We Really Really Like it Here

Our first morning in Florence, it took us awhile to get out of the gate. The apartment is so quiet, and the shutters block out the light so beautifully, that none of us managed to wake up before nine. Bill and Abigail kept snoozing away, but Grace and eventually rallied enough to get some breakfast at the grocery store, which was not nearly as weirdly different and terrifying as our first trip to a French one. Here, we still had to weigh our own vegetables and figure out the difference between various kinds of Italian yogurts, but all that is old hat. Oh, if the old WhereverLaunaWent could see me now.

The grocery store even sold Philadelphia cream cheese, which we were sure would cheer up grumpy old Abigail. It did. That, plus the extra hours of sleep, plus the fact that we let her laze around all morning, and didn't start our sightseeing until two in the afternoon.

Remember how yesterday I told you the earth-shattering news that Italy is not at all the same as France? Here is today's bit of wisdom: traveling places with your young children is not at all like going to those same places alone. Wherever you go with children, there they still are, and they still want some candy. Which means fewer museums, way more downtime, and a stable schedule of mealtimes. Or else you'll wish you never left home.

While we were waiting for the kids to soak up adequate amounts of downtime, Bill went out foraging at the real market. He reported that most of the Italians he met there spoke perfectly good English. If they didn't, that did not stop them from delivering lengthy lectures on how to cook the produce, meat, and cheese he had just purchased from them. He also got us submarine sandwiches at the deli a few doors down from our apartment, which was apparently full of smartly dressed Italian-American young women talking on their cell phones and each being more glamorous than the next. Bill has spent a lot of time in sub shops, but this was the first time he left one feeling unstylish. And old.

The last time he was in Florence, he was twenty two. So this would be the twentieth anniversary. The girls thronging the sub shop hadn't yet been born when he and Alain were last eating gelato on the Ponto Vecchio. Relative to the rest of Florence, we're awfully young. But relative to the sweet young things in their retro-80's outfits and white Keds, we might as well have been painted by Raphael several centuries ago.

After lunch, we shoehorned the girls out the door with promises of Bridge Gelato and souvenirs. We had no real destination, just an intention to wander as productively as possible. We first happened on a museum full of wooden models of Leonardo daVinci's most important inventions. A lot of them looked totally familiar -- pulleys and levers and cranks that have become part of every machine you can imagine. It was like this guy invented the whole mechanical world, from cranes to planes to bicycles. However, when you invent everything, some of what you dream up might never got off the ground, either literally or so to speak. Less successful than his pulleys and dredgers and ball bearings were his flying machines and square wooden parachutes, and some air-filled skiis he imagined for walking on water.

Over in one corner was a huge wooden six-sided box, full on the inside of mirrors on each wall. I got a big kick out of making the girls, and then Bill, close their eyes as I led them to the door and then into the box. "When you open your eyes," I told them, "you will be looking at my favorite thing in this museum." Their reflections went back and back and back, hundreds of little Abigails or giant Bills multiplied into infinity. My favorite things, to the millionth power. OK, other people have pointed this out before, but Leonardo really was a genius.

Soon we fell victim to the powerful gravitational pull that seems to yank every tourist in Florence towards the pink of the Duomo. We walked part way around, looking some at the dirty green-and-white tiled walls and some at the hordes of tourists standing in long lines waiting to enter. Each of the lines had its resident angry/dirty gypsy girl, plunking herself right at the head of the line to torture people with her pleas. Strongly against Bill's better judgement, we three lobbied for Ben and Jerry's, set just across from the long lines heading into the Duomo. My argument was that we eat authentic European gelato/glace all the time, and we never get Ben and Jerry's. So for us, Ben and Jerry's at the Duomo wasn't a goofy tourist thing to do. I'm not sure the argument was all that cogent, but he bought us three cones of chocolate chip cookie dough nonetheless.

Cones in hand, we wandered down the long street, full of fancy shops, towards the Ponte Vecchio. How this became a world-famous tourist attraction is beyond me, as it looks like nothing very spectacular -- just a bridge with funny little houses on it. Every other tourist in Florence was also wandering over it, mostly either towards the gelato store, or away from it, clutching their cup and a spoon. Here, Bill and I sat on the curb while the girls bought themselves souvenirs. Grace found two little dolls -- one for herself and one for a doll-loving friend back home. Abigail found a glittery blue half-mask with glass beads hanging down below. It was just that combination of girly, shiny, and strange that so fascinates her. She put it on, and we all kept walking south.

