After hosting NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on Friday, June 17, I'm heading home, packing up, and catching a plane to France, where I'm embarking on an uncharacteristic week-long vacation, courtesy of two sets of friends who are there to a) put me up, b) put up with me, and/or c) take me around.
In the interim, I'll still be supplying BEST BETS every day, and other correspondents should be posting, but this is my last column until I return.
I do, however, have some final departing thoughts...
Want to know how media-consumed I am? Among the things I want to do in Paris are:
1) Go to the Rodin museum, pictured above (even though we have a sister Rodin museum in Philadelphia, which is great), just so I can get next to The Thinker and take a picture a la Dobie Gillis, pictured at right.
How lame. How me.
2) Find, if I can, the curved street with steps where Owen Wilson, in Woody Allen's Paris at Midnight, waits eagerly each night to be transported magically back to Paris's Golden Age.
I want a picture taken there, too, though it may only be a stage set.
Otherwise, I will allow Paris, and my friends, to transport me magically through Paris as it is. And stop writing, and even watching TV, for a while.
Ah, Paree...
And by the way -- we're all among friends here, but I don't want lurking strangers getting the bright idea that just because I'm out of town, it's a good time to rob my house. My absence is being covered by both a house-sitter and my visiting son, and they each get the same terms as always:
If the cat is alive when I get back, it's worth $100. If not, $200.
Despite that offer, I've always come back to the cat.
So far...