Hey, everybody, IRA Glass here, it's our show's 25th anniversary, and to commemorate that, we're putting eight favorite episodes into our podcast feed. And here's one of them. This is a this is from the year 2000.

It is from the years so long ago that the person at the center of the show, David Sedaris, still smoked.

David was on our show so often in the early years of the show, but he was always reading his stories. I think this is the only episode where I actually interview him and we chat on tape and you hear this other side of him or he's just talking, though I have to say it's not very far from who he is in his books.

Like you see the same person in his new collection, The Best of Me or in the book Me Talk Pretty One Day, which is the book where he writes most about living in France, which is what this episode is about.

Anyway, here's the show. It's a gray, rainy day in Paris, a shocking line of tourists waits on the grounds of an old medieval palace, now one of the most famous museums in the world. But David Sedaris, who lives nearby, said David.

So explain where we are. We're at the love.

And this is the closest I've ever come. I've never set foot, never set foot inside a love. So you've lived in Paris for how long?

Two years. But I still haven't visited. I didn't see the point, why come to Paris and go to the one place where you're not allowed to smoke? As a matter of fact, it's my goal to be the only person who's come to Paris and has never set foot in the live. You live how far from here and probably about a 12 minute walk, 15 minute walk from the left, but I'm close to Notre Dame too. But I've never gone in there either, and it just doesn't interest me.

I mean, I think so many people come here and they feel like they have to do certain things because somebody told them to do whatever they're going to go home. And people say, what do you mean you didn't see the pantheon? What do you mean you didn't go into the loo?

So I'm guessing that a good number of these people are just standing here because somebody told them that they should do it right. I don't think that they're all museum goers at home. I don't know. Do people like look back and remember the experience of standing in front of a painting? I might remember eating something or buying something or seeing something like an accident or somebody who's really twisted up in some way but not looking at a painting.

Maybe I'm wrong and maybe this does qualify for them, it doesn't get any better than this, but. I don't know, I just from people that I know that have come here, they go to live because somebody told them that they have to. Today on our radio program, where you might go in Paris instead of the blue, I spent three days with David Sedaris, who writes a lot about what it's like to live in France.

We never saw the Eiffel Tower or there a damn museum, the famous cemetery where Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison are buried.

No historical sites, nothing having to do with the culture or language of the people of France.

But if you want to know the best place to buy a model of a rotten tooth, a collection of leeches, or a life size replica of a human head with the top cut off so you can see what's inside.

David did show me that this is a pretty good medical supply store like these body parts that they have here. They're handmade and hand painted.

They're not nearly as expensive as you would think that they would be. I got my sister Gretchen a stomach or back bone. I got her a backbone made out of papier mâché for Christmas.

And I think it probably cost about 60 dollars, which was that's a great price for a backbone. Today on our program, Americans in Paris and how our Paris sometimes has very little to do with the one familiar to the locals from the WBC. Chicago, it's this American Life. I'm IRA Glass. The French government says that three and a half million Americans visited Paris last year. The U.S. government says it was more like two and a half million. Either way, it is a lot more than the actual population of Paris, which is two point one million.

Americans have dreamy and romantic ideas about Paris more than other places, I think. In 1944, at the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, E.B. White wrote, probably one of the dullest stretches of prose in any man's library is the article in Paris and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet when we heard the news of liberation, being unable to think of anything else to do, we sat down and read it straight through from beginning to end Paris. We began capital of France and of the Department of San, situated on the illiteracy to the U.S. We and the Ylva in the San, as well as on both banks of the sand.

The word seemed like the beginning of a great poem. A feeling of simple all over overtook us as we slowly turned the page and settled down to a study of the city's weather graph and the view of the sand looking east from Notre Dame, the rainfall is rather evenly distributed. The Encyclopedia. Evenly distributed, we thought to ourselves, like the tears of those who love Paris. But what is it actually like in Paris, really, without the rose colored glasses if you're American?

Well, are this American Life team headed overseas to find out? And let's just pause for a moment. What exactly does that sound like, you wonder?

Well, here's a recording. Would you like to take a guided tour? No, no, no, we're not tourists. We look like those people who run around gaping all day. I guess I can't understand anyone coming to Paris to work. My suggestion is that we all go straight to our hotels and get some rest. I for one, I'm exhausted.

Well, one of our program today, him talk pretty three days, David Sedaris gives me and you a walking tour of his favorite places in the city that he calls home back to savvy American in which we try to answer the question, what is it that some Americans see in Paris anyway?

What is the draw? That three notes of a native daughter, why it helps sometimes to pretend your French accent is worse than it really is and why it's harder to cut into a movie line in Paris than in New York and whether it is the same for African-Americans these days in Paris as it was in the heyday of James Baldwin and Sidney Bouchet. Answers, stay with us. Equine him took pretty three days. Two years ago, at the age of 41, barely speaking French, David Sedaris moved to Paris.

