Avec Romane
..notre petite voisine francaise-americaine et la bonne amie d'Alice et Edith.*
Un escalier des filles
P.S. Wikipedia informs me that I missed Yale's 25th-anniversary celebration of the French in Action series! Who could forget learning grammar by watching the unfolding '80s romance between coquettish Parisian Mireille and disaffected Yale dropout Robert Taylor, roaming France in search of meaning? "Mystere et boules de gomme!"
P.P.S. Okay, this blog post is getting far afield, but a few more minutes online, and now I'm intrigued. Who knew French in Action had a cult following? According to one of the fan blogs (for a language course?!), "French in Action succeeds by cultivating the fantasy that there’s a Mireille on a Luxembourg Gardens park bench waiting for you, too. In this way, Allain as Mireille has done more to promote French among young male English speakers than anyone since William the Conqueror. Sources say Charles Mayer as Robert has had his fair share of admirers (of both sexes), too. Capretz rightly understood that nothing fixes the short attention span of the young like a good jolt of hormones."
I said it was memorable but I never thought it was especially sexy. It may have been a soap opera, but by the mid-1990s it already felt passe, and we laughed at it. The only highly charged feelings in French 125 were those of shame, as our Parisian TAs mocked our accents and affected great amusement at our grammatical errors, while Monsieur Capretz stopped the video every three seconds to repeat the last bit half a dozen times, until we understood each sentence. They don't mention that aspect of the FIA method. Then again, the above paragraph suggests that maybe the male students were getting something out of it that I was missing. I always thought Robert needed to get a haircut and a life.
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