This is the first one...

I'm a late adopter.

I keep having this recurring dream; I’m flying to Paris, it’s a last minute trip and there’s always some deadline or drama, I don’t have my passport, we’re late going to the airport, I’m with my mom, I’m with Maury, a guy I was friends (and made out with once) with in my early 20s, I’m alone, I’m with strangers. It sounds glamorous but it’s very stressful. It’s like I’m always anticipating the journey that seems impossible, just out of reach.

And I’m going to France on Tuesday. But first we are moving out of our house that we’ve lived in for ten years. I’ve never lived anywhere for that long before. Even in my childhood we moved every five years or so, I had rock star parents, not actual rock stars but they were hippies who got rich and my mom had me young so she had ENERGY when I was growing up. And she was audacious, she travelled around Europe in the 1980s with two nannies, one from Honduras and one from the Philippines both without papers or visas, when they went through immigration she would just tell the customs officer that they were with her! And how could they refuse a blonde, beautiful American woman in a fur coat and diamonds and 15 suitcases? I remember arriving at the airport with her and my two brothers and my dad and so much luggage. And always at the last minute, like literally how are we going to make it, last minute. She hated being early. My dad and I like to arrive early. Once my dad and I travelled together, just the two of us, and got to the gate with more than an hour to spare and sat quietly reading. Heaven. But something was missing. The drama, the anticipation of will we won’t we make it? My mom brings the drama to the party in the best way. It’s exciting to be around her and her sister, my aunt Forrest. My mom had three sisters and all of them changed their names as teenagers except Carol. They all reinvented themselves. They wanted to move away from their childhood with the mean, drunk dad and the East Vancouver lifestyle. Their mom, my grandma Edna, would dress up all eight kids and take them to open houses and pretend they were going to move to a fancy mansion on the other side of town. My grandma never did, but my mom sure did. She made it happen. She’s amazing at it. The alchemy of my mom and dad together helped make my dad famous because otherwise he might’ve been one of those guys who lives in a van and makes art out of garbage and monologues at people. It’s amazing what you can get away with when you’re famous.

So we are moving to the country. It’s like Green Acres. Maybe I’ll hate it. But my dog will be happy and so will my boyfriend. I’ll come and go. My son is 18. It’s all gone by so fast. I remember when I moved to Toronto. For a guy I had just met. I had a garage sale and literally sold everything in my studio apartment on Doheny in L.A., did my show in New York City, got pregnant and moved to Toronto. It all happened in a whirlwind. And now I’m here. With a new man, well if 14 years together is new. I feel like crying. I’m tired. Moving is hard. I’m not a good planner so I just go in with brute force and get it done and then lie in a heap exhausted. I’m going to Cannes on Tuesday. I lived there when I was 14 years old and haven’t been back since I was 16. Getting older is so strange. Mercury is in retrograde.

It’s the morning of my flight and I’m sitting on a futon in our temporary basement apartment. My three legged dog doesn’t like it because the floors are too slippery. I woke up at 1am last night to book movies with my badge but the website was overloaded and I didn’t get one. I’m burning through my data because I don’t have internet here. But I’m leaving. I’m excited and nervous. The unknown. But then it’s only a week and a half and then it’s over. Cannes. Glamour. When I lived there when I had just turned 14, it was a sleepy little beach town in the winter. I wanted to drive a moped and I wore very cute outfits. But then the festival comes to town. They took pictures of us, my mom and dad and me in our bathing suits. I was a ballet dancer so I pulled my leg up to my ear not realizing at 14 that I was being a bit obscene and my bikini top was a little see through. I had a boyfriend Steven. Who lived next door. My first boyfriend. Well he wasn’t officially my boyfriend since he already had a girlfriend but we’d make out. And he drove a motorbike. And he would never show up when he said he would. I’d sit listening for the sound of his motorbike. Even now that sound hits me with a pang of anticipation. My dad named him, “My Invisible Boyfriend”. It started my kink of being attracted to men who were hard to attain. Never mind men, things in life that are hard to attain. What I want being just out of reach, me seeing it and grasping, feeling just outside of it.