He had no special feelings about France, no particular interest in the French. You'll be the same if it's Korea. He said to me a sentence that I think if the French ever heard that he said it, they would deport him. He moved for two reasons. One, his boyfriend, who had a rundown house in Normandy, and two, why not? And over the course of two years, he has written extensively about his experience and stories for the radio, for magazines and for his newest book in his stories, David portrays life in Paris as a series of humiliations and near humiliations.

And if you hang out with him for a few days, you realize he is not exaggerating much. This is my worst nightmare right here. Barely even three blocks from his apartment on our walking tour of Paris when he stopped on the sidewalk. OK, my lighter has run out of fluid fluid, which would mean that I would have to ask somebody if they're for a match. And so what I would say is, hello, do you have some fire?

But I and I so hate saying that, that I usually carry, like, four lighters on me.

So I always have a backup digging into your bag. Extra cigarettes. I know I must have a lighter in here. I will not spend the afternoon asking people if they have fire.

I was curious about David's thoughts about Paris precisely because he was never somebody who had any special feelings for the place, he didn't move here with his head full of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Sartre and Paris. He was a blank slate. And so for several hours every day I was in Paris, David would walk me to the places he finds most interesting. And the first thing I learned was this. It is so traumatic to learn a new language that a lot of David's experience of the city, a lot of his personal geography of Paris has to do simply with where people are cruel to him when he speaks and where they aren't.

This is a hardware store where the owner and the people who work there are really, really nice to me. I buy things here all the time. They buy things that I don't even need just because they're so kind and they generally just start laughing right when I walk in the door. And then the owner will call his assistants out of the back room and say, he's back, he's back. And I buy things like I bought a heating element for it so I could make tea in my hotel room because I had to go to Germany so I can go in and say hello.

I am looking for a stick that make the water hot hot today. So I say like really stupid things when I go in there, but I only say it in French. But they're incredibly good sports. I bought an ironing board and I was able to say hello. It has been three weeks. I bought an iron. Now today I look for a table that might work with my iron. Have you set your table? And he said, oh, an ironing board and went and got one out of the back.

But he's really, really nice and it's a place I can always count on where somebody is going to be good to me when I walk in the harvester doing anything.

Do they sell batteries? Yeah. Could you get me some batteries for the for the camera. Sure. We need four up.

It's a tiny store. Just enough room for a few customers to stand a store that's taller than it is wide with shelves full of merchandise running up to the ceiling, plus brooms, feather dusters, baskets simply hanging over our heads to be retrieved by a hook on the end of the stick. Well, it was a deal that doesn't go through the layers.

It doesn't work, I suppose, Saturday morning and found Documental Me the Magic Island registry, too.

This is my boyfriend, David says. I'm trying to say this is my friend. He is making a documentary of my life. He tapes everything.

Aujourd'hui, just shailesh did people do blah blah. Secondly, we pay this Martok and we're back on the street less than a minute and a half. See, that's what's so nice about that guy. All right. I went in and he said, I haven't seen you for a long time. They've been on vacation. And that's just the worst the world to me. That is so incredibly nice for somebody to to notice your absence. Some shopkeepers don't notice him.

He'd been buying his newspaper from the same woman in his neighborhood seven days a week for over a year. And recently she said to him out of the blue, Are you a tourist here on vacation? I said, I've been coming here and buying my newspaper.

Every day for the last 19 months, no, I'm not on vacation, I have an apartment around the corner, but it took it took that long for her even to acknowledge that she had seen me before.

But that's why I go there every day. I was waiting for that moment for her to recognize me. We go into a chocolate shop and a bookstore in a cafe, and each place we go, if there's a little conversation, just normal small talk and goes, OK, he's really delighted and can recite it all for me afterwards.

Line by line, when he first moved here, when his French class wasn't going so well, he was constantly being scolded by people for not understanding the simplest things, directions, prices with the proper change. People here are crazy about exact change. He swears to me. He realized at some point that he could make it all feel better if he transformed himself from the inept foreigner to the inept foreigner with a charge card.

People will be really nice to you if you spend a lot of money. So then I just started going out and buying things that have a bad day in school. I to go out after school and buy a desk or like pricey lamps because. People were unfailingly nice while I was writing out that check, and I would say the most screwed up thing and they would say, oh, you speak so well, and they would compliment me and I would feel so good.

And then I would leave and I would think, wait a minute. It took a while to get that under control, so I feel like just like observing your day as an outsider, I feel like you've put yourself into this position where the smallest human acts of kindness have turned out to mean so much to have, whereas before there were things that I didn't really think about.

It doesn't take much to make me happy now, whereas before I feel like it took quite a bit of.

Is your experience here more of a feeling of adventure, a more feeling of humiliation? It's more of a feeling of humiliation. It would be a feeling of adventure if I were a different type of person, if I were a more adventurous person. But like for me to get on a train and go to Switzerland, I don't think, oh, good. I get to have an adventure. I think, oh, great. I get to make an ass out of myself in two different languages.

