Les filles, les filles, les filles...

I'm bilingual. It says so on my resume, and on some certificate in the vault of my high school. Now, high school was, um, eight years ago for me, and I've forgotten a lot of the French that I picked up from grades 1 through 12. It came back a little last summer in France, but then left again. So my French is about as reliable as a deadbeat dad. Maybe my English will stop believing its lies and promises and turf it out for good next time.

But I want to keep my French. And I've been enjoying the silly sentences of the Speak English Cafe, so I thought I might enjoy some silly French sentences. With this in mind I contacted the French departments at Wilfrid Laurier and Waterloo Universities. Laurier never got back to me, despite being named after a French guy. I did, however, gets lots of invites from secretaries and students at Waterloo to join the Cercle francais, even though I'm not a student. The first meeting of the year was yesterday; a nice-emailing student named Caroline offered to meet outside the Modern Languages building. I thought, pourquoi non? and showed up promptly at 4:45pm.

Mon dieu. Apparently at U of W only women speak French. By the time the meeting was called to order, I was the only guy in a room of about 30 girls. Not only that, a fair share of them looked to be first-years with bilingual certificates not nearly as deep in the high school vault as my own. There I was, sitting right in the middle of these keen 18 year-olds clutching their backpacks and dayplanners, wearing a broken pair of sandals and my aviator sunglasses, not even a pen or a scrap of paper to make me look like a student. I'm sure they were eyeing me warily, wondering if I was the local version of Matthew McConaughey's character in Dazed and Confused. No, but I do know this Agent Baker guy...

We did the introduction rounds---nom, specialization, raison pour joindre le cercle. When it came to me I said:

Je suis un boy-toy,
Le monde se moque de moi;
Je suis un boy-toy,
Personne ne sait pourquoi

Which, for those of you who don't speak French, is roughly equivalent to "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred.

No, I didn't say that. I just said I'm Ryan, that I'm not a student anymore but did my Master's in English a few years ago, and would like to join le cercle to practice my French. To give that deadbeat dad another chance.

Anyway, this was just a planning meeting to go over previous years' activities and elect an executive. Part of me wanted to throw my name in for president, but I thought small steps would be best in the beginning. But soon, I know I'll be the leader of a fearless pack of young women terrorizing campus, storming the offices of staid deans and registrars while defenseless secretaries squeak "oh no, it's Dread Ryan and the French Maids!", hopping onto desks, looking down at the brown-tie bureaucrat squirming below, thrusting my index finger and hissing Parlez-vous francais?

Yeah. Gotta go...it's almost silly sentence time at the Speak English Cafe.
-How much would you pay for a boo-boo bunny and a set of mattress straps?
-Fifty dollars!