Since 1992, Bill has been telling me stories about a particular square south of the River Arno, in Oltrarno. In his memories, this square was the cornerstone of Heaven itself, a nearly-perfect rhombus with a fountain in the middle, a beautiful chuch at the wide end, and sweet little houses and cafes lining its long edges. He couldn't remember the name, but looking at the map, he thought it might be Santo Spirito. Although we had no particular stated destination in mind, this was clearly where Bill wanted to go.

At least on this particularly idyllic and warm afternoon, I could see why. The bustle of the city quieted down to the level of little chirping birds and a burbling fountain. We ordered a few drinks and sat down at an outdoor café, surrounded by other families who needed a late-afternoon break. We watched the shadows of pigeons walking around on the white canvas strung over our heads, and watched a little girl dressed all in pink play in the square with her Father. The Church of Santo Spirito is basically the Anti-Duomo, with a nearly-bare façade that looked more like something in a desert than something in Firenze. A teenage Michelangelo carved its wooden Crucifix. In a city like Firenze, full of flashier sites of faded Renaissance glory, it would have been easy to miss this one.

On the way home, we hopped back on the tourist bandwagon, picking up a few tickets for the Uffuzi for the next morning. Ready or not Boticelli, here we come!

To Florence

Driving south along the Italian Riviera feels like the Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day; several hours of the coast look like the same place over and over. The vowel-laden names of the towns keep changing, but (at least to me, with my eyes glued to the road, pupils adjusting over and over between the bright sunlight and the dark gloom of endless tunnels) the landscapes seemed the same.

It's Groundhog Day, except warm, and beautiful, and you're clearly not in Punxatawney, PA. Each time you round a bend, or emerge from a tunnel, the azure Mediterranean is flat and smooth down to on your far right, the ochre-colored buildings of another hilltown have been sprinkled around another tall church steeple, and yet another grove of olives is sprouting, fuzzy and soft around the edges of the town. Most of the towns have a port spiked with the masts of fancy sailboats. It's just flat-out gorgeous all the way from Monaco to Genova. It gets a little less picturesque around Bolzanito, the regrettable Genova suburb where we once stayed overnight at a fancy hotel for real cheap, on the way home from Austria.

Rather than have its main autoroute dip up and down with the endless steep hillsides, the Italians have used bridges and tunnels to defy both gravity and granite. (This affinity might explain why Italian-Americans are so prevalent in the Bridge-and-Tunnel hordes coming to Manhattan from New Jersey, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens.) While the road veers around plenty of side-to-side curves, it is essentially flat, either zooming along far above the ground on a bridge, or boring through a mountainside tunnel. This makes for a lot of alternating bright and dark. When I told our friend Jessica we would be driving along the coast to Florence, she mimed the action of eternally raising and lowering one's sunglasses, and that is what I spent the afternoon doing on our way here.

So anyway, just in case you haven't heard this before: France and Italy may be neighbors, and they share a glittering coast, ochre-colored buildings and a lot of olive trees, but there the similarities end. Even their olive trees are different: French olive trees are pruned low, wide open in the middles, while the Italian ones are all sprawly tall.

The very first highway rest stop, just ten kilometers over the border into Italy showed us that things would be different. We stopped to eat some awful roadside panini, which had been warmed only nominally, and were essentially full of frozen mozzarella within. In France, when you stop for lunch at a rest stop, you often still sit down to a slow hour-and-a-half long meal with three courses. (If you are French, it is more likely that you would have brought a picnic, including a table and cutlery with which to serve your own three courses.) Here, we put in our order, then stood at a crowded counter with no discernable line, order, or structure, waiting for it to be filled.

