Stupid Tourist Tricks

This afternoon I'm watching a video of the Stephen Sondheim musical "Sunday in the Park with George", based upon the life of Georges Seurat and depicting his work in creating his large painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The persons depicted in the painting are brought to life in the musical, starring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters.

La Grande Jatte is an island in the Seine. There is a hilarious scene with a Southern couple in their 50s, who have decided they don't really like Paris and want to go back to America. They are on the island and trying to figure out how to get off the island so they can get aboard ship and sail back to the States.

The corpulent man, in his Georgia/Alabama/Mississippi accent, tries to communicate with a boatman on the island to ask directions. With enunciation that would make any choral director proud, he speaks slowly and loudly: "Excuz-ay Maah-sir. We are lost." The boatman replies "Anh?" The even-more-corpulent wife, in her ruffled frock and pearls, taps her husband and says, "Let me try, Daddy." She approachs the boatman with a coquettish look and, using grotesque imitation sign language, says slowly and distinctly (and even more loudly), "We are aliens here, unable to fiiiiind passage off island." The boatman looks at them, then points in the direction of the boat that will take them off the island and says, in impeccable accented English, "Why don't you just walk into the water until your lungs fill up and you die?"

It is too funny. It is what you wish you could say to every stupid tourist you encounter on the streets of Tucson or Washington or wherever they are.

Listening to this exchange suddenly took me back to 1993 in Quitzerow, Germany, where Tyler was an exchange student. My then-husband, Bob, and I flew to Berlin, I think, and rented a car to drive up to Quitzerow, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where Tyler was living with his host family, the Pagels. This was Tyler's second host family and they were a nice family with twin sons a little older than Tyler. They lived in the former East and had a fencing business that had enabled them to come out of the communism successfully. But because of their geographic location, their second language was not English, as we had expected when Tyler went to live there, but, rather, Russian.

As Bob and I were planning the trip, we had assumed that we would be able to get along on my "nur ein bischen Deutsch" from college because we understood that most everyone spoke English. Alas, the Pagels spoke almost no English. Poor Tyler was stuck translating for this entire trip.

Bob, being a country boy, a good ol' boy, had quite a vocabulary of colloquialisms. He was trying to be cordial and say things to Herr Pagel, but when Herr Pagel didn't understand, he would just say it again slower and louder. Or turn to Tyler and ask him to translate something. The two men were shooting pool one evening and Bob asked Tyler, "How do you say 'bells and whistles'?" Umm, you don't. It doesn't translate.

My memories of this trip are chock-full of uncomfortable situations because of Bob's total absorption with himself. (You only need refer back to my stories of doing a sinkful of dishes at 10:00 at night after my four-hour commute and a full day at work and an evening of teaching piano, while he and his son sat in front of the television, to understand the validity of that statement.) Some of the memories were of awkward situations, and some just of typical ignorance.

And some just plain funny: Bob, who lived in Hillsboro, Virginia, was a big civil war buff. And he loved to know the history of places as we drove the back roads from Hillsboro up to his parents' home in Buck Valley, Warfordsburg, Pennsylvania. So when we were driving along a road in Germany, he saw a historic marker beside the road and pulled off to read it, before realizing it was in German.

I think by the time the trip was over, Tyler was hoping this would not be the marriage to last the rest of my life.