me God, we were going to do something that had been a dream of mine since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. We were going to go to . . . Moulin Rouge!
That’s right. Since I was a wee thang, going to the world-famous home of the cancan has been on my bucket list. My obsession with burlesque started when I was ten years old, when my stepmom, Anne, showed me the movie Gypsy. Gypsy is about a girl who grew up to be the most famous burlesque dancer in the world, Gypsy Rose Lee. Hell, I was so obsessed with it that my junior year of high school, I convinced my theater teacher to do it as the spring musical. I, of course, had to play the namesake.
It was a great show. We built adorable sets and taught the country boys in our school, who would finally come out of the closet years later, how to tap dance. We even got a real baby lamb from a local farm that my character is given for her birthday. Perfect and adorable, right? Well, it was, until I got to the part of the play on opening night where I had to pull down the straps of my red sequined dress to appear topless while doing a breathy version of “Let Me Entertain You” . . . and accidentally made eye contact with my eighty-three-year-old papaw in the process. More than a little awkward.
My love for Gypsy bit me in the ass later in life, too. There was a magical six-month period when Anne and I were both living in New York City. She was still in the TV producing business (she’s now a reverend—talk about a job change!), and the show she was working on filmed out of the city. It was a great bonding time between the two of us. We would get nice dinners and have sleepovers, and every couple of weeks, my dad would fly up to spend time with us. It was a blast.
One particular weekend was like any other in Anne’s Big Apple residency. I joined her and my dad for an early dinner and said my good-byes outside afterward. They were headed to her Upper East Side rental, and my ass was going down to the Lower East Side to meet my friends and boyfriend for a burlesque show at the Slipper Room.
“Burlesque?!” Anne exclaimed, clearly feeling those chardonnays. “David, we have to go.” I panicked. What? I hadn’t had a guy meet my parents since high school. I couldn’t let them tag along and have this first meeting take place in a grungy bar. But before I could object, Anne whistled for a cab—which I didn’t even know she could do—and I found myself sliding over to make room for my folks in the back seat. I immediately texted my boyfriend to give him a heads-up. It read:
WARNING: I am running like ten minutes late. Also, my parents are with me. Also, for the next few hours, you aren’t a smoker.
Once we got there, they all said their hellos while Anne tried to not look like a drug dog sniffing out the tobacco on my new boyf, and then we took our seats. It took about ten seconds of the performance to realize that this was not the type of burlesque Anne was expecting.
Let me try to conjure up this visual for you: the woman onstage had her left arm hanging like normal and a fake right arm made to look like it was tied to her chest. THEN! Her real right arm, covered in black with her hand exposed at the end, looking all severed and cut at the wrist, appeared. For the next three minutes, which felt like a leap year’s amount of time, she danced as if the detached hand was crawling all over her to the tune of “I Put a Spell on You.” Boob grabbing and simulating diddling her Skittle was also included. This was not “Let Me Entertain You.” This was “Let Me Enter-my Own Body.” You know that feeling when you’re watching a movie with your parents and a sex scene starts and it gets unbelievably painful?
You. Don’t. Know. What. Real. Pain. Is.
Anyway! Back to classier times . . .
You’re probably familiar with Moulin Rouge from the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film in which Ewan McGregor’s character, a poet, falls in love with a bombshell cabaret star, played by Nicole Kidman. Nicole gives, in my opinion, one of the greatest foreshadowed “I’m about to die” coughs in modern cinema, second only to Claire Danes in Little Women, who straight killed it. The movie is hyper-vibrant and flashy, as if everything is coated in fairy dust and someone raised the saturation on it, Instagram-edit-style. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to crawl inside of it and live there.
Once I scored the tickets for us, I could barely contain my excitement. I knew megastars Nicole and Ewan weren’t going to be onstage or dancing through the sky, and the theater probably didn’t have all the rights to the David Bowie songs that the movie’s soundtrack boasted, but I WAS GOING TO THE MOULIN ROUGE! I couldn’t wait to taste the cold champagne that flowed so freely in the movie and sit back in my velvet banquette to be entertained by dolled-up women practically floating in heels and bejeweled high-cut thongs behind giant feather fans.
I met the girls for a glass of champagne near the theater, excited to reveal my big plan.
Sarah on the left. Jess on the right. Some weird-ass Game of Thrones chair made out of wine bottles that hadn’t been dusted since 297 AD behind us.
“I’ve always wanted to go there!” Sarah squealed, raising her glass for a cheers. “How did you get tickets so last minute?”
“I pulled some strings . . . specifically my purse strings. We have to pay for tickets, but thanks to a little finagling, we get a couple of bottles of bubbly for free!” We all clinked our glasses in celebration.
“Ewan McGregor was so hot in Moulin Rouge,” Jess said, with lust in her eyes that can only be brought on by having been married for a year. I had forgotten about ol’ Ewan in that movie. Maybe there would be a hot dude at Moulin Rouge who I could fall in love with. My mind wandered, because I am a cartoon human with a constant running thought bubble.
Mommy, Daddy, how did you meet?
Well, darling, I was strolling through Moulin Rouge one crisp, spring Parisian night when I walked past a table of obnoxious American women. As if in slow motion, the redhead laughed, throwing her head back and raising a toast to her friends. There I was, surrounded by dozens of some of the most beautiful women in the world, and it’s like time stopped. Your mother was the only one I could see.
We strutted into the Moulin Rouge feeling whimsical and ready to have the romance take hold. Everything was luxe: the red carpeting, the velvet curtains, the insane chandeliers. We sat at our adorable table with a portly Frenchman beside it, ready and willing to pour us champagne. After a cheers and some excited giggles, the lights went dim and that’s when I saw him. No, not my version of Ewan. I saw . . . the gayest man alive.
Y’all, I know that might not be the PC’est thing to say, but hot damn, it was true! The man made Liberace look like a drill sergeant.* This man was in head-to-toe sparkles in front of all the other dancers with their lavish headpieces. He was committed to every move with his whole being; however, he was also about one beat too fast for the rest of the group. It was painful, like when you watch someone giving their all in karaoke, but they’re just a few words ahead or behind in the song than they should be. But unlike in karaoke, where the crowd can sing along and get their tone-deaf asses back on beat, we just had to watch this man and his off-time dancing from afar. We were witnessing the least sexy spectacle of our lives. Lavish? Yes. Garish? Yes. But sexy? Not in the least.
Out of the sea of dancers in their rhinestones, a backup dancer emerged, lifting one of the sheer-suited females with ease. He looked like a tornado that had just plowed through a glitter factory. Finally, the song’s pace slowed down, and the female dancer dismounted. This man found his spotlight and smiled proudly into the audience.
“Doesn’t that guy look like a fat Bill Hader?” Sarah whispered. I squinted my eyes past the sparkly mesh, and HOLY SHIT, he was the spitting image of Bill Hader from SNL, if Bill Hader had just been dumped and gained forty pounds. This is the moment in the show where I never stopped laughing. Just when he’d disappear into the wings and I could squelch the Mamrie Mumbles, he’d bust back out with such fervor that I’d lose it again. It didn’t help that my friends kept saying things like . . .