The people around us all pushed and shoved their way towards the front, and the service people moved like lightning. Once the people got their sandwiches, they stood around eating them unselfconsciously. (Try as I might, I have still not seen a real French person eat a single morsel of food while walking -- or even while standing up. It's just not done.) When Bill sat down at the table Grace and Abigail had claimed, he grinned broadly. "We're back in Brooklyn!" he crowed. (Of course, had we ordered these sandwiches at La Bagel Delight on Seventh Avenue, the shoving crowd and fast service would have been the same, but the sandwiches would have been hot and delicious.)

Aside from all the astounding 15th century art and architecture surrounding us here in Florence, and the gorgeous warm sunshine, it's true: this feels a lot like Brooklyn. Maybe it's the people, (a multi-ethnic mix, heavy on the Italians) or maybe it's the fact that we're staying in a city, but we do feel awfully at home, given that we're in a place where all the signs are in a language we don't speak.

The streets are full of people rushing around and looking as though they have somewhere important to go. The few people we spoke with with in our first 24 hours here have smiled warmly at us and at the kids. That feels like Brooklyn, too -- people like our kids, even when they are in the way, or are behaving like monsters. One adult, Dad-aged man patted one of the girls sweetly on the head. Another Florentine -- fashionably resplendent in a suit, a tan, and expensive eyewear -- had to stop his bike to avoid running over Abigail. Despite the inconvenience of stopping short, when he looked at her, his face broke into a huge warm smile -- for the benefit of nobody in particular. Italians just seem to like children, and the more adorable the better. Our kids' pink glamour-girl sunglasses, gifts from Toni, seem more adorable in this context, and help the girls to fit right in with the other Eurotourists and wandering American teenagers.

So far, we've really enjoyed the return to our old unhealthy habit of eating-while-walking. We've also had no trouble being understood. Either the people we are talking to speak English, or we've somehow been able to translate enough to make things plain. Bill has also pointed out that if you squint long enough at one of the signs, it's easy enough to figure out what it says. "Italian is sort of like New York City Spanglish," he said, "with tutti-fruitti mixed in."

On our way here, Abigail and Grace enjoyed listening to the onboard computerized voice of Diesel Liesel give her usual directions -- in clipped, precise French -- and then having her Italian cousin pronounce all the names in Italian. "Maintenant, prenez le droight vers…," she would intone in schoolmarm French, and then another, lustier female voice would chime in the Italiano name of the exit: "Fierenze Sud." Hearing this sudden change in personas, Bill then adopted the voice he has created for Leon, our Spanish Volkswagon, (it sounds a lot like Barry White crossed with Joey from Friends,) and flirted with Liesel: "How many foreign ladies you got under that hood, baby?"

During the drive towards Florence ("Firenze" if you are Italian, like Liesel's onboard computerized cousin) Abigail tipped her hand on the subject of languages. "Now that I speak French," she said, "it will be a lot easier for me to pick up Italian." Suddenly, after so many months of refusing she had learned anything at all, she's not only admitting that she can in fact speak French, but also she's threatening to "pick up" another entire language.

When we confronted on this, she said, "Of course I speak French," as though we had been ignoring a plainly obvious fact, rather than beating our heads against the wall to get her to speak. Abigail is a lightswitch, and it's either on, or it's off. After Toni and Bud left last weekend, she was off -- way off. She was sour and angry and selfish, interested only in what the world had done for her lately. Suddenly, here in the Tuscan sun, she's back on, with a vengeance. I will try hard to remember moments like this one to get her -- and me -- through the last month of French school. That is, unless we just decide we like it too much here to go back.

We're staying in the apartment owned by the parents of Bill's sister's best friend's husband. Happily for us, his parents speak English well, are incredibly sweet, and welcomed us to the house by name, and with happy smiles. The girls were of course "Bella Bambinas," and quickly learned "Ciao" and "Prego." We walked up the long flight of stairs to the top floor of the house, which is a wide apartment with a long broad terrace facing west. In one way, it's just like back in Aups, except on top of a building, and without the plants and the pool. In another, it's just like the Rear Window setup of our place on First Street, looking out over other people's apartments and gardens.

The apartment is adorable, and as clean as you can possibly imagine, with red tile floors and tidy, compact furniture. It somehow evokes the spare, 60's era feeling of my grandparents' house. There are huge windows with enormous panes of crystal-clean glass, looking out over the roofs of the city, and big ornamental gardens on both sides of the house. Despite the fact that we are smack-dab in the middle of Florence, because of those gardens it is incredibly quiet here at night -- even silent.