That's what I wind up doing in Germany. They always include breakfast with your hotel. I'm not a breakfast eater, but I want a cup of coffee or something. And we started this. I stayed at a hotel in Germany. I don't remember the town the last time I was there. And so I go downstairs to have my breakfast and there's six people sitting at a table and usually they've got lots of tables. But here there's only one table.

And I'm thinking, well, I don't really want to sit with six people, but if I turn around and leave, then they'll think that I'm being rude. So I've gotten this far. So I have to sit down at the table with these six people. So I pull out a chair and the man says something to me in German and I say, Oh, no, just coffee for me. I'm fine with that. What he was trying to tell me was that I was in his kitchen.

This was the kitchen of the owner and this was the owner of the hotel in his and his family sitting down to breakfast. I just saw this door and I opened it and I was in their quarters. And then he had to go and wake up his nine year old. So his nine year old come and explain to me in English that, in fact, the dining room was downstairs. So I don't see that. And so I didn't see it as an adventure.

It just happened.

David moved here at a particular moment in his life after years of making his living, cleaning apartments, carrying furniture, he finally had published books, made the best seller list, was on the radio, went on tours until 2000 and 5000 seat halls with people who wanted to hear him read.

And I think most people are built to take only so much of that to have people think that were somebody. I think for most people, for people who are not hopeless egomaniacs, there is a normal balancing that has to happen. I believe that there is somebody to believe that there are nobody. There's a ratio, a balance that has to happen in most people's heads. I've known David for ten years, and I think that what happened to him is that the somebody side of that equation got crazily inflated, fantastically inflated.

And so the nobody side had to hyper inflate to catch up. They had to balance out. If a nation of book buying adults was going to tell him how great he was back home, he needed an entire second nation of adults, reminding him that really, how important was it?

And that's exactly the case. When I do go back, it's not like going from, I don't know, having an audience to being anonymous. It's beneath. I mean, it's it's beneath the Planet of the Apes. It's going from having an audience to being to being a foreigner, which is the lowest life for them to be a foreigner.

When you were a kid, were you feeling humiliated a lot? Yeah. I mean, I always had I did want to open my mouth because I last and I sounded like a girl. So it's not it's feeling that I'm used to the really the feeling that I get here is more comfortable to me. One day, David takes me to a cafe that he goes to all the time, often alone, and I'm surprised when he tells me that he is somebody who until recently had trouble going to a restaurant or a cafe by himself just to get a cup of coffee, because I'm always afraid that they're not going to see me there.

And then I'll just be stuck there and other people will say, look, they're no one's waited on that guy. And he's been there for half an hour and he doesn't know what to do with himself. I get terribly self-conscious situations. Mind you, I'm not scared that if I'm sitting in a restaurant alone that that they won't see me. I assume that that they'll see me and that the wait on me, you know, I mean, it's a business and they need the money.

And so they usually don't, you know. But I'm always convinced that they don't see me and that they're not going to wait on me. And it just seemed to happen to me so many times in my life that I would go into a place. And then you have to pretend like you're leaving of your own volition, like you've been waiting for somebody. And then you look at your watch and like, I guess you're not going to shell. I'm not going to sit around here and wait any longer.

And you make this whole this whole little play that you do. But really, nobody's watching it. But it's very elaborate. And then you can get out, get up and leave things like what you're describing. It's like you're sitting there and you think that other people are watching in such a way that they will think, oh, that guy hasn't gotten waited on. That's what I do. I look at people like that and I notice when it happens to other people.

And it's because I look at things like that that I imagine everybody else in this turns out to be quite a burden to carry into a foreign country. If somebody does something stupid in front of him, David says he goes home, write it down, tells his friends, sometimes turns it into a story that he reads in front of thousands or tens of thousands of strangers. And so when he says something stupid in French, which he does daily, he believes that it is possible the shopkeepers or waiters just shrug it off, never think about it again.

But it seems just as possible that they go tell their friends and laugh at him.

That's why I get so embarrassed of the way that I speak. It's because I go home and I write everything down. That's the way I am. I assume that everybody else is that way as well. We walk to the places that David likes best in Paris and it's like hopping from one discreet island that David had already explored and found to be safe for human habitation to the next discreet island. I think this is the way that anybody gets to know any new city, especially a city where you do not speak the language.

You try one place and then you try second place and you return to those places over and over, slowly expanding your territory to gradually include more little spots that you return to. The places David takes me to usually had one of these characteristics. They were fantastically unusual and interesting things to buy. They were places of a type which simply do not exist in the United States. There are places where the French was usually very simple people.

Often this meant the presence of children. At the Luxembourg Gardens, there's an old puppet theater where we see treasure of the Sultans. It's like watching an art form as sturdy and indestructible as the cockroach, the slapstick, the menacing character sneaking up behind our heroes back. So everybody yells in warning.

