We're With The Band

This is another picture of me and Alain. He had a band with the guy on the left, Jean-Pierre. I made Alain let me and Lindy sing with them because two people in a band is not a band, Alain.

At 15 and 13 Lindy and I owned the same dress. She always wanted to do everything I did and wear everything I wore. She probably begged my mother to buy her the same dress she bought me. And I probably yelled at her and said We're Not Twins You Stupid Moron. Because I have an incredibly sophisticated vocabulary from reading all the thick books in our library.

We entered a Battle of the Bands at the Casino de Royan, the next town over from Meschers on the west coast of France, and came in second. I was devastated but I remembered that it's not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. I bet I know who coined that phrase. LOSERS. Here we are singing at the Casino de Royan. As you can see, we just had the one performing outfit. We're even wearing matching shoes. Sure it's a horror to look at now but check out Alain's shoes. I hope to God we did not all plan to wear white shoes for the contest because if we did I have to turn in my subscription to Vogue and move to Bulgaria.

Three years later I was in college in Paris and dating a German named Karl, below. Karl devirginized me. I can still see the trauma etched on my face as it finally dawned on me why he kept pushing my head down to his crotch. I probably looked like someone in The Blair Witch Project. I saw Karl only once more, in New York, many, many, years later. His brother took me aside and said "Karl no longer speaks. He got tired of talking."

At dinner I kept up a steady stream of chatter and eventually he answered one of the forty hundred questions I asked him, Why did you give up talking? He said he had talked enough and was going to spend the rest of his life listening. Because I have excellent taste in men.

Why are some of my pictures oddly shaped? Because I used to put my photo albums together like this and yes I have a disease.

The next summer we were in Canet Plage in the south of France and my sister looked like this in a bikini: Horrifying.

She was 14 and had longer hair but I convinced her to let me cut it all off because A. I'm a terrible person and B. Not one boy found me remotely interesting while she wore that fucking bikini. But the only thing shorter hair did was call more attention to her body. She always had spectacular boobage until she lost them in a tragic aerobics accident many years later. No body fat? No boobs. Run and hide, A Cup, run and hide.

Meanwhile I can increase my cup size just by looking at pudding.