And there -- just to the side of the terrace, to our North and East -- the pink roof of the Duomo. You can see the people who have climbed up to its highest windows, and see the individual rows of brick, in ever-smaller concentric circles towards the solid-gold ball and cross at the very top.

It's so close that you feel like you could almost touch it. Or, if you are Bill, you would describe it as "so close you could hit it with a BB gun. At least if you pointed it way up in the air." Boys are so aggravating.

So for now, I'm going to postpone my promised dissertation on the ways to be a happy French expatriot, playing the game, and focus instead on soaking in this new country as yet another American tourist in Florence. On tap will be a daily dose of gelato, tickets to the Uffizi if we can get them, a trip on the #7 bus to Fiesole, and an inconceivably high number of requests by the girls for stops at souvenir shops, "just to look."

Fete de L'Oeuf (Festival of the Egg)

Today in Tourtour was the Festival of the Egg, at which eggs were decorated, hung in trees, tossed exceptionally long distances by young men, then caught by other young men. Huge decorative nests had been built in the plane trees over the sand of the boulles court, and eggs bigger around than a bike tire set in place in them, as though the dinosaurs had never left France, and had just stepped out of their nests for a few minutes.

There was one even more enormous Egg sitting in a nest of hay bales strung up in effigy next to the Church. I kept thinking that an army would pop out of it, like the Trojan Horse. It was even too big to have been delivered by the Trojan Bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But, of course, this being France, it is the Cloche (the Bell) who delivers and hides, not a bunny of any size.

Eggs were also being thrown about among wandering hordes of middle-schoolers, smushed on the heads of young and crushworthy girls by the boys who fancied them, and slopped along the roadways, left to bake in the sun for the next few weeks.

It was a significant departure from the festivals we've been used to in Aups -- rather light on the sale of agricultural products, and rather heavy on the whimsy, and the children's entertainment. There was an entire section dedicated to kids' games, where Abigail played with, or at least near, the other kids. Two friendly grownups were doing maquillage (face-painting), for some reason dressed up as Native Americans.

And all up and down the hill between town and the Church, there were giant musical instruments made out of wood, toys, old bicycle parts and even rubber gloves. They were made of wheels, of old saucepans, and hula hoops. One instrument was made out of recorders with some of the holes wrapped with tape, and connected to rubber boots so that when you smushed the boot, the boot would force air into the recorder and it would play.

It was sunny and warm and beautiful. The town was crowded with people who looked eager for the summer season to begin after their long hibernation. We ate a picnic together in a clearing, pulled together from the leftovers from everybody's Easter dinners, plus egg salad made of all those chopped up tumeric-colored Easter eggs.

And More Friends

Friends

Easter Eggs à la provençale

A few tips, just in case you spend Easter in France.

There is no Easter Bunny. Here, the Cloche, "Easter Bell" brings your treats.

Should you wish to give your children one, you can purchase a chocolate Easter Escargot at the grocery store. We did.

It is nearly impossible to find white eggs in a grocery store. I put some serious pressure on the nice old man who sells us vegetables, and he grudgingly sold us the six he had in reserve. You can dye brown eggs, but they come out in shades of brown, so scrawl on them with white crayons first to make them more interesting.

You can make terrific purple dye by boiling red cabbage with vinegar for half an hour, or yellow dye from tumeric, which in French is curcuma.

Happy Easter, Everybody.

Family Circus

Over last weekend, enormous posters appeared on every light post in town: a photo of a white tiger on one side, and a white-faced clown in a spangly outfit on the other. Each poster of the hundred up in town was exactly the same, and advertised the "Loyal Nouveau Spectacle" to be held at the "Place du Cirque." Wherever that was.

These posters appear rather more frequently than you might imagine in the medieval hilltowns of the Var, but we hadn't hit a circus yet. Circuses are one of those things other people find fun and I find a little scary. When Grace was three, we took her to the Big Apple Circus in New York City and she nearly lost her little toddler marbles. I always thought that really small-town circuses, like this one, might be staffed by guys you might not want to meet in a dark alley. Although "staffed" seems perhaps the wrong word when you're referring to a circus.