There always comes a point where he hit somebody over the head with a stick and and the kids just eat it up, like when he starts hitting people at the state government. And I've seen like probably this is the fourth time I've seen the treasure, this Alden's. I dislike like coming because it makes me so happy to be around people who are so happy. After the princess is safe from the pirates and the friendly tiger is rescued from the savage jungle to come live in Paris, we head outside to the carousel where six year olds are strapped onto wooden horses and handed little wooden sticks, play a game that dates to 16th century Europe or possibly earlier, a jousting game where they try to spear a dangling ring while speeding by on horseback.

David also takes me to one of the tiny mom and pop theaters in his neighborhood. The whole culture of movies is different in Paris, with hundreds of theaters showing all sorts of movies, new and old, little place you have here.

It's a lavish home.

David sees a movie every day in Paris.

He also takes me to the flea market that's happened every weekend on the outskirts of the city. It's a sprawling warren of booths selling old paintings, watches and what amount to five centuries of coffee table decorations. We find a device in one store from the early days of telephones. It's just a paper cone really designed to be attached to a telephone inside a theater. So your family at home could supposedly listen in on the concert or play over the telephone in defiance, I might add, of all the principles of proper microphone placement.

But that wasn't the highlight of our fleamarket trip.

Whereas most places here, you know, people have their booth. And like I was here that last shopping day before Christmas on. Oh, my God, that's Judge Judy. That's Judge Judy with that white Hakone. I love Judge Judy and that was her right there, shall we say some. You know, if you watch her show, you get the idea that, you know, saying something bothering somebody like that is so inappropriate. And that's what she does for a living is tell people that they're acting inappropriately.

I can't believe that we sang her. I love Judge Judy so much. I wish that she would run for mayor of New York.

While Judge Judy, your biggest celebrity sighting in a while in Paris, I saw Catherine Deneuve, but Judge Judy's better than Catherine Deneuve, as far as I'm concerned.

This square up here. This is the pantheon, and again, I've never been inside of it, but I know that all kinds of famous French people are entombed here. Like, I don't know, I think Balzac's here are people like that, like really super famous writers, but I've never set foot inside, but I like the frozen grocery store that's across the street from it.

The store is part of a chain that's all over France called Picard.

Everything they sell is frozen and they've got this method for freezing them. I don't think we have in the United States like they could freeze lettuce and they've got everything in there from me to frozen soups and spices. But it's not like TV dinners.

Like you can buy a little packet of ostrich shops or of horse meat or duck leg stuffed with prunes and sausage. And there's all this in plastic bags. So it's not taking the stigma out of frozen food. And every French person I've talked to swears by this story, especially people who have kids, because the food is really, really good. And if you open one of these in the United States, you would just be minting money. You wouldn't be able to count the money fast enough.

I guarantee you it would be such a huge success.

Inside, it is exactly what you want when you're traveling in a foreign country, every object is familiar but packaged and presented in a way that is pleasingly new and exotic.

So it's all comprehensible, but at the same time palpably foreign. And the foods walk that disturbing but fascinating line that foreign foods can have between looking delicious and looking frightening. Snails packed in green stuff in their shells of many different sizes, coolers full of massive frozen crayfish. Locally, they're about to come back to life, premade shish kebab ossobuco pick up a few things.

And then down the hill we stop at the regular supermarket for a quick run to the dairy case. You screamed at last night. He was so ashamed of the butter that we saw during dinner. And he he held this brand of butter right up to my face and told me I'm never, ever, ever allowed to buy it again. Something to replace that butter. What kind of butter did you buy? It was this, but it's grand jury brand of butter of Brittany, and I'm not allowed to buy that anymore.

Why? Because you said he was really picky about things like that. He said I saw IRA putting that butter on bread and he and he had like four pieces of bread. I'm so embarrassed. But I was awful. And I said, I don't really think that I was going to go home and write in his little notebook dinner at Hugh. And David's butter was terrible. That's what you're wrong, my friend. Note to listeners, if you eat at Hughan David's, avoid the butter.

31 back. We climb a wooden spiral staircase to a story that's been in operation since 1831, Deyrolle, which David calls the Noah's Ark of Taxidermy as a kangaroo and moose.

There's two wild boars, about five different varieties of monkeys, a hyena, pair of zebras, a polar bear and a beautiful ox containing different reptiles, snakes and lizards. And is an ostrich. Ostrich is, what, nine feet tall? It's really magnificent. We walk through room after room filled with pigs and lions, cats and dogs, the dogs are especially relooking, some of them, according to the woman who runs the place stuffed by their owners.

But they never had the heart to pick them up. The price to buy an ostrich or a lion or gorilla is nearly 10000 dollars. To rent them for two days is 420 bucks American. Most of the business is rental. David buys a magpie black and powerful and sleek looking.

