1.

In an early episode of MAD MEN, Betty Draper and her friend Francine are gossiping in Betty’s kitchen about their new neighbor, the scandalous Helen Bishop, divorcee and single mother.

Francine: Have you seen her walking, up there on tree ridge?  Where the hell is she walking to?
Betty:  (shakes her head as she smears cream cheese onto a celery stick) I don’t know.

Later, when all the ladies have gathered in the same kitchen for Sally Draper’s birthday party, they go around and share their honeymoon stories.  Helen tells them she went to Paris.

1.

In a Q&A with PBS, filmmaker Perry Miller Adato talked about her documentary Paris: the Luminous Years (2010), which I recently learned about and—because I am hopeless when it comes to all things Parisian—I immediately watched.  About the unprecedented gathering of artists in Paris during the early part of the 20^thcentury, Adato said:

First day of class: after a writing exercise that helps break the ice – 10 minutes of “put someone you don’t know very well in a situation of physical duress, and write the scene in first person” (a few students share out loud, while we listen and then comment)—I ask the students to go around the room and say their name, major, and “where they’re from.”  I use air quotes, and they all laugh, knowingly.  We all understand that the question is fraught, and complex.  In this room of twelve (including me), a college classroom in New York City, only two offer a simple answer to the question: I am from Dallas, Texas.  I am from Atlanta, Georgia.  Third and fourth generation, respectively.   Two out of twelve.