I don't particularly like spangly clowns, or the threat of a white tiger. But for reasons I can't explain, I really wanted to go, anyway. It's been a long winter, and in a small town, the thrills can be few and far between. So we went. The next night, I interviewed Bill once again, in part to memorialize the experience, and in part because we really like sitting at the kitchen table, drinking red wine and making each other laugh.

Launa: So Bill, what were you expecting when we went to the circus?

Bill: Well, I was expecting a circus like the one that used to come to my hometown of Hanover, NH, before the town barred them from setting foot in the town limits. The people who ran that circus weren't so much performers as simply unsavory characters. They seemed to have no talents at all.

That includes animal husbandry. The straw that almost literally broke the camel's back was the way they used to beat their animals. You can't hang out in a pet-crazed town like Hanover for a few days spending your day beating animals. That circus was also characterized by a powerful dung odor. I think they didn't have enough bookings, because they always stayed and camped in the town far too long, so the ground beneath the circus became mushed up grass and dung and junk food. I was positively terrified by the clowns, because you could see under the paint that they had never smiled at all.

So, I was expecting something dingy when we went to the circus in Aups. I tried to coach the girls in what a real small town circus might be, because they don't get a lot of contact with that kind of stuff. I didn't want them to be expecting the Big Apple Circus, which is the classy outfit that took the place of the Scary-Carnies-Animal-Beater Circus.

The last time we went to the Big Apple Circus, we were with Mary and Alain -- who are super-talented people, and thus know super talented people. They actually knew the guy who rides the little tiny bikes. And then, at the end, Tiny Bike Guy invited us all backstage -- or do you call it back tent? He introduced us to the show dogs. The kids got to pet the elephant and the horses, and we met the other performers.

(I was beside myself, and could barely restrain my enthusiasm. But when I asked the girls later what they thought, they just said,"Eh.")

So with this circus, I tried to psych them up for the old 70's style kind of boring, kind of smelly, kind of terrifying circus.

Launa: It was a whole lot nicer than that, wasn't it?

Bill: Yeah. My expectations were completely wrong. I love that about France.

Launa: The posters and the guy driving around town screaming out of his microphone gave me a sort of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" vibe. And earlier that day, the weather had been positively freakish. There were strong bright shafts of light, and super-dark clouds, and then a hailstorm right at noon. These all seemed ominous. Abigail brought home that flier that listed all the acts, and I couldn't help but think we would be seeing something tawdry, dirty, and sad.

But I wanted to go anyway.

Bill: Yeah. me too. Because as we walked down toward the unused pool area of town, where we play basketball, I noticed that, as usual, there were animals in the pasture that abuts town by the court.

However, this time, instead of seeing sheep grazing there, it was camels and yaks, and there was a tiny little toy pony tethered to the chain link fence of the tennis court.

The camels and horses were wandering around together. They did have the little truck pens for the animals, but clearly they just let their animals loose in every town's open pasture land. And weirdly, none of the people in town thought that having camels and yaks, llamas and Shetland ponies frolicking around together was weird.

Launa: I assumed that there would be some jungle animals -- you know, Elephants or Tigers, mostly because the circus van that drove around and around the roundabout by school was decorated with a fiberglass tiger and an elephant. But really the yaks and llamas were the main attraction. Just the ruminant family.

Bill: I really liked the guinea pig display that they put out for the families waiting. There were really only a handful of us -- there was a portail, and we were all milling about. But the kids could look at the guinea pigs, the birds, and the rabbits in their tricked-out cage painted with gorillas and tigers and panda bears.

The kids were psyched that there were guinea pigs. They also had those two itty-bitty show dogs who were running around and playing with all the kids.

Launa: Wait a minute. They weren't really "playing," nor was it with "the kids." The dogs were more like humping the kids' legs, and it was really only our kids. The rest of the parents wouldn't let their kids touch them at all.

Bill: I was still thinking along the lines of the horrible 70's circus, so my thought was that the dogs were going to steal our money for some sort of Faigin character backtent.

