Nuit Blanche

My cell phone rings. It’s Jake: “Hey, aren’t you having a party tonight? I’m at your apartment with some other assistants but you don’t seem to be home.” “Oh yeah, I am” I reply, “but not ‘till 10:30; I’ll be back in half an hour.” Jake says they’ll go bar-hopping and come back.

Hmm, I guess people are actually coming over.

I had invited about 15 people over to pre-game before going out on the town for Nuit Blanche, a city-wide all-nighter when generally underappreciated modern artists fill the streets with installations and Parisians drunkenly wander about pretending to get it. I had only heard back from about 5 people saying they were coming and would bring some cheap wine.

By midnight my relatively spacious but surely not cavernous flat is filled with around 30 people, mostly Americans but a spattering of French guys who are friends of a friend. Wine is flowing generously. So generously in fact that I spill a bit of red on the pristine white canvas dining room chairs. Shit. Ally recommends using white wine to get out the red wine. Keith recommends re-upholstering the chairs. Jen does some quick internet research and decides the thing to do is to concoct a precise solution of Dawn and hydrogen peroxide. Finally, I remember that I threw a Tide to Go pen in my carry-on. It seems to at least dull the red out a bit. I decide to hide all remaining white things…from myself.

Emma walks in at the height of the impromptu festivities and stops dead in the entryway, a look of absolute denial on her face. I quickly scamper over and assure her I will “take care of everything.” She nods suspiciously. Luckily the stained chairs are blocked from view by the mass of bodies. I hope this isn’t the end of our short friendship/housing arrangement.

Once I’m sufficiently full of wine I start encouraging everyone to head out for Nuit Blanche.

The full list of Nuit Blanche attractions is far too overwhelming to digest, but there is one installation I want to see for sure: a gigantic skull made of Indian dishes. I drunkenly set of on my mission, followed by around 10 people trying to keep up with my New York walking pace. The skull is about twice as far from my flat as it appears on the official Nuit Blanche map. But it is pretty cool. Naturally I enjoy any excuse to blab about India, so I eagerly point out all the different shapes and sizes of tiffin (Indian lunch boxes) that form the 10-foot-high cranium. I am awesome.

Post tiffin-skull we basically wander around northern Paris from 2am to 5am in search of anything cool or fun, but finding little. We come across 1 or 2 other bits of perplexing art. I wander into this fabulous Middle-Eastern pastry shop full of jelabees, and I vaguely recall excitedly telling the owner that I had eaten jelabees in India. I don’t think he cared. I bought something yummy with dates in it. I wish I could remember where that shop was…

By the time we actually get to where some of our friends are allegedly hanging out it is nearly 5:30 in the morning, I am tired and sober, and the metro is running again. My will to Nuit Blanche is gone. I half-heartedly wave goodbye to my wandering buddies and sleepily head back towards home.

I use up my last remaining bit of energy loading the dishwasher with all the empty wine glasses and putting the furniture back in order. The Tide to Go has worked magic; the only traces of the red wine are some extremely bleached patches on otherwise aged white fabric.

I sleep like a baby, confident in the knowledge that my accidental party was way more fun than Paris’ intentional modern art-fest.