Loving Whispers From Under My Bum

Ah, printemps a Paris, when the weather is so gorgeous that I feel totally sorry for all those schmucks with jobs who make money and are stuck inside all day (yes, I am still unemployed.  No, I am clearly not rationalizing away my bitterness).   It's weather for sitting outside at cafes watching Parisians (especially those with adorable puppies and/or babies) go by, taking a stroll in the park with my parasol (yup, I'm totally rocking that sucker this side of the pond), or picnicking along the Seine with new friends and a bottle of wine (although when we attempted this, the Frenchness of the event was kind of ruined by the busting out of an American football; oh well, we still get French points for the smelly cheese).

Yes, my friends, it is a time of romance, and boy, is love in the air.  Or, as it turns out, under my bum.  (No, this is not a kinky TMI post, so you may continue reading without trepidation).  I was sitting in my beloved MontEnchantedFairyLandsouris the other day, enjoying a quiet moment with Jane Austen, when I heard whispering.  I looked around; I was relatively isolated.  I thought I was going crazy.  I left the park  unsettled.

The next morning, AH and I went for a morning jog in the park when I heard it again.  Thankfully, AH heard it too, so I could rule out the cray-cray.  We discovered little speakers placed under the benches that were the culprit.  Then AH stumbled upon the sign explaining their purpose:  they were part of an art installation, "Loving Whispers." The plaque explained that the artist had recorded people speaking loving words in their native tongues and then had them set to play in motion-detecting speakers under the benches of the park.  His reasoning for under-taking this scheme?  Something to the effect of, we confine love to the private sphere and can never express our love in public, so he wanted to merge the public and private spheres.  Blah, blah, ArtyArtArt.

In the states, in the context of a culture still not quite over our Puritan past, I would think this quite sweet, maybe even profound.  But this man clearly does not live in the Paris I live in, because I've found that people here have NO trouble displaying their affection for one another.  I've spotted anything and everything (and I do mean everything) from making out on street corners to full on straddling.  When trading worst PDA stories with my friend from Ghana the other day, I told him about the couple AH and I saw in a pizza parlor where their intense make-out session progressed into him slipping his hand up her dress (I wanted to tell them that as I was not paying $2.50 a minute for this service, they should take their happy hands elsewhere).  He told me about the couple he saw all but getting it on on the same bench as a homeless man.

Kissing on a bench at sunset along the Seine?  OK, it's a romantic setting, I get it, please keep the slurping noises to a minimum.  Full on gropage in a subway station that reeks of urine?  No, you have no excuse. And I'm not just talking young, hormonally charged teenagers; I'm talking adults up through late middle age as well.  Normally, I think mature couples showing that they're still crazy about each other is sweet.  But when I'm concerned that I'm going to have your saliva flecks fly onto my face, the sweetness is gone.  Really.

So sorry, Loving Whispers Guy, but I don't need an audio track to the visual feast of romance and eroticism that I am assaulted with on a daily basis.  So for now I'm going to have to say that I prefer my art in the Louvre where I can document and mock it, not whispering sweet nothings in Chinese at me from under my bum.