For nearly thirty years, I’ve been fascinated by a man I never met. He was the uncle of my supervisor at the after-school retail job I had my senior year of high school, and the following is everything I know about him.
1. He was a middle-aged man from Texas.
2. Sometime in the mid-nineties, he took his wife to Paris for their anniversary.
3. Throughout their ten-day stay, each time they left a shop or restaurant, he’d tip his cowboy hat and address the establishment’s (presumably horrified) employees in his very best French-adjacent drawl: “MARE SEE BOW COO, Y’ALL.”
This story pops into my head at random intervals because, well, the mental image delights me. But it has some practical applications as well.
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