Just practicing writing. This may or may show up in some way, shape or form in my Cold War project. It's a true story, but the names have been changed to protect me from getting sued.
Helen Karras walked into her French I classroom in August 1975 and let out an audible gasp. There were students everywhere. We were sitting in seats, on desks, on credenzas, on top of her desk, in her seat, and leaning up against the back wall. “There are too many of you! How can you possibly all want to learn French? There is a Russian class that needs students. Don’t any of you want to learn Russian?” We were all silent.
She then began methodically to go around the room, asking us one by one why each of us wanted to learn French and talking up the Russian class, which she also taught and which was in grave danger of being cut due to lack of interest.
Anxiously awaiting my turn, I thought briefly of the Russian kids and their tenuous access to Kool-Aid, but I had seen the Russian textbook and wanted no part of it. It was a white cloth-bound affair, quite small, full of half-drawn stick figures calling each other “Comrade” and asking each other if they had been to the labor meeting. There were no photographs, no children, no animals, and nothing inviting at all. Certainly no Kool-Aid. I opened my brand new copy of Son et Sens, the French text book, as I waited. “On va à la plage?” read the first dialogue, where friends were pictured happily talking at a bus stop. “Non, on va chez Suzanne.” ("Are we going to the beach?" " No, we’re going to Suzanne’s house.”) The cover featured a beautiful sunset. Inside were colorful charts to aid grammar apprehension, as well as lessons in culture and notes about what French children drink and watch at the cinema. By God, by the time Ms. Karras got to me I would have a reason to take French.
"You!" she finally demanded, pointing at me. Are you goint to tell me your family is from France?"
I gulped. I didn't know she was going to give me a reason. But at the time, I did not realize "Norman" was a French name. "Uh, yeah. No, I don't really want to take Russian."
I was really curious about Russian people, especially Russian people my age, but I did not aspire to be a stick figure comrade on my way to a labor meeting. I wanted to go chez Suzanne orà la plage, eating beautiful food with beautiful young people and saying things like <<je ne sais quoi>> and <<elle a du monde au balcon>>* with an accent so rich with nasal vowels and French prosody that one could see the pointy sideways quotation marks falling from my lips.
"You!" she finally demanded, pointing at me. Are you goint to tell me your family is from France?"
I gulped. I didn't know she was going to give me a reason. But at the time, I did not realize "Norman" was a French name. "Uh, yeah. No, I don't really want to take Russian."
I was really curious about Russian people, especially Russian people my age, but I did not aspire to be a stick figure comrade on my way to a labor meeting. I wanted to go chez Suzanne orà la plage, eating beautiful food with beautiful young people and saying things like <<je ne sais quoi>> and <<elle a du monde au balcon>>* with an accent so rich with nasal vowels and French prosody that one could see the pointy sideways quotation marks falling from my lips.
Unable to convince many of us to leave by sheer intimidation and throwing her four foot frame in our faces, Ms. Karras (no relation to the ex-Lions player; remember, I made this name up) set up shop trying to do so through a combination of humiliation and weeding out through dull drills. Catholic school had prepared me well for both.
The first task we had….after learning the “on va à la plage” dialogue…was to get a French name. There was a list of French boys' names and girls’ names halfway through the first chapter, and we were each to choose one that would remain with us the rest of the year. I quickly learned there were two kinds of people….those who will jump at any chance to mask their identity (like myself) and those who seek security in familiarity. Half the class chose the French variety of their own name (Diane stayed Diane but we had to call her deeeAHNNE now). I dubbed myself Marie-Thérèse, basking in the nerdiness of not only two French names, but one belonging to Donny Osmond’s sister.
One of my soulmates in choosing an unusual name seemed to always get the brunt of of Ms. Karras’s humiliation sessions….and indeed did drop out after the first semester, even though I hoped he’d stay. I don’t remember his real name, but he wasted no time in decided on a French name. “Napoleon,” he said.
“NAPOLEON?????” Ms. Karras guffawed. “That’s a ridiculous name. A Napoleon is a pastry.” “Napoleon” just smiled. She tried again. “Napoleon was a third-rate dictator. He was very small and stupid.” “I like that name,“ her nemesis insisted. And he stuck with it. Whenever she called on him, she did it with drole sarcasm. He must have wanted to kill her. She, on the other hand, was sure his very presence in his class was a higher placed rival's plot to annoy her.