And we head down to the street so that you have things like this. When you were a kid, my mother had a great aunt who's the only person in our family who really had any money, and she was married to a man who was a big game hunter. And I only she would come to our house to visit when we were young. But I only went to her house once and it was right before she died and she had a trophy room.

And there were all kinds of animals in there, extinct animals. There were snow leopards in there. There were white tigers in there. And you would walk into this perfect room and there were thousands of eyes staring at you. And I just thought, this is what I want. And that's the thing that I loved and that's the feeling you get when you go into Deyrolle, that that all of these creatures that are that are stuffed and poised to pounce, that they're all staring at you.

The same feeling you get from being in front of an audience. It's the same feeling you get in front of an audience, yeah, that people are looking at, but these are creatures that are looking at you. You know, that feeling, that feeling that when somebody is watching you, David, of course, thinks about that feeling a lot, especially here in France, where he wonders what Parisians think as they watch him.

Speaking so bad, why? It's not entirely so hard at the early stage fright, worrying about how to say every little thing, anxious and straining to understand all the words around him except thinking that makes me feel alive and then makes me notice everything around me when I become complacent like I was in the United States.

You know, you just get used to things so you don't think about them, we don't. Do you think I'll get a cab? I'll go to the airport, I'll have a patty melt. You don't think about it. Whereas now with me, the anxiety starts early on. And I'm always afraid that someone's going to throw me a curveball and ask me a question like what seiner you just ask me a question like that out of nowhere and I'll appear foolish.

So it it keeps me on edge. But really that that edginess has always made me feel alive. Someday, David says he'll be more comfortable in French. His accent will improve and that daily anxiety will be removed from his life. And when it is removed for me, then I probably won't be interested in living here anymore. I'll probably leave because he'll be just like living back home. Plus, the more you learn, the more disappointed you wind up being.

And it's easy to like somebody when you don't know what they're saying is interesting. I hadn't thought about that. That that not understanding somebody makes them seem more interesting than they really are. I just assumed that everyone talked about books and movies all the time. That's all they talked about as far as I was concerned. And then I learned a little bit more and I realized that they're no different than people anywhere else. They talk about the same banal things that we all talk about everywhere.

At one point at the cafe, David goes to all the time we sit and watch a waiter that David likes to watch, though he barely dares to say a word to him. The waiters in his mid 40s are the kind Baghi face picture, the actor who played the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, Ray Boulger. This way there's kind of a cut up. He hangs out with the regulars, making them laugh at this and that. That's makes it fun to watch.

He wonder, though, I wonder where that guy lives or how much money he makes. He's married. You know, you don't wonder about everybody, but I've always wondered about that guy. You think he makes his bed.

But now things are good for David in Paris. He still feels curious about everything, about figuring out what it all means. And that makes everything so interesting all the time. The mystery has not ebbed from everyday life. Ray Boulger takes a sip of wine. It was like a day when people drank on the job. He's behind a bar, he's drinking wine and smoking a cigarette, and he's picking his nose. Those are three good reasons to live in France, I think.

David Sedaris, his book about Paris is called Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Coming up, a public radio host who does not speak French mingles more foreign words in a minute, Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

I'm IRA Glass, it's this American Life, the radio program that dares to ask the question got me. Oh, my. Know, after you, madame. If I can lay my cards on the table at this point in the program. I have never understood why anybody cares so much about France, I mean, it's fine, it's lovely.

But there is just this thing that some Americans have for Paris, though, as they are the first to admit it can be kind of ridiculous.

Well, when people ask me where I live, I sometimes say Paris and they say, well, I mean, you live in Paris, but. But that's my dream.

Kristin Manado has lived in Paris for five years. You know, why do you live in Paris? And I said, well, you know, I just sort of wanted to all the reasons that you give sound really embarrassing, cliche and ridiculous at this point. I mean, Paris is a stale dream. And and it's kind of like falling in love with the most obviously cute boy in the class or, you know, like the star of this or like a movie star.

It's like being a groupie. And and and then you try to convince the other sort of 25 women who he slept with the last week. Well, you know, I really love him. And I think he loves me, too. You know? There are some people who come here and they sort of get off on that feeling of being. I think they're unusual because they put themselves in this position. And to me, that's that's really kind of awful.

And I think they're really special. Yeah. They think it makes them special to live here as if it's as if it's original and be part of the horrifying thing about moving here. You know, it's it's it's sort of disappointing experience to realize that your your dream is so banal.

I mean, this is a dream I had my whole life. And it seems ridiculous to me now that it meant so much to me. It was so important.

The thing about living a city, Christine says, is that a city doesn't really love you back. Whenever I asked Americans who love France what it says about France that just got to them so much, when did it begin for them?

Their feeling about France, they all talked about scraps of French culture that made it to them when they were very young. The Matalan books, the Red Balloon, French films, Montessori French class in grade school.

I think there is still a part of America where the idea of Paris, Paris, not the space program or the Internet or moving to New York City, Paris represents reaching a world outside oneself.

