one time i had a dream that i met emma, the cousin of mathilde, who is the fiancée of my cousin harold. emma was going to be the maid of honneur at their wedding. she speaks english with a slight accent.
she was in new york for the summer working for french television. emma was on the production crew of a documentary team that was making a film about how new yorkers used telephones. the documentary had 5 episodes and was going to be aired over the course of one week back in france. most new yorkers would never see it.
the episode that was her specialty was the one on text messages. it was going to air on a thursday evening. she was conducting interviews to discover in what cultural practices new yorkers used text, and what their attitudes towards texts were. emma said that she wanted to explore and explain how french people and new yorkers used texts in different ways.
some of what she was filming was candid shots of people texting on the streets of new york city, but a great deal of it was people just talking about text messaging. she had several questions that she used as prompts, but mostly, she wanted people to speak at length and tell stories. most of them were just people on the street who were willing to talk about it, from all age groups, all national backgrounds, all classes. she wanted the documentary to be very multicultural and democratic - as this is how she perceived new york.
we met several times over the course of the summer - when i was in new york city (mostly in manhattan) - for lunch. we went to the big museum for an afternoon.
all summer, emma said she wanted to visit albany to see the museum of science fiction, and visit the hippies of woodstock, but wasn't sure if she had time. one wednesday she sent me a text saying that she, the camera-man, martin, and his girlfriend were on their way to woodstock. i called her back to tell her that i was on a mustard mix for a party for government officials in watertown, but that bubbles would show them around.
bubbles said he could show them a few things but he was in a high stakes online chess tournament and had to get back to that. they said it was nice to meet him. he took them to the village green and tinker street. they decided to have lunch at one of the restaurants, and bubbles said he had to get back to work. so they wandered around town on their own. i'm not really sure what they did. when i asked they joked around in french and i didn't understand all of the words in part because of the personalized slang they invented for the woodstock stuff and secondly because they spoke quickly and interrupted each other to be funny.
the next day i arrived back, and we went to albany. we went to the museum of science fiction and the concert down by the river. martin thought that was the best part of his trip to america. i suggested that they spend friday at the dutchess county fair, but they said they wanted to make a boat ride on the hudson. so they went down to docks in kingston and tried to get people to take them aboard. i told them this probably wasn't a good idea, but they found two families from quebec on a yacht who were delighted to have them for the afternoon. martin's girlfriend, justine, said they had excellent bbq in the american style. they spent the weekend going to the mansions of rich people in dutchess county. on monday morning they packed up their gear, and headed back to the city. emma kissed me on the cheek and said they were going back to france that week, but she would see me at the wedding.
she was super-cool, cute, and very funny.
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