A Sample of What You’ll Get

 

 

An American Fool in Paris:

 

 

A bit of background won‘t hurt ya, especially with someone like Chosie, who is or has been, as everyone knows, Pope, President (of the USA®), Commissioner of the Soap Box Derby Championships, Chairman of the Olympics Committee, and probably most impressive of all, BFF of Joey Chestnut, eighteen (18)  times Champion of the Nathan’s Fourth of July Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest (and winner of just about every contest anywhere for eating just about every kind of imaginable and some unimaginable edible and nonedible stuff). Joey has even bested Chosie’s Co-Chief-of-Staff (an honor shared with Chosie’s bunkie and one of the loves of his life, Gal Friday), Icky the Spider, in a bug eating contest. Ya’d like to know how he got all those great gigs, right, but sorry, this little book is JUST about his shenanigans in Paris. For the rest of that stuff, ya gotta read #3, The Most Unkindest Cut, in the “What Chosie Knows” series.

 By now, of course, Chosie is a seasoned Frogophile 🐸with dozens of sophisticated trips under his belt to Paris doing and eating sophisticated things (check out the extra holes he’s had to punch in said belt).

Wasn’t always that way. Back in the day, Chosie was kinda an unseasoned rube, even a bumpkin, who didn’t know nothing about France how the Frenchies use aspirin suppositories for headaches and are

“A funny race

That fights

With their feet

And fucks

With their face.”

(Remember that poem. It comes up again later.)

So Chosie, getting ready for his first trip to Paris back in the day, not wanting to look like a fool when he wandered around the “City of Light,” REALLY prepared, careful-like.

Not one to crack a book, including a tourist guidebook, if he could help it, Chosie began to study up on other Americans 🇺🇸 who had traveled to Paris.   He got some ideas watching Gene Kelly (“An American in Paris”), but that movie’s Paris locations looked suspiciously like Hollywood sound sets. Hard to fool Chosie. 

Ditto for William Holden in “Paris When it Sizzles,” although Chosie thought it was worth a try sitting in a Paris sidewalk cafe to see if Tony Curtis or Les “Tarzan 🦍” Barker might show up like they did in the movie. Chosie liked the idea of sucker punching 🥊 Tarzan, who, judging by the fight scene in the French café (or maybe in the Hollywood French café facsimile), punches 🥊 like a girl and when punched folded like a cheap suitcase, a metaphor Chosie never really understood. Do you?

Chosie screened, if that’s what you call renting on Netflix, Marlon Brando (“The Last Tango 🕺 in Paris”), Humphrey Bogart (“Casablanca”), Robert DeNiro (“Ronin”), Gene Hackman (“French Connection 2”; okay, that’s Marseille but geography ain’t one of the things Chosie is any good at and they’re both French, right?), and Keanu Reeves in “John Wick 4.” In that one Chosie loved the idea of hiring a taxi to race around the Arc de Triomphe shooting his Daisy Red Ryder® BB gun at the bad guys and getting some cardio running up and falling down the Montparnasse steps.

The trouble was that NONE of those famous “American 🇺🇸 in Paris” movies had ALL the sights Chosie wanted to see there. His plan was to download his “guide film” onto his phone and then use it to identify what he was looking at. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself confusing Le Tour Eiffel with L’Opera, par example (for example). (Okay, he’s having his girlfriend Gal Friday stick some French words into this thing in a probably really stupid attempt to pass himself off as something more than a monolingual illiterate oaf.)

Then, finally, he came across THE film that should be the BIBLE for every American 🇺🇸 tourist in Paris, definitely the greatest American in Paris film ever made, the Disney masterpiece “Croissant 🥐 de Triomphe.”

Here’s the plot (and it’s corker!).

A Paris cafe runs out of croissants 🥐(croissants). Quel dommage! (What a pity) They make an emergency call 📞 to a croissant 🥐 bakery on the other side of Paris. A delivery guy fills a bag (un sac) with croissants 🥐 and rides to the rescue, sorta like the cavalry in Fort Apache, but I think the cavalry lost in that one, and you can guess what’s coming next. As he races across Paris from the bakery to the cafe he rides past or through or over or under EVERY famous postcard site in the city: Notre Dame (Notre Dame, but not the football team), the Arc de Triomphe (The Arch of Triumph), the Moulin Rouge (Red Windmill), and, as a great throw-in bonus, the delivery guy races through the Magic Kingdom Palace at Paris Disneyland (where Chosie immediately booked a special VIP tour) and accidentally breaks Cinderella’s glass slipper. 

  Mickey Mouse, who plays the intrepid delivery boy, gives the performance of his life. Minnie is the beautiful and chic cafe owner. Donald Duck is great as the cook running the bakery, and Goofy and his gang are wonderful as cafe customers in their berets. In a genius touch, Mickey’s delivery bike looks like a souped-up tortue volante (flying turtle). Une petite drôle, n’est pas (pretty funny), right?

So Chosie borrowed a tricycle and rode everywhere Mickey went. Très amusant (another French way of saying pretty funny)!

And The Chose-man was so impressive, nonchalantly telling any tourist within earshot, “That’s the Eiffel Tower, if I’m not mistaken. Don’t get it mixed up with the Winged Victory.” Let’s face it, Chosie had become a sophisticate.

 That was Chosie’s first trip to Paris. And he ain’t no country lout these days!

And now in this little book yer gonna read the later adventures of that American sophisticate spreading his savoir faire (savoir faire) to tout le monde (everyone) so thick they can’t stand it.

Table of Contents

An American Fool in Paris. 1

Table of Contents. 2

Introduction. 3

  1. At Les Deux Magots. 7
  2. Joe Cool Becomes a Sophisticate and You Can, Too! 9
  3. Chosie’s Dream.. 12
  4. Mission for Chosie: Are the French Still Chic?. 16
  5. Mme. Christine Lagarde is the Chic-est Woman in the World. 21
  6. At the Musée d’Orsay. 25
  7. Chosie Has the Answers. 29
  8. The City of Light Sees the Lite. 33
  9. Chosie LOVES Cathedral Land. 38
  10. Interview with the Hunchback. 42
  11. French  Only Speak French  When Americans  Are Around. 45
  12. Chosie Interviews Paris Mayor Ann Hidalgo. 48
  13. Chosie Will Choose New Hunchback of Notre Dame. 51
  14. Chosie Exposes the Secret Shame of France. 54
  15. Chosie’s Confronts Courteous Passengers On His Flight To Paris. 57
  16. The Celebrated Jumping Grenouille of the Champs de Mars. 60
  17. At the Book Club, Another Chosie Débâcle (Debacle) 63

Epilog. 67