Richard Klein first started coming here as a teenager from a small town in Pennsylvania and is essentially constructing an entire life around the feeling that he got in Paris.

He went on to become a scholar and director of the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University, author of several books, Eat Fat and Cigarettes are Sublime, which are deeply suffused with a sensibility that is partly just an American or anyway, semi Parisian sensibility that is all about the small pleasures of everyday life.

You know, the French have a much more much more uncomplicated and much less guilty relationship to their body, beginning with sort of eating. I mean, not only the way they eat, the kind of pleasure that they take in eating. I mean, the American notion that food is medicine, for example, is totally repulsive to to the French. And yet increasingly, I mean, in America, I mean, that's all you hear. I mean, people eat only as a function of what they think is good for them.

And I mean, nobody in France would eat strictly as a function of what is good for. I tell you, I think really the heart of it was for me when I came here in 1998 for the first time, I was like, oh, I was the central marketplace right in the heart of Paris, sort of not far from where we are. And I remember I used to go there and not every night, but frequently. And then in around 2:00 in the morning, you would kind of go out in the streets and lay out, which was the central marketplace.

And I used to bring all the food every night. Trucks would bring the produce and food from all over France to the center of Paris to the heart of Paris and display it in the stalls at the mall and on the streets. Butchers were there with their sort of blood splattered coats, and people made gorgeous piles of artichokes and carrots and cabbages and, you know, and it was 2:00 in the morning and it was like life was just beginning at that hour.

And people were there sort of buying and selling and and then right next to lay out was just underneath notwithstanding. It was the center of prostitution in Paris. And the the people who worked there would, you know, work until four or five o'clock in the morning and then they would visit the prostitutes or something there or all night.

But but this world, you know, I don't know this incredible sort of life and food and sex and beauty in the middle of one of the most beautiful parts and oldest parts of the past.

But it used to be until like the 19th century, the biggest cemetery was so right then in Paris. If you walk around Paris with Richard, he's constantly pointing out spots that had special meaning to Louis the 14th or there's a restaurant that happened to be one of the first restaurants ever built in France just after they began the idea of restaurants or the shops with the notion of putting big, huge windows on the front of stores probably began so people could window shop.

But it is a lot of what is so pleasing about being in Paris is simple. It's a really interesting, pleasing place just to walk around. McQuiston Hanano tried last year to give back in the States again. She found she miss living in Paris. She missed all that. Could be kind of hard to get ordinary things done in France. Always kind of an outsider here, even after years in the country. But she just feels better here.

You know, you walk down the street in Los Angeles and you feel le I mean, that's a terrible example because it's Los Angeles, but you feel kind of dwarfed. And and here I just think, yes, this is exactly it. This is how life should be. The pace, the scale, the way it looks.

At three notes of a native daughter, Jenna MacDonald had already learned the language, she'd already learned the culture had French friends in a French apartment when something happened that made her realize how much she hadn't figured out.

I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And like there's a there was a long line and we were like, let's jump the line. These white people, they're going to be scared of us. We'll just go and jump the line. We'll get to the front of the line. So, of course, you know, walks up to the front of the line like, yeah, you want to try me?

I'm black. That usually works in New York. These people were ready to rip our hair out and they were white. I couldn't believe it. They were like in French. What are you doing? The line starts back there. You can't just walk to the front of the line. They were like, ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I'm like, these are white people and they're not scared of us.

But that's when I realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore and I liked it. I mean, of course, it was kind of humiliating because, you know, we're supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then, like all these, like French bitches in high heels are like threatening us.

And they were in our faces.

And it made me realize that that whole, like, black white game just doesn't work outside of the United States.

Because white people aren't afraid of you here and at the same time, they don't hate you because that sort of goes together. So I'll I'll take it. I'll wait on line. OK, now I don't dare jump lines.

So that opened my eyes. Janet and I are sitting in the cafe for one of the most famous and corniest and most pretentious settings in which to me, because it and the Domagoj Cafe next door, we're home to Sartre and Camu and Simone de Beauvoir.

And when he first arrived in Paris in 1946, Richard Wright, who's well known by then as the author of Blackboy the Native Son, I mean, now it's sort of a gathering place for like tourists and wannabes and nostalgic fake French people such as myself.

It's classic old cafe on a corner with aging fixtures and plate glass windows onto the street. Lovely, but not ornate. By the time Richard Wright arrived here, Josephine Baker had come seen and conquered.

Klatches had come and conquered. Jazz had simply conquered, Wright wrote in a letter. There's such an absence of race hatred, it seems a little unreal.

I wanted to talk to Janet because I wanted to find out if it was still that way for blacks in Paris. It didn't seem possible really.

And the half century since those days, there's been an influx of black Africans to France and they are not beloved National Front Party with the slogan France is for the French.

