The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine.
And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". Naughty good fun from an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.Īn extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. After months of this, Sedaris finds that the first French-spoken sentiment he’s fully understood has been directed to him by his sadistic teacher: “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” Among these misadventures, Sedaris catalogs his many bugaboos: the cigarette ban in New York restaurants (“I’m always searching the menu in hope that some courageous young chef has finally recognized tobacco as a vegetable”) the appending of company Web addresses to television commercials (“Who really wants to know more about Procter & Gamble?”) and a scatological dilemma that would likely remain taboo in most households. Having moved to Paris, he enrolls in French class and struggles endlessly with the logic in assigning inanimate objects a gender (“Why refer to Lady Flesh Wound or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”). Sedaris (also an essayist on National Public Radio) approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language. Brilliant evildoing in this family is not unique to the author. Sedaris-soon after she’s put a beloved sick cat to sleep-is terrorized by bogus reports of a “miraculous new cure for feline leukemia,” all orchestrated by her bitter children. (Lou, to the prankster’s relief, always politely declined Mrs. Midland” was impersonated by Lou’s 12-year-old daughter Amy.
Only years later is it divulged that “Mrs. Here is father Lou, who’s propositioned, via phone, by married family friend Mrs. Sedaris at first mines what may be the most idiosyncratic, if innocuous, childhood since the McCourt clan. The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache ( Naked, 1997, etc.).
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