Chère Madame France,
Last weekend, I was blessed enough to spend time exploring your exquisitely beautiful capital city. My heart danced down the streets of Paris, waltzing with buildings of white and awnings of red to the tune of a far-off violin. I watched boats pass beneath bridges, sailing on the Seine with equal ease to the birds soaring on the sky above. I chased a pigeon through the tables of an outdoor café. I witnessed a proposal under the Eiffel Tower, ate a lime glacé from a rickety food cart, watched two men urinate on the side of a road, and beheld celebrated works of painting and sculpture, while drowning my brain in wine and eating twice my weight in bread. It was a quintessentially Parisian experience, but there was something missing from the city, a gaping hole between my expectations and reality. Pray tell, Madame, where are all your mimes?
The mimes, I say. The mimes! My whole life, I had imagined Paris as a land where short men with painted faces prance around in black pants, striped shirts, red bandanas, and black berets. I was expecting imaginary walls to stop me in my tracks and to find people trapped in clear boxes or riding invisible escalators in the center of sidewalks. It was my greatest dream to be reeled into a performance circle by a greyscale stranger, like a Bluefin Tuna torn expertly from the sea. Alas, your city was utterly mime-less. With each turn of a corner, I faced a new street completely devoid of striped, sprightly folk and watched a feather fall from the wings on my mime-filled dreams.
Have you been lying to us, France? Was there a time when your streets teemed with mimes, or was this all a smelly slice of Swiss set to falsely lure us into your giant tourist trap of a town? Perhaps, you have banished them, for their charades were more captivating than the dinky Eiffel Tower trinkets in your souvenir shops. Have the catacombs become homes for every mime in Paris? These people need a voice, and that voice is mine. Free our mimes, France! Let them loose into the streets. If you fail to do so, I shall never return, for I cannot love a country so heartless and greedy such as thee.
It is possible, though, that you are not at fault. I do wonder if the mimes fled on their own accord—if they were performing some sort of experiment on humanity, testing our ability to appreciate active silence. If so, we definitely failed. After watching our failure, the mimes could’ve launched an invisible rocket to a new planet, eager to find appreciation elsewhere, or simply slipped into hiding where they could live happily in shared mime-hood.
It is possible, though, that the mimes never left Paris at all. Maybe, they are like Santa’s bells in the Polar Express, only sensed by those capable of suspending disbelief. Have the mimes become invisible to us in the rat race to adulthood that saturates our present era? I’d like to believe that mimes still exist—silent, but deadly, pulling the strings of society and dragging humanity through life on a lasso. I’m okay with that reality—I’d trust a mime with my life, so long as he’s capable of using a stranger’s iPhone to Facetime the police.
I am not sure if the human race will ever see mimes again, but if anybody knows what happened to them, if anybody can right this wrong, it is you. I demand an answer, France. Where are your mimes?
Amitiés,
Emily Schaefer
P.S.
Kindly stop plastering every building, fountain, and sculpture with cherubs—those chubby naked babies make me fear for my life.