When 15 percent of the vote in national elections, could it be possible that African-Americans still get a warm reception here? Janet said yes.

I'm not sure what it is. All I know is that it feels very different to be around French white people than American white people. Different how I feel much more comfortable. I feel that I'm not a black object. Richard, right after arriving here in the mid 1940s, said that he felt that all of his life he'd been carrying a corpse with him and when he came to Paris, he felt it slip off his back. Did you have a did you have the kind of feeling.

Yeah, I really have to say that I have felt that way ever since I got here. And a lot of my friends say, you know, why are you living there? In fact, a friend of mine, I went to law school and he said, what is it about speaking French that makes white people not racist? He was very skeptical. But it really it goes beyond that. It's not just that we feel free of the burden of race because we're still black.

I still experience myself as black. It's just that that's not like the center of my identity. It's not the first thing people relate to when I meet them here.

Janet first came to Paris in 1975 and moved here in 1995. She's a lawyer in the French office of a big American company. She grew up in the public housing projects in Brooklyn, worked her way into Vassar College and went to graduate school, law school. And like a lot of people who make the jump from very poor crime ridden neighborhoods into the college educated upper middle class. She felt like she didn't really fit in anywhere that with family and friends in the projects who were shooting heroin, barely surviving.

Now with the black students she met in college, I thought they were bourgeois Southern Belles. I didn't want to be anything like them and they didn't want to be like me either. They thought I was trash, I was project trash. I thought they were like they put the B in bougie. And so I grappled a lot with that. The racial identity, like, what will my posture be? I'm from the projects. But, you know, people say I talk like a white girl and, you know, then the white girls are like, oh, you're so project.

And then when I got here, none of it mattered, because if I spoke three words of French that made sense. People liked me and they celebrated me. So I didn't have to worry about talking like a white girl or a project girl or anything. It was an incredible relief.

The central conflict of her life suddenly vanished in Paris. All the distinctions about what kind of black person she should be, they were all moot. In fact, the most distinguishing fact about Janet was not that she was black. It was that she was an American, which surprised her.

I associated the word American with, you know, white guys with flags on their lawns who didn't particularly like me. And people would call me American. And I'd say, I'm not American, I'm black. And these are like black French people. And I, like you are so American.

And they I remember these French West Indian friends of mine, this one in particular from Martinique was saying, you even walk like an American. I'm like, what do you mean, what is an American walk like? And she said, they kicked their legs. When they walk, they kicked their legs forward.

I don't know, I tell my friends, because I was in Brooklyn just a few weeks ago and this woman who'd never been to Europe was saying, so what's it like? And in France, are they like, what are the people like? Are they prejudice? I said, no, they like us. It's like incredible. A country full of white people and like, they like us. But it's still it's a difficult thing because they like us, but they don't like other people who look like us.

And that's sort of the French paradox. Paris, of course, has its own housing projects in the suburbs that surround the city now with generations of Africans who were born on French soil, who face job discrimination, housing discrimination, and they're not well received, they're not welcomed and they are French.

And so, in a way, for African-Americans, we're in a very bizarre position. It's almost like being an honorary white in apartheid South Africa. And I noticed that, you know, as my French got better and better, that sometimes I wasn't as well received as I would be if I played up my American accent.

When French people if I walk into a shop and people would think I was just, you know, basically what I say just another just like one of their own, like from Martinique or Guadalupe, it wouldn't be the same reception if I like, came on with a very heavy American accent or even spoke English by how would they treat you if they thought you were an African black?

A little bit of a chill in the air like, you know.

Yes. May I help you? Not so much. Oh, was it American? Oh, I love New York. I love to speak English. So it's it's very bizarre. It's a it's a hard thing to reconcile because, I mean, good feeling is good feeling. And when someone receives you and makes you feel good, you it's a positive experience.

When you're in a shop and you can feel that there's a chill in the air and they think of you as an African, were you actually play up your American accent?

Well, what happened was I started experiencing that. And so I actually adjusted my my speech so that, you know, at least I would get the benefit of, like me. I mean, I'm here in this country. I want to get the benefit of being an African-American. So instead of, like, walking in with Madame damage, mental starts to soar. I'd say we civil players give up who may day.

Maybe maybe I shouldn't do that.

But it works. Yeah, and it works. A friend of Janet's has suggested to her that maybe Parisians prefer black people from America because only a certain class of black Americans usually comes to France educated, cultured, interested in France.

When Janet asked the writer Cornel West about this at a speech he gave this summer in Paris, that was his argument.

Basically, he suggested, was a class thing. And they said, well, you know, look at you. You're a professional, you're articulate. Maybe if you brought 15 of your cousins, it would be a different thing. So basically, he was saying if I brought all my, like, home girls from the hood, like who didn't go to class or and who weren't lawyers and who didn't speak French, you know, the reception might be a little chillier, even though they also are black American.