Now I am in Cannes. Major Eat, Pray, Love bullshit but with networking and pitching and wandering around with a badge around my neck trying to feel like I fit in. But it is Cannes. So beautiful, the ocean, the buildings like I’m on a movie set, the outfits people wear as if they were curated by a costume designer, “Make it Triangle of Sadness meets Fellini”. It rained mostly and I got a blow dry that was so terrible it was like someone just made my hair as frizzy as possible. Oh Sandra how could you do me that dirty? To add insult to injury she charged me ten euros more for ‘mousse’. But I got to practice my french with her. I keep running into Canadians.

As an older woman in France, it’s nice. I roam free like a ghost. Not getting hassled if you don’t count the dirty looks I get from the mean, old ladies on the bus. But hey if it gives them pleasure to judge me, go for it. I accidentally got high for my first day at Cannes, by taking an edible the night before to help me sleep. I made the classic mistake. Zach said here this is a good amount to take; it was a quarter of a quarter. So I ate it, but felt nothing. Waited. Then I took a whole one. I tasted the weed. I passed out and woke up in the middle of the night so high that I felt upside down. My mouth was so dry that it was twisted up like a dry rag being rung out. I woke up at 7:50am. Saw the note from Zach, don’t miss your movie at 8:30 and give yourself time to get a badge. My first day at Cannes and I’m high. Not relaxed but HIGH. I throw on some clothes and run out to the front and see a Chinese dude with a festival badge waiting for an uber. Can I share your ride? Yes. We make it to the Palais. It’s 8:20am and there’s a line. But it’s not moving. I talk to a man from Switzerland. Small, compact french man who lives in a small town and pitches me his fantasy movie about animal shamans. I’m holding on by a thread. I’m trying to be normal. I need coffee. The badge place doesn’t open until 9am so I’m off the hook for missing the movie. I make it to the Telefilm breakfast and get coffee and try and make coherent small talk. It’s like I’m a hot mess character played by Kathryn Hahn; messy hair, an oversized bag, and hysteria. I wander up the escalator of the Marche and end up watching a panel about festivals and see someone I know. Serendipitous.

I missed my train. I actually didn’t miss it. I was early. Paranoid I would be late I got there with 40 mins to spare. Got a coffee. Waited to see what track the train to Paris would be on. They posted it. Number 2. A train pulls up. My train!? I think. Boy that was fast. And it’s early?! As the train starts to make its way it suddenly occurs to me that this train does not feel like the train for Paris. I freak out, “Ca va a Paris?” “No Madame c’est le train a la Bocca”. I’m a Madame now. The last time I was here I was a Madameoiselle. Oh no, I’m so stupid, I’m so stupid. We get off and a kind young man helps me with my bags as I’m hysterically keep repeating, I’m so stupid why did I get on this train? The conductor tells me to go back to Cannes on the other side of the tracks. So I do. It’s tiny little station and there’s another person, a small young handsome man with the festival badge in a black suit. I’m so freaked out I just start randomly telling him what happened. He’s kind. I’m so stupid. I must be getting old. It’s true. Travelling now feels more perilous somehow. When I was younger, it was hard yes, but I just did it. I travelled around Europe a lot. But I never figured out hostels which would have been fun. So we end up talking and he’s a producer on a movie that was at Cannes last year. Wow. I try not to do that thing, where people’s energy change when they find out that this person is ‘someone’, has clout. I’m genuinely impressed because I loved that movie. We chat and exchange cards. He’s very sweet. I tell him that I thought of Triangle of Sadness a lot this week at Cannes. “Cannes? It’s worse than the movie”, he says.