Launa: At first, the circus seemed to be fronted by these two skinny Russian sisters, and I assumed there was a whole grand operation behind them. But the longer I watched, I realized that the "whole grand operation" was being run by three families, two spare boys, two magician girls, and one grandma. There were a mess of kids, and in between taking the tickets, ripping us off for popcorn and doing flips off a high platform, the circus performers were being normal parents of toddlers.

Bill: I was impressed by how tiny, and clean it was.

Launa: The next day, when I was grocery shopping, the little circus family was, too. They had the toddler in the cart, and while they were browsing the organic section, he was chucking things out of the cart one after another. One of the blondes drove a shiny Beamer to the store. So they're doing OK for themselves, even without the tiger. Or maybe because they don't have a tiger, and they get free grass for the animals in all the towns. I guess their only expenses would be gas for the little Elephant car that drives around whipping the kids of each town into a frenzy.

Bill: You know, even though it was so little and cute, and there were only about thirty of us watching the show, it was still sort of gripping emotionally. You'd think that the fact that the ring was only about 20 feet across would make the acts less frightening. You'd be less worried about the performers hurting themselves.

But I thought the opposite was true. It was more moving, because they were doing things on a scale I could imagine. One of the blonde Russian-looking moms did that act where she did a backbend, dropped onto her hands, and then flipped down. First she stood on a platform one foot tall, then two, then way high up in the air. I just kept thinking, her family is watching this. There is no safety net. No smoke and mirrors. She's just standing on a tall stool, bending in half backwards, and letting herself drop.

Launa: And in between, she would writhe like a pole dancer. Don't forget that part.

Bill: Yes. I believe I remarked, at the start of her act, "This one is for the Dads."

Launa: Yeah, she was a big step up from Princess the Pony. Things really picked up after that first act.

Bill: I viewed Princess the Pony as the sort of Grande Dame of the Circus. She walked around the ring in a stately way, although she was kind of dirty. She did her best on arthritic knees to kneel -- which is a move we were subsequently to see from a number of different animals, including the goat, the llama, and the camel. The anaconda couldn't manage that move. It just kind of got set on the floor mat, and lay there, staring at our children.

Launa: I was glad those two little dogs were darting around right then. I was pretty sure the snake would prefer a little dog to Abigail.

Bill: I think the snake was asleep. But I enjoyed the snake act.

Launa: In what way could you describe that as an act? Two guys just set it on the floor, and left it there for awhile.

Bill: Yes, but in regular life, you sometimes forget the pleasure of a good long stare at something strange.

Launa: The just-staring effect was improved for us, because although they were giving the audience Anaconda Facts, we had largely no idea what they were saying.

Bill: But my absolute favorite part, was the goat, standing on top of six successively smaller stools, that were meant to symbolize the Eiffel Tower. I think that goat deserves a Circus Oscar for making it to the top of his tower of stools. We were so close to the act that we could see the goat's stools were tippy. They weren't all safe and professional and boring.

Launa: I loved him too. But halfway through the act, I started rooting for the goat, and against the Ringmaster/Goat Trainer/Toddler's Dad. He did five levels of stool, then that mean circus man brings out ANOTHER STOOL, from his pocket or something. It seemed so unfair to make Mr. Goatie do keep climbing on successively smaller stools. Talk about emotionally gripping; I've never empathized with a goat before.

Bill: The last stool was tiny! How did Mr. Goat even fit his hooves on that?

Launa: It was like Princess's act had been multiplied. The horsie stood on that one table and turned around. But then the goat had to do it six times, six times higher.

Bill: I know you didn't think much of Princess, but she did more than that. She walked slowly across a broad seesaw. She turned herself around in three circles, she walked around the ring.

Of course, the one part of the Princess act I would eliminate if I worked at the circus was the part where the portly animal trainer got on the other side of the seesaw and balanced with Princess, thereby revealing that he weighs almost as much as a medium-fat horse.

When you and Princess can see saw together, you know it's time to hit the Stairmaster.

Launa: "My name is Princess. My hobbies are: Walking in circles. Turning Around in Circles. Standing on Tables While the Audience Listens to Yanni. And see-saw."

Bill: I also thought that the trapeze act…

Launa: Hmmmmmmmm.

Bill: OK, let's get this out of the way first. That woman is gorgeous, and she has an incredible body. But that's NOT why I am saying it was a great act.

