Laurie posing in the rain by the grave of Sarah Bernhardt in June 1995. Sarah Bernhardt had been one of her family nicknames, and I am very confident that Laurie will more than hold her own in any Drama Queen Deathmatches that may be taking place in the afterlife.
Spending a week together in Paris was one of the things we had always talked about and finally did. She'd spent two weeks driving around Bourgogne and the Loire with her boyfriend at the time (whom I now always fondly refer to as the Dickhead), and I was on my way home after a couple of months in Eastern Europe. The three of us dined extravagantly at le Grand Véfour and family-style at Polidor, had cognacs at the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz, rented bicycles and rode around the gardens of Versailles in the rain, took a tacky boat tour on the Seine.
Then the Dickhead went home, and we stayed. We saw too much art, drank too much wine, went to cafes and cemeteries and cathedrals. It was Paris, and it was perfect.
My favorite picture from the trip isn't of any of those things, however. The first night we were both tired from lugging our baggage across the city to a new hotel and we ended up spending the evening in our room, reading. Which is how we had spent hundreds of evenings together, but we found it hilarious that after so many years of planning a Paris trip, we ended up deciding that all in all, we'd rather be reading.
On the back, I wrote Laurie and Kathy do Berkeley San Francisco New York Paris.
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