“NAPOLEON?????” Ms. Karras guffawed. “That’s a ridiculous name. A Napoleon is a pastry.” “Napoleon” just smiled. She tried again. “Napoleon was a third-rate dictator. He was very small and stupid.” “I like that name,“ her nemesis insisted. And he stuck with it. Whenever she called on him, she did it with drole sarcasm. He must have wanted to kill her. She, on the other hand, was sure his very presence in his class was a higher placed rival's plot to annoy her.
Strangely enough, I have very few bad memories of that first year of French. I still have Helen’s recipe for crêpes (it’s delicious). And despite the fact that I think she knew I was lying about my family being French, she gave me my due as someone who took pretty naturally to the language.
She never, however, acknowledged “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly” was a spaghetti western. Somehow a class discussion on European film turned toward films shot in countries where the actors don’t speak the language, and spaghetti westerns came up. “Oh, like “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”,” I offered. My turn for the humiliation treatment. “Harumph. ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ is certainly not a spaghetti western.” The class laughed. I turned red.
Ms. Karras didn't like teaching languages very much apparently. Predictably, the Russian class was cut a couple of years later and she went off to enter the very capitalist career of selling real estate. Our French classes, too, got smaller as the years went by, until in Senior year there were only six or seven of us who made it our duty to figure out how to have a party every single day in class. It turned out not to be as hard as one would think given our Algerian-born teacher's propensity for going on and on about French and Muslim cultures. The best was the wake for the dead Arab on the beach, murdered heinously by the antihero of Camus' l'Etranger, a rather short novel assigned to us at the beginning of the year which we manage to stretch out throughout much of the rest of the year. Strangely enough, I appear to have surreptitiously learned an awful lot of French despite this, having managed purchases from non-English speaking shopkeepers, translating for birdbrained European travellers at customs in Detroit who plana summer-long trips in the States without knowing that no one speaks French here (finding out that not even the customs agents do is a dreadful shock), and in 2004, to convince gendarmes in Bayeux that I was probably at fault for totalling my rental car after running head on into a Mack truck. (Hope they don't arrest me next time I show up at de Gaulle). And maybe it was because of these cultural games, where we made up lots of "franglais" and read lots of magazines about Johnny Hallyday and listened to Plastique Bertrand's "Coueur d'Acier" that we got a strong footing for later French adventures. But Ms. Karras'earlier drills and insistance on good...no, perfect pronunciation and diction emblazed la belle langue in my head. And it opened many doors for me.
But while my lifelong love of the French language has brought me untold happiness and many friends I would have otherwise never known, Helen Karras appears to have effectively cursed my ability to learn Russian. Since mastering my second language, I've earned a college degree in a third: German, cum laude. My Spanish, while learned in college courses in bits and pieces, has still come in handy in my field of social work as well as during travel. But despite knowing the Cyrillic alphabet, despite being able to transliterate Russian into its English "sound" equivalent, after five years of self study backed by my knowledge of how learning language works, you think I could get beyond "The cabbage soup is good", and "Thank you very much." Grammar beyond simple traveler's questions and answers will not stick in my brain for more than a minute. Apparently, nouns, adjectives, and some other words, have cases and maybe moods, and that makes a lot of words end in "ya" that didn't used to....sometimes....but don't ask me which and when and why three seconds after I learn it. They have a letter they tell you sounds like a hard "g". Except for about 70% of the time when it sounds like a "v", and no one tells you about that until an epiglottal stop is about to come out of your mouth like you're gargling cabbage soup.
My coworkers, about the only humans I interact with on a somewhat daily basis, say my newfound inability for a new language to "catch on" for me is because I am old, and that my brain cells can't take stretching to incorporate another way to communicate.
But I think Ms. Karras put a curse on me the day I refused to take her Russian class, helping to doom the indubitably socialist-backed experiment in an unlikely white collar town, and when I failed to succumb to her attempts to intimidate. You got me, Ms. Karras. I simply cannot learn Russian, just when I need it most.
But Ms. Karras never reckoned on Babelfish.
_______________
*<<Elle a du monde au balcon>> means "She has the world at her balcony", in the sense that a starlett might have a lot of attention from the media. But we learned in French III or IV that it is often used as a euphemism to describe a woman who is well-endowed. <<Dolly Parton a du monde au balcon.>> We got a lot of mileage out of that phrase.
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