Because she also had a stunning outfit on. I would call it Spandex Cowgirl Stripper. The part I liked the best was the shoes. I don't think I've ever seen a trapeze artist walk out in five inch stilletos. They were like an amuse-bouche for the rest of the act.. They just piqued your interest in the lower half of her body.

So she walked out, then she took her shoes off after 20 seconds. At the end of the performance, they were placed back in the middle of the ring so that she could put them on again.

But come on, Launa, don't you think that her act was just way, way better than you could have imagined a trapeze act could be. I mean, if she had fallen, her whole family -- including her toddlers -- would have seen her break her neck.

You're being awfully quiet.

Launa: Well, perhaps I was less moved by her than I was by the goat. So I'm trying to decide whether or not I should comment on her talents. You know, that whole if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't write a blog....

Bill: That isn't very nice. You shouldn't hate her because she is beautiful. And supple. And strong. And lithe.

Launa: And sells popcorn.

Bill: Anyway, I realized that the closer you sit to a trapeze, the harder it looks.

Launa: I still think that the act was a little more pole dancing than trapeze.

OK, now let's see if we can remember all the acts:

First there was Princess and the fat man. Then there was the girl doing back flips to "Please Don't Stop the Music."

After that was the little boy and his father: the 10 year old boy who would lie down on the ground, and then his father would pick him up by the ankles, and throw him up for a flip. I kept wondering if he had to do CNED, and what the rules are for circus-schooling your kids.

Bill: Then there was the magic act, where they pulled a bird out of a flaming fry pan.

Launa; That didn't seem very French to me. The French thing would be to cook the bird and eat it.

Bill: Don't forget the Trapeze! And the Little Pony, just after Princess. She also kneeled.

Launa: That was the tiny pony who was kicking the stuffing out of one of the llamas out in the pasture earlier. And the llamas. And the camel! I was so afraid he was going to drop a few quarts of loogie on our kids.

Bill: No, that wasn't a camel. It was a dromedary. Not Camel. I went to Morocco, so I know these things.)

Launa: The scary huge snake.

Bill: The goat. And the juggler! he was good. I always like a juggler who drops something at some point, then picks it up, and gets it right. This proves that it was HARD for him to do. I was hoping he would break out the guinea pigs for his act, but I guess he's not at that level yet.

Launa: Plus the clown. But I think that's it.

Bill: It was nice to see the nice town Medical director out with his son. We haven't seen him much since he helped us get those swine flu shots in the fall. I noticed that he was enjoying the trapeze artistry as much as I was. Another gent who can appreciate the finer things in life.

Launa: I think that the clown act might have been a little funnier if we had understood the French. Because the kids in the audience were going completely bonkers.

Bill: All in all, it was a very tidy, small, family event that was just perfect for children. None of that weird scary clowny carny stuff. They weren't even whipping the animals, just shaking this thing that cracked near them.

Launa: In fact, all right, I will admit something. There was a little part of me that was a little disappointed that there were no scary, toothless, meth-addict carneys. They weren't selling any of the weird circus food, like the candied nuts that are 10 year old. There was just popcorn. And all the acts were child-sized. They were just at the top level of what a child could imagine being amazing.

And what a Dad might be interested in watching.

Bill: As I said, something for the dads too. Unfortunately , there wasn't anything for the moms, was there?

Launa: The juggler was OK looking. But he smelled bad, from all that juggling exercise. We could smell him from where we were sitting. Not as bad as like an elephant, but worse than the horse, and also the goat.

Bill: But not scary, except in that good way, of being anxious, and then relieved. Lots of ruminants, a snake, some good backflips.

Launa: You know my very favorite part? At the very end, they played a sweet-sad song about the "Fin du Spectacle:" the circus being over. The whole circus staff came out, holding hands, and waving to the crowd. They walked in a little line, and everybody was smiling. The audience was smiling. The trapeze lady and the ten-year-old, and the boys who carried the see-saw and the snake. All really smiling, not a fake smile anyplace.

But smiling biggest of all? All those toddlers from the circus families. They must have seen this show a hundred times, and they still were rapt. They watched their moms and dads stride around the ring, clapping their little hands in time to the sad music, and grinning ear to ear.