I should have had my hair cut before leaving Dallas, but didn’t, so naturally it immediately started looking awful. I asked Bets if I could get an appointment somewhere and we popped into Michel’s on Friday and got one with Sylvie for 10:00 the next morning. Bets had proposed an activity for Saturday morning—a lecture on the Scientific Evidence for the Existence of God at the Anglican Church she has been attending. Unfortunately, hair took priority and Tom and Bets went off to the lecture while I walked the two blocks to the hair dresser with a vague promise to either come by the church after the hair, or maybe just come back to the house.

I came out an hour later with very French hair! Kind of spiky, pixie-ish, and as Sylvie put it : pas si serieux (not too serious). That’s me: pas si serieux and just a barrel of laughs. But the hair looked pretty good so I decided to follow the directions and walk over to the Church and see if I could find them. At least I knew there would be English spoken in case I had to search them down. And by now the lecture should be over or close to it.

I got there in nothing flat and peered in the window where I saw about fifty people seated in the pews and a gentlemen with head bowed sitting at a table on the raised altar platform. Tom and Bets were right there so it was easy to slip in and sit beside them. That was about 11:15.

Talk about serieux! The lecture was about de-bunking Darwin’s theory of evolution with punctuated natural selection (don’t ask), DNA helixes, and probabilities of the Big Bang being 1 in 1 with 194 zeros behind it, a number so large as to be unimaginable. Not to mention impossible. The speaker was just getting started. The lecture had started at 9:30 and he talked until 1:15! Shades of every unintelligible PhD seminar I had ever suffered through. But I did serve a useful purpose—that of poking Tom periodically so that he wouldn’t nod off and snore. The man is clearly brilliant (and a friend of Betsy’s so I must tread carefully here), and I found out later that he is not only a cosmologist (that’s different from a cosmetologist) and physicist, but a businessman who made a fortune buying and re-selling castles and other real estate. But public speaking is not his forte and he mostly kept his head down and read in a monotone from his paper. Then he would say, “I’ll conclude (my heart would soar) this section, and open the floor for questions. Then I will continue with the presentation.” This happened three or four times. Finally, he actually did conclude (the morning session) and rather than eating lunch at the Church and staying for the afternoon session on the evidence for the truth of the Christian God being greater than the other Gods of the world’s monotheistic religions, Bets proposed that we leave and have lunch at one of her favorite beach restaurants on the Croisette with the rest of the Beautiful People. Lovely food, a bottle of wine... Hmmm, I mused, as much as I’d rather stay here and eat cold cuts in the Church cafeteria and listen and learn for the rest of the day, I’ll do what you want....

We made our escape and had an especially lovely time at Rado where the food is excellent and the people watching superb.

Francine has arrived! Francine Pascal is a long time friend of Avery’s and of ours as well from our various trips here. She even accompanied Betsy to Dallas one time and did some research for a book loosely based on Highland Park High School. She lives full time in New York but has a beautiful home in Golfe Juan where she spends some months of the year. She is also a best-selling author whose work has sold 150 million books and is translated into 25 languages. If you have daughters I know you have heard of her, but if you can’t place the name, she is the originator and writer of the Sweet Valley High series, a staple among adolescent girls. There are hundreds of titles in the series and millions of girls have read every single one.

Not only is Francine a best-selling author, she is a lovely person and we very much enjoy her company. Though newly arrived from New York, she agreed to meet us at the Yacht Club and that’s where we had dinner—overlooking Cannes Harbor and watching the sunset. Afterwards, Francine said she would meet us in the morning for our day in Gourdon, a wonderrful village where we have been before but not often. After Gourdon, we planned to go to visit our artist friend, Nall in Vence.

Tomorrow more about our lovely day in Gourdon and our visit to Nall.