Last night I went to a party that I was invited to by a Canadian publicist/weed activist that I knew from the pot comedy rooms in Toronto. I bought a green gown and some shoes to go to the party. I didn’t need to but I did. I wandered around in the afternoon and ended up in this store and got a pair of high heels. Then I wandered across the street and tried on a dress. A long green dress. The gay man who worked there told me get the dress. I’m an easy mark. The middle aged american woman searching for some romance. I had the high you get when you buy something that’s reckless and unnecessary. My mom and I shopped a lot in europe when I was a teenager. It’s our love language. Judge me all you want. But the rush of going into these little french boutiques with the something just right. The lack of practicality in these clothes, the je ne sais quoi of the dress. I hope my dress wasn’t matronly. Then I had to go back to sign papers for our house sale on zoom in Canada. Viktor looked crazy on zoom, all beard and an empty house. My hair in curlers and my makeup. Then I took an uber to the party. While I waited another driver was helping me when my uber got lost and called my cell looking for the place. He said, the model and he pointed to me. I thought he was referring to me as a model! I mean I looked good in this dress but THAT good?! My god, I’ve still got it! But he meant the model of the Uber, the model of my uber. Then I asked the caretaker to take some pictures of me in my green gown. When I looked at them, I got sad. The way the wind blows on the dress it clings to me and shows my belly I thought. I look…my age. It’s heartbreaking getting old when inside you feel 25. But it’s heartbreaking being young too. It’s all just heartbreaking.

The party is in a big white house on the hill overlooking Cannes. I don’t quite understand what the party is for, it’s a female film festival a fashion show? Both? There’s hot women in gowns wandering around like birds. A beautiful woman takes my picture by the bougainvillea . “You look so good in that green!” I find the publicist. She’s from Hamilton with faded purple hair and sandals, and sporting a goatee. She’s the second woman at Cannes I saw who just rocked their chin hairs like bad asses. Older men in expensive suits look lost as they are ignored by the young models in gowns and slick men in all black. I went to get a glass of wine and the glasses were plastic wine glasses and the bottoms kept falling off. The wine was in boxes. No judgement but I clocked it. Oh okay. This party is definitely not gonna have food. I didn’t eat dinner but had a glass of wine. Then I tried to network. Or just have conversations with people. The fashion show started and these ‘models’ walked into the garden and around the pool. The sound system came from cheap speakers and some of the models tripped and one fell because it was treacherous. It was like Fellini, and Triangle of Sadness and Ed Wood all rolled into one. I loved it. But wished I had someone with which to share the spectacle. Like isn’t this crazy, isn’t this bizarre? Look at us. Drinking cheap wine out of plastic glasses at a rented Villa in the hills overlooking Cannes. It’s hilarious and wonderful. I saw a rich looking man with a swarthy look watching the show as well. “Why are you here?” I asked him and he said, “I have no idea” and he laughed showing a gap in his teeth. I told him he had a nice jacket. I asked him where he was from and he got cagey. Are you on the lam? I said jokingly. Not anymore. He said. He also mentioned that the pattern on his jacket stops facial recognition software from working. I wanted to engage. Who was this guy? What is his story? But then a gorgeous sulky woman/girl in a fitted dress walked by and he followed. Ah! I get it. Or do I? It’s all so crazy. I feel judgemental. But I love it. I love the yearning and glitz and the smoke and mirrors. I met a girl in the bathroom at a restaurant across from the Palais. Within minutes of meeting me she confessed that she’d once done porn. “Only once,” she said holding a big glass of red wine, looking like she hadn’t slept for a while.

