If you’d put the scene in a movie the audience would’ve groaned. Too cliché. Too Paris. Too fashion. Too American-in-Paris. Too much everything.
After sunny Italy I deplaned from Easyjet and followed the mob toward baggage claim. As we 200+ passengers arrived at the escalators we were hailed and thwarted. “That way!” snapped a fashionista French woman with a walkie talkie. The way she waved it and talked and walked you could tell she meant business. This was no policewoman or airport guard. She was a producer for the fashion photo shoot being staged on the escalator that we plebians needed to take. “Closed! Take the stairs!!” snarled the razor-edged glam lady, looking more and more like an S&M impresario.
Meanwhile putatively hip music boomed, and a starveling, cringing, putatively sexy gal gobbed with makeup and hung with ridiculous rags wiggled to the loud sounds. The photographer, a groovy American guy in his 40s probably, with a camera the size of a cannon, kept shouting “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” as the mob pushed and growled and struggled down a nearby staircase, carrying those hideously heavy carry on bags, back packs and whatnot that plebians like me carry.
I knew I was back in Paris! The other Paris. Not Paris, Paris – the loveable city of my book!
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