But I think if that's true, that is not about racism, then that's about class. Before I met Janet, I read the book that she wrote about what it was like for her growing up, it's called Project Girl, and what's remarkable about it is how frank she is about all the compulsive things that she found herself doing during the years. And she was regularly traveling between the projects. And what are the aspiring upper middle class is a struggle. And a first year at Vassar, for instance, she felt so out of place that she started taking the train down to New York City to score heroin, things she never even done when she lived in the projects until she got kicked out of school for that.

This is if the further that she traveled into the world of college, the more the project side of her personality was compelled to express itself. Somehow she depicts herself as somebody who is depressed and embattled and sort of lost for years. And the most striking thing about meeting her, if you read the book, is how completely happy she seems today. She's one of the happiest people I have ever met, just relaxed and funny and at ease. And her feeling about France, the country with this transformation took place, it can be sort of shocking to actual French people.

When we just won like Euro 2000, I was I came to work and I was telling the Moroccan secretary we won Noosaville in Ghana and she, like, you know, just glares at me because she was born here. And she says, I'm not French, I'm Moroccan. It's just like black Americans. I'm not American. I'm black. And I was like, we won. We won. And she's like, what are you talking about? You're not even French.

What do you mean we won? I'm like, I'm French in my heart. And this black friend of mine was saying, you know, you're the only person I know who could sing the mouth says that shows like how extreme you are. You know why? It's because I say to them, I never had a country. I never had a country. I had like a hood. I had Brooklyn, but I never felt like I had a country.

So now I have a country. It's a little one. You know, we always come in third or fourth place in the Olympics, but it's like France. Here's something else, there's certain things about French culture, gensets, that just make life here very pleasant. One thing people don't ask you personal questions, where you grew up, where you work with your family, like, what's your story? You're not constantly explaining yourself. She says she has one friend who she knew for five years before she knew this woman had a grown son.

Also, there isn't the same striving, the same ambition to be. No one is in the states, especially compared with the corporate law job she used to have. Everybody was expected to put in 60 and 70 and 80 hours a week here.

That would be seen as very strange. Work just is not that important to most people.

Like, I'll get tears in my eyes, just like sometimes I look around the subway and I look at all these French people and I'm like, thank you for letting me live here in your country. We head outside.

But you feel like it's your country, but your identity here isn't that of a French person, it's that of an outsider. I know, and I think that's what it is to be such a girl. I was always an outsider and I feel most inside right now where I'm most outside. Go figure. Oh. That's what freedom is, though, it's not about nothing left to lose, it's about nothing left to be. You don't have to be anything.

I was I was just thinking about it this morning, it's like I'm an outsider, I will always be a foreigner, no matter how good my French gets, I will never really be French, no matter how much of a wannabe I am. And yet I feel that I'm home.

I'm just home around the corner from the cafe for this, where the author, James Baldwin lived for a while. Says she feels like she understands a little of how he must have felt coming from Harlem. For a family that was always struggling and then arriving here, everything is so pretty and so much easier than home. Here we are.

This is where James Baldwin lived with that painter, 56 Luzhkov. But see, he lived way up in the top on the top floor. Let's just say one, two, three, four, fifth floor. Obviously a walk up and the cheapest apartments are always on the top because you have to walk farther.

And that's where he was. Wow. He probably even mailed letters at that post office down there. He mailed letters back to Harlem.

Hey, and here we are. Baldwin, of course, said settle in France permanently. And when Janet first moved to Paris, she thought it would just be for a few years now, every time she goes home, she sees too much about the United States that she just does not want to deal with anymore.

And she's realizing she may never move back. Well, our program was produced today by Susan Burton and myself, AVAC, Julie Snyder, Bush-Cheney, and Alex Blumberg, contributing editor for today's program. Paul, Tough Jacket, Margaret Connolly speak. Nancy Updike and Consiglieri Siravo additional production help on our rerun from the Cornfeld.

Jessica was not Catherine Raimondo's Donelson and Matt Tierney. Today's program was first broadcast in the year 2000. You can no longer smoke indoors all over Paris. And I hate the fact that I have to say this. Janet McDonald, the writer of Project Girl, who is so wonderful in the third act of the show and who I kept in touch with after the program. She died in 2007 at the age of 53.

Her book is still available.

City Music was played for us in the accordion by Dean Olsher. Jad Abumrad recorded them how the musical help today came from the amazing John Connors, Nikki Rimkus and Cathy Berquist.

Special thanks to Stephen Berkely, author of the book A Place in the World called Paris, and to James Campbell, whose book Exile in Paris, was a useful summary of all the facts surrounding Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

Two years in Paris. Also, thanks to Sandrine Costello, Catherine Johnstone, our website, This American Life Dog, This American Life, is delivered to public radio stations by PR X, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks as always to a program's cofounder. Mr Tremaglia reminds you, don't forget, please learn from the experiences of others.

Dinner at Hughan David's butter was terrible.

That's right. I'm IRA Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life at.