Cornish senior Brian Bermudez blows for Orchestra L'Pow; Filles Tournoires can-can girls.
Whenever Parisians celebrate or protest, they're said to "descend into the street," usually the Champs Elysées; when Seattle's Campagne stages its annual Bastille Day festival, they simply commandeer Post Alley.
A charming idea: at the formal restaurant upstairs, would-be Royalists dine on a $70 menu of crab, caviar, and a rich, aristocratic dish called vol-au-vent financière (puff pastry filled with veal sweetbreads, squab, duck, wild mushrooms and foie gras).
In the alley down below, Revolutionaries eat cake, or at least sugary bugnes lyonnaises. Or pommes frites with garlic mayonnaise, depending on taste. Beer, wine, and a succession of "French" street performers, including an ambitious chanteuse whose notion of Liberté Égalité and Fraternité extended to Déshabillé.
She goes by many names; today it's the Swedish Housewife.
What would have got a working girl of Marie Antoinette's time busted for vagrancy gets nothing but smiles on July 14th, 2006. Vive la révolution!
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