Ten Little Chances to be Free

First of all: happy Barricade Day! Hopefully I will have some Les Mis fandom goodies for later tonight.

Second: Who midseason finale. ( Spoilers, sweetie )

Also, going to call it right here right now: the 1100-year-old Doctor in Impossible Astronaut is the real Doctor, but his ganger somehow survives and stabilizes. I've seen a lot of people speculating that it's the other way around (that 1100-year-old Doctor is a ganger) but this would be a brilliant way to give all that "gangers really are the same people as their originals" business some unexpected payoff.

June 6 went well, Châtelet are a bunch of poopyheads and moved our seats inconveniently, we still managed to be a giant block of fangirls laughing at inappropriate moments in the show, and afterwards ten of us somehow ended up at my flat and realized too late that the Metros were no longer running. So we hung around and fangirled until the Metros were running again, i.e. 5:30am. And some very silly and wonderful things resulted from that, let me tell you.

Surprisingly enough, Barricade Day festivities did not end with, well, Barricade Day, and my recollection of the past few days is actually quite fuzzy--I know they involved, in approximate order, the sewer museum, lucieandco staying at my flat for a couple nights, way too much wine, Père Lachaise, way too much booze, Carnavalet, and yet more wine and fangirling. Drunken topics of conversation have included Hungarian grammar, that weird Javert/Enjolras video of 'Die Schatten werden länger', the Postmodernism Generator, slashfic, ten million tales of everybody's Irish ancestors, Quatrevingt-Treize, bad fanfiction, Lucien de Rubempré, more slashfic, and some probably-extremely-profound discussions of Enjolras and the Romantic sublime whose details I have already forgotten because damn, we were sloshed. And we all managed to spoil the endings of our WIP fanfiction to each other.

And how do I manage to keep making LJ posts at 4am when I have somewhere to be in the morning? Fuck, I'm going to bed.

Today was utterly MAD and I renounce at any attempt to make a coherent narrative out of it, so I leave you with bullet points:

- Trying to get Les Mis fans to show up at a particular place at a particular time = herding cats. I suspected it for a while what with RSVP chaos and such, but it is now official, and I was duuumb not to leave half an hour's waiting-around time in all the tour meetup points.

- Musain burger restaurant totally has a ball pit upstairs. A revolutionary ball pit where you can hide out and plot the overthrow of the government.

- Doing a lightning tour of Carnavalet and dragging people through the exhibits at double-speed hurt my soul, but the staff were incredibly amused by us. Like, incredibly amused. They kept grinning and saying hello just on seeing the tricolor sashes, and then we got to the Restoration/July Monarchy exhibits and they were seriously LOLing at us and our disparaging comments about Charles X.

- Really Carnavalet will never be as fun as it was this afternoon, with fourteen really nerdy people pointing things out and providing flippant, often sarcastic summaries of everything and everyone from Voltaire to the revolution of 1848.

- Lulz there is a flat for sale at 16 rue de la Verrerie. We should pool together and make it a giant collective fandom library/archive or something. It would be awesome. And completely implausible on so many levels, but the idea makes me grin.

- There are group photos of us being silly and revolutionary at the site of the barricade!

- And afterwards we got last-minute tickets to Les Mis and there were Marius and Enjolras understudies, and they were both fairly awesome. (More on that later, I think.)

- I had to make a battery run for my recorder fifteen minutes before the show, and my frantic running-around took me past the stage door. Twice. The first time all the stagehands were out back smoking. The second time all the stagehands were out back taking cell-phone videos of the crazy girl in the sash.

- This guy about our age came up to us at intermission and asked for a photo with us. This was funny but not inherently Twilight Zone-esque until he just so happened to mention that he played Gavroche in the Broadway 10th anniversary show, and was not there for any special date or event, he just happened to be seeing the tour.

- Second Twilight Zone moment came at the stage door, when Katie Hall and Rosalind James were chatting (very indulgently, mind, given that we were all there and hyperactive and dressed up) about the Paris engagement. And it got onto the difficulty of finding Les Mis places in Paris, and I did not even realize I was giving Cosette directions to the Rue Plumet until after it had been pointed out to me through fits of laughter by... pretty much everyone else there.

- lucieandco and I talk about Balzac when we're drunk. Be afraid.

OMG it is happening. A dozen people in tricolor sashes running around the Jardin du Luxembourg and having lunch in the burger-joint-that-would've-been-the-Café-Musain. I can't believe this worked.

Have to run off to Carnavalet in a few minutes to continue the tour, I just wanted to go squeeeeee and wish you all a happy Barricade Day!

MEETING PLACES FOR THE TOURS

How to recognize the group: There will probably be people in tricolor sashes and period costume running around. Here's a picture of me. Yes, my hair is still that color, and yes, it tends to stand out in a crowd.