Then Lana. I met Lana, from Moldovia in a blue sequined gown. Hair in a chignon. A high lyrical voice. She’s an actress from London. She told me I looked beautiful in my gown. We started chatting and she told me that she had just done a movie called Warhol and the editor loved her work so much that he had told the producer and the producer had emailed her. “Do you want me to show you the email?” “No it’s okay, I believe you”. But she grabbed her phone anyway, scrolling to find it. She was infectious but relentless. Talking a mile a minute about studying acting. Being a model first. Wanting to be a good actress. Like the girl in the bathroom the words spilled out of her like a waterfall of information. Not everyone here is on cocaine? Or maybe it’s just in the ether. The networking virus of talking. Sharing. I sound mean. But I like her. I do. She was beautiful and smart. Spoke 6 languages. Spent summers in Sardinia. But then the cheap wine and no dinner started to dull my senses. I sat captive between her and a couple from Vienna who had made a short film about sex trafficking. I mooched a ride with her and her friend, a model in a hijab, down the hill. Lana started speaking to our Uber driver, a french woman, in a lyrical french, almost seductive. Her attention elsewhere. Oh I forgot, I asked her, “What’s your dream?”. “I will win an Oscar next year!” She exclaimed.

And Simon. I had lunch with Simon. Someone I hadn’t seen since I was 17 years old. We’d kept in touch thanks to social media. He had been kind to me at a party my parent’s had in Paris. I was 15 then and awkward with big frizzy hair and a body that I hadn’t grown into. He took me out and being a whole two years older than me it felt very grown up. Then we met again when I as 17 and out of my ugly duckling phase. We got very drunk on Auqua Vit a Scandinavian liquor that’s supposed to not cause hangovers, and we ended up making out very messily in his attic apartment in St. Germain. I mumbled in my wasted way how I hated my boobs. And he sent me home in a taxi. I woke up with the worst hangover of my life but when you’re 17 somehow it fizzles away by noon. Then when he was in Geneva, he left a note and a joint for me in my room at my Swiss boarding school. The next day they raided our rooms with dogs to look for drugs. As luck would have it I had my first class off, so I took that joint which I had put in a coco cola pencil sharpener and threw it into a field. Now more than 30 years later I’m at lunch with Simon. He’s very hungover but somehow looks the same. Maybe with less hair. We catch up. But somehow it’s strained. I confess that I thought we had bonded over the fact that our father’s were both looming figures in our lives. He balks at this. “No one knows who my father is, in this world.” He says glancing around. He then talks about the premiere he went to last night and the parties. I can tell I’m a disappointment to him. Not fabulous or famous enough. Or maybe it’s my imagination. Afterwards, we walk out into the hot sun. I offer him sunscreen for his bald head and he declines. We part ways. I thank him later on Whatsapp for the lunch and never hear from him again.

The young french kid on the train reading ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ in french. Surrounded by french men in suits. The african italian man on train to Marseille telling me about his brunch restaurant and his daughter Ruby. From Venice. The train conductor only charged me 50 euros. Etran the african italian man told me he could’ve charged me 120 euros. The woman at the train station in Marseille, ah like Precious from Friends and I told her in my broken french that it was based on me. And the older woman in the ticket booth I knew for sure I wouldn’t get a refund for my ticket.

Now it’s the morning of my flight back home to Toronto. My reunion tour is coming to a close. I’m in Chiswick at my friend from Uni’s house while she is in Cornwall with her family for spring break, half term. I met up with my best friend from boarding school Traci in London for lunch. But before that, I spent two days in Paris with Jess and Michelle my closest friends from Uni. We stayed at the best hotel ever. I was nervous to spend so much time with people I hadn’t seen in over 30 years. But then you remember that there’s a reason why you were friends in the first place. It was fun, renting bikes and riding around Paris, visiting Christine the woman we stayed with when we went to Paris while still at University. We had to pick up my mom’s car, a Deux Chevaux and drive it back. I couldn’t drive it so Michelle did. We stayed at Christine and my sister’s apartment on Rue Dragon. They were models in the 80s. It was all wine and cigarettes and fabulous coffee and macrobiotic diets. Christine is Swedish with a face like a 1940s movie star with a gap between her front teeth. We drank her diet tea and had cramps and spent the day on the toilet. Then we went out to dinner with her and her producer friend and drank so much delicious red wine. My older sister Robbi was a model and I inevitably had a crush on her cute French boyfriends except for Thierry who was a junkie and abusive in that very particular European man way which can sometimes be mistaken for love. I saw them fight on the street in Paris and he pushed her down to the pavement. No one intervened because it was just a ‘passionate’ fight between lovers. I hated him after that. Michelle, Lorraine, and I went to the Bains Douche a hot nightclub in Paris and saw Mickey Rourke. When we told Michelle’s daughter the story, she said, “Who’s Mickey Rourke?” That day, we rode a beautiful Merry Go Round. I mean that literally.

