I often use this blog to post polished essays, or polished poetry, or polished whatever. But that’s also a lot of pressure, and that’s part of the reason why I haven’t talked about what I’ve been up to this year, which included some wonderful trips to Tonga and France this summer. Now it isn’t summer anymore—it’s not even jacket weather anymore. It’s coat weather. And I still haven’t talked about France. So polished or not, let’s talk about France!
In my first blog posts from BYU, I talked about my opportunities and privileges in more-or-less self-aggrandizing terms. Look at this road trip! Look at this concert! Look at this club I’m in! But the truth is just that I’m either really blessed or really lucky (or really both) to be surrounded by good, interesting people.
Mark Geslison and the BYU Celtic Folk Ensemble are some of these people. (Mark is married to the sister of one of my favorite people I met in Denmark, but that’s a different story.) I’ve had the opportunity to play music in all kinds of venues with that group, from the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival to an Irish-style pub in Salt Lake City. And the friendships I’ve made there have been priceless. Anyway, Mark was involved in the leadership of a group called American Folk Ensemble that performs worldwide, and I got the chance to go with four other musicians to accompany a group of cloggers from a dance studio in Herriman to present American traditional music and dance at French festivals in Romans-sur-Isere and Gap.
See, crazy, right? I never imagined that would be me. But there’s photographic evidence that I did, in fact, take the train to the Salt Lake airport and meet up with the band and the dancers, then get on a plane to Charles De Gaulle, then take a plane to Leon, and then get on a tour bus. You guys. An actual tour bus. A put-your-suitcases-in-the-undercarriage-and-then-play-cards-on-the-tables-in-the-back tour bus.
I’ve been to Europe three times: first as a missionary, then as a tourist, and now as a performer. I have to say, it’s been a warmer welcome every time. Not that I blame any of the people from before. We did cold contacts as missionaries, knocking on people’s doors or stopping them on the street, and particularly in Scandinavian culture, that’s an easy way to get people annoyed at you, especially when it’s about something as private as religion. Then as a tourist, it’s the ambivalent blend of you’re crowding our streets and you’re driving economic growth, which I’ll accept. This time I was an honored guest. Jean-Louis and his wife, the older couple we lived with, excitedly showed us pictures of the last group of musicians they’d housed and treated us to cake and currants from their currant bush and baguettes.
Don’t let anyone tell you that baguettes are a stereotype. We had baguettes with every. Single. Meal. It’s a real thing.
The ten days or so we spent in Romans-sur-Isere were on a pretty busy schedule. We performed every day I think, or almost every day. On the first Monday or Tuesday, we practiced with the cloggers at a dance studio in the morning and then had a little break to see the town. There was a beautiful view of the river from the hill. This is me and Melissa, our vocalist who could produce quite the magnificent yodel.
That evening we performed at an outdoor amphitheater in the city and got our first taste of the other groups at the festival. The team from South Africa was my favorite, with drums and awesome call-and-response vocals. There were also teams from Venezuela, Greece, Poland, and a few other countries. The preparation tent was another thing, like the tour bus, that felt mundane, but belonging to someone else’s mundane, and was thus totally interesting. Dividing walls split the tent into sections for each country, decorated with a piece of paper with the country’s flag and name in French, and in each section were completely different costumes and a completely different language being spoken.
Here’s Ben at that amphitheater during dinnertime. He’s our mandolinist and one of the lead perpetrators of taking pictures of me sleeping on the ground. Which happened fairly frequently, starting from our layover in Charles De Gaulle. In my defense, we had a busy schedule and it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit!
We had smaller performances at retirement homes, too. At our first one, the dancers cracked the tile floor. The people in charge didn’t seem angry and I wonder if they noticed.
I was always blown away by our reception. People seemed so happy to see us wherever we went, even though most of us couldn’t speak a lick of French. As a musician, you worry about remembering the chords for all the songs and whether you come in on the A part or the B part and which key of Oh Susanna is best for the vocalist. And if you mess up on any of those things, that’s all you notice. It was like that after our hour-long band-only performance in the city center. I thought the first ten or fifteen minutes was awfully rocky. We got into a good groove by the end, mostly thanks to Melissa’s killer vocals. But the whole time I was like, I never did figure out if we were in D or A for that one song. Sam the bassist was an emergency replacement for our previous bassist and still didn’t have all the chords memorized, so I’m sure he was having the same experience. I stood next to him and whispered the key and chords to him at the start of most of the songs. But people were dancing and having a good time and singing along to Country Roads and the director told us at the end that the mayor said he loved the show.
Stages are the darndest things. You can prepare for as long as you want, but knowing the music is an entirely different experience than getting put up on a platform in front of hundreds of people and told, “Give us a good show.” It’s terrifying at the start but when you get into it there’s nothing like making good music for people having a good time.
The festival in Romans-sur-Isere included three or four performances, and we also got bussed three hours out to Gap one day to a different festival there. That was the biggest one—I think the crowd was just under a thousand people—and was honestly a fever dream. There were red and blue lights and a fog machine. We the band were on a taller stage at the back and could look out over the dancers on the main stage underneath us and see a little bit of the audience despite the lights on us.
Our bus buddies to and from Gap were the Venezuelan team. They were exhausted and silent on the ride there, when I was trying to be fun and get some road trip games going, and absolute party animals on the way back until 2 a.m., when I was trying to sleep. As wonderful as it is to hear the Phineas & Ferb and SpongeBob theme songs sung in Spanish to flamenco guitar accompaniment (and it truly was wonderful), I would have preferred to hear it at one in the afternoon and not one in the morning.
I now interrupt this travelogue to bring you a picture of the best ice cream I’ve ever eaten, from a local place in Gap where Jean-Louis and his wife took me and Paige and Melissa out to eat.
Yeah, so that was one funny thing. Before we got assigned to our host families, I’d assumed that Sam and Ben and I would be in one house and the girls in the other house. But Sam and Ben got put together and I got put with Paige and Melissa. The girls shared a bed in the actual bedroom and I had a pull-out bed in the basement room outside it. This arrangement, besides being conducive to Paige telling us all about her Greek fiddler love interest, also resulted in exchanges like:
Melissa: “We should have a sleepover!”
Me: “I am not moving ten feet away so I can sleep on the floor.”
Melissa: *cackles*
When we had time off, Jean-Louis and his wife took us to the chocolate museum in a nearby town and pretended to be professional chocolate tasters and be snobby about our preferences for dark over milk chocolate. I also read Brandon Sanderson’s new novel Yumi and the Nightmare Painter as an ebook. It’s strange that you can be halfway across the world, using different outlets and eating baguettes (see above) and still have the same phone with the same books by the same authors from home.
There was plenty else that happened. We toured the shoe museum in Romans (known for its erstwhile shoe business and the enormous sculptures of shoes scattered throughout the city), formerly a monastery, and Ben and Melissa sang some gorgeous choral music in a room with particularly churchlike acoustics. We went gift shopping for the others in the group. We had a picnic and a pool party with one of the dancers’ host families and a birthday party for one of the dancers. We stopped by Lidl for ice cream and disposable wooden silverware and European Red Bull flavors. But this post is already too long as is, and there’s plenty of ice cream and disposable plastic silverware and American Red Bull flavors to enjoy in the present. ∎