( FRIDAY, 4th JUNE )

( SATURDAY, 5th JUNE )

( SUNDAY, 6th JUNE )

Sketching out plans for how I'm going to do the Les Mis tour on Barricade Day. Tell me which sounds better to you? (Even if you're not coming, I could use some feedback.)

Immutable facts:
- The Procope reservation is for Sunday afternoon lunch
- All the good restaurants in the Marais are closed on Saturday

Planned segments of the tour:
- The Marais, between the barricade and the Place de la Bastille, including 2 museums (at LEAST 4 hours total)
- Latin quarter, close to the Procope, includes the burger joint where the Café Musain used to be (probably a couple hours if people have time to go exploring)
- Saint-Marcel/Place d'Italie/Gobelins (one hour tops, I should say)

Things the plan needs to accomplish, in order of importance:
- Not making people late for the show
- Not exhausting everyone
- At least leaving time for lunch and dinner
- Preferably either eating somewhere along the way, or letting people loose in a neighborhood with plenty of restaurants
- Not wasting people's Metro/bus tickets, grouping things that are within walking distance

Plan 1:
- Isolated trips (Rue Plumet, etc.) Saturday morning. Marais Saturday afternoon after lunchtime. Completely ignore the fact that, by going to the Marais on Saturday, we are missing the best falafel in Paris, and just do the whole thing starting from Bastille and dump everyone in Les Halles at dinnertime to partake of the, er, numerous and varied food options there. Les Halles = close to the theatre, so we are golden.
- Saint-Marcel on Sunday morning, lunch at Procope, Latin Quarter in the afternoon, dinner at the Quality Burger Restaurant of Revolutionary French Fries.

Plan 2:
- Latin Quarter on Saturday morning. Lunch at Quality Burger Restaurant. Split up Marais trip; do Carnavalet, Rue de l'Homme-Armé, Rue de la Verrerie, Saint-Merry, and the barricade on Saturday afternoon, and end in Les Halles.
- Saint-Marcel and/or isolated trips on Sunday morning, lunch at Procope, second half of Marais trip in afternoon: Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire (optional), Bastille, Victor Hugo museum, Eglise Saint-Paul, absinthe shop, La Force, then have delicious delicious falafel for dinner in the Rue des Rosiers.

Of course there are many other possible combinations, but most of them completely screw us over for time and/or leave us with nowhere to eat.

So far I am liking Plan 2 better; it will waste a hell of a lot more Metro/bus tickets, but splitting up the Marais section might be a good idea since there are two museums in there and it's a long damn way. And the Rue des Rosiers can accomodate almost any dietary restriction imaginable: kosher, vegetarian, food allergies, etc.

Fortunately there is no need to specifically schedule in the site of Javert's final jump, since the theatre is practically SITTING on the Pont au Change and you can go walk around there at intermission if you want.

Okay, the Barricade Day website is online, Théâtre du Châtelet is getting back to me tomorrow about the group tickets, and I no longer feel like a complete lazy tool. (BTW, if you're not already a member of barricadeday and you're interested in going, join!)

Obviously, let me know if you find any glaring mistakes on the website, or if the RSVP/guest list spits out incomprehensible PHP errors at you (which it shouldn't).

Now I just need to study for that exam on Wednesday. *faceplant*

The PHP/mySQL, that is. I just need to plug a few security holes, fix a few broken links, and finish the travel info section, and the Barricade Day website will be online.

Théâtre du Châtelet still hasn't got back to me about the group tickets, even though I paid them at the end of November. Today I got a big ol' envelope from them in the mail, ripped it open expecting it to be the tickets, and instead found a bunch of promo flyers for their production of A Little Night Music.

FUCKERS. This means they HAVE my address, so it's not like they don't know where to send the tickets. This incident finally pushed me to write them an angry but oh-so-polite email asking what the fuck was going on. With a bit of help from the study-abroad program director on the formal business French, because I'm actually quite horrible with all that "je vous prie de bien vouloir blah blah blah" crap. They're out of the office this week, but they should get back to me on Monday or Tuesday. Or there will be hell to pay.

Barricade Day website is, I swear to God, almost done. The only things I need to finish are the section with travel tips for Paris (two-thirds done), and the RSVP/guest list page. It's going to be a form that uses PHP/mySQL to maintain a database of who's coming to what events, so I don't have to do it manually. Since I'd like to get it up quickly and don't want to worry about gaping security holes, it's not going to be editable except by me. I'd kind of wanted to set up a username/password thing that would let people update their info, but in the interests of time and security, that just isn't happening.

Since I haven't finished any fic in ages and ages, I figure that for Barricade Day I'll dump a couple of the less-sucky partially-written fics up here. Neither of them is more than a couple of pages.

( Enjolras/Combeferre, written circa May 2007 )


( Combeferre and Courfeyrac are plotting, written July 2008 )