Now I’m at Heathrow ready to go home to Toronto. Well for a couple days and then we move into our place on the lake. What if I die before I get back? This morning I went on a nice walk along the Thames. It was one of those glorious sunny days in London when you think “I could live here”.

Now I’m at our cottage, our new home. I convinced Viktor to go for a swim with me even though we didn’t have a way to get to shore because the dock needs to be connected. The rocks are covered in tiny sharp little barnacles or clam shells and he cursed me as he tried to get back up. I wanted to laugh as he floundered and his flip flop that we got in Iceland kept slipping off his foot, flipping and flopping.

I freaked out when we got here because there’s barely any cell service. Then I found the former owner’s diary in a Mead breast cancer awareness agenda from 2011. Her name is Ruth. Why didn’t her daughter take it? What was their relationship like? She never mentions her or her grandkids in the diary. She was very solitary and into her crossword and sudoku and nature. It made me terribly sad. She had a list of things she wanted to do for retirement. She was a doctor. I don’t want to retire. I’m too young. Retire?! What the hell. But Viktor. The way it was written, her debauchery was watching too many seasons of Ray Donavon. Where is the porcupine buried? The first night here felt like the beginning of a horror flick. We even saw a camera on a tree. It’s very remote. Viktor felt attacked because I was freaking out. What have we done?

But now I like it. I get up really early because of jet lag or because of falling asleep at 10. And go down and have coffee on the lake. The water is very still. I didn’t know it was the sun that made the water ripply. Viktor explained it to me but I stopped listening. Something about the heat. God I should probably get some ADHD meds. But what is it all. Ruth’s list of things she wanted to do after she retired; 1.Go to Iceland and Newfoundland 2. Learn the violin 3. Living at Red Horse 4. Building my rock mandala/meditation spiral 5. learning how to care for livestock 6. volunteering at Sue’s Sandy Pines animal rescue 7. Doing more kayaking, hiking , naturalist, geology 8. Learning how to use a compass, make maps.

Why does that list make me so melancholy? Maybe because I know that seven years later her place that she built for her dream of retirement was sold by a power of attorney because she could no longer care for herself. And those Christmas cards. The letter from her friend that basically brags about what her grandkids are doing, tells her how much she sold her jam at the Christmas fair ($5) and then tells her which friends are dying of what type of cancer.

Today I saw a water snake slither by me as my legs dangled into the lake. There was a single line of Canada Geese flying overhead. Pablo and I watched them. There’s lily pads with yellow flowers near the shore. I hung one of Ruth’s handmade mobiles on the tree. I’m going to donate her art. Not hers, but the artwork she has hung on all the walls. She was a patron of the art fair. I wonder what she looks like. She’s like a character written by Carol Shields. Why don’t I feel Canadian? I can hear Viktor snoring. He tried to light a fire in our wood stove but he just managed to smoke us out and test the fire alarms (they work). But I wanted to swim in the lake and go to that cute thrift store in the town over. I did. I bought a ballet print for $25. Her name is Sara. I tried on a jumpsuit but it didn’t fit me, I’m long waisted. It is very peaceful here. Maybe my dream of having artist retreats may not happen. I’d like to build two more cottages on the property and a stage so I can have 7 people come stay for the long weekend and we can perform at the end of it.

My god the last self tape I did was so bad. I was wired trying to remember all the dialogue and it was so hot and Wes kept correcting my lines. And Jack had to go to violin. I probably should not have sent it in. How am I going to do self tapes here? Or maybe I’ll just go do them in Toronto. Fix up the Woodrow apartment. It’s nice to get out of the basement though.