FOR SALE: “Vanity” (Menton; Place Saint-Michel)
Pencil, Pastel, & watercolor
2025 ($200. If interested in purchase, please email dterrydraw@aol.com or telephone 919-909-9811)
Menton is basically the last town on the French riviera before one crosses over into Italy. It’s not particularly “fancy” (nobody is when your neighbors are Nice and Monte Carlo). but it is singular in its blending of both cultures.
Not to go entirely Tennessee Williams/”Suddenly Last Summer”/”The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone” on everyone, but?…..
One doesn’t have too look around much to realize that the steps and plazas are filled with young men who may or may not be gigolos (they usually aren’t, of course, since most of them are fairly stupid and wouldn’t last five minutes in the real business), but who certainly are quite vain. Gold chains, tank-tops, and no doubt still living with their mothers. Presumably, their maternal uncles eventually get them jobs as manager of a tire-shop or something similar. By that time, they’ll have knocked up one girl or another and have been married. They will have many affairs, but will probably never get divorced.
BUT?…….for a very few years there, they get to sit on the piazza steps, wink at giggling tourist women, and play cock-of-the-local-walk. It’s a very old story.
That said? I do wonder at youthful, male vanity….those few, quite brief years before one’s either sent off to war, or is forced to marry, or take that job at the factory, or otherwise compromise. This happens to women, also and of course……but women are, as a general rule, more inclined to swing with the punches that adult life throws at one.
