7/4/2023 0 Comments A faux pas![]() ![]() "Would you see if they know it?" asked Bob. "Ah, the hymn, yes, I know," he finally said, as Bob continued to sing. "Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light…" Hearing the boat's band warming up, Bob started belting out his own song: the "Star-Spangled Banner." Would this elegant Frenchman keep his cool in the face of the Americans' incessant demands? After patiently explaining how to pronounce foie gras, Lacatos got another request from the couple. No, I think the one in Vegas is bigger!"įor Jean Lacatos, Bob and Bonnie's waiter, it promised to be a long night. As other diners gazed quietly out of the windows while they passed the Eiffel Tower, Bob shouted: "Look at that tower! It's just like the one in Vegas. "Oh, look, we started moving!" Bonnie screamed as the bateau pushed off from the dock. If there is one word that summed up our ugly Americans, that word is "loud." Loud clothing … and loud voices. Do football jerseys count as evening wear? It's a romantic dinner cruise on the Seine - talk about a moveable feast! Everybody was dressed in their finest ensembles. ![]() The modern version of these blundering Americans appears in David Sedaris' book "Me Talk Pretty One Day," where he describes Americans wearing "the pleated denim shorts, the baseball cap, the T-shirt."įictional ugly Americans have also been immortalized in films such as "National Lampoon's European Vacation," where the Griswolds made American a synonym for hapless.īut is there any truth to the stereotype? And what about the American stereotype of the haughty Parisian who seems to relish putting outsiders in their place? For a week during the summer, "What Would You Do?" took its actors and hidden cameras to Paris in an attempt to find out.įor their first evening in Paris, Bob and Bonnie headed to one of Paris' most popular attractions - the world-famous Bateaux Mouche. Novelist Edith Wharton once said, "How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be 'American' before being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?" In "Innocents Abroad" (1869) Mark Twain painted the ugly American as a naive, blundering fool. Western tourists, oblivious to French etiquette and culture, have thrived in American literature for more than a century. We wanted to test the legend of the ugly Americans to see just how ugly American tourists have to get before the French rise up and shout "non!" For the first time, "What Would You Do?" took its actors and hidden cameras overseas. But in this case, they were actually actors from the United States. They're the "ugly Americans," those famously hapless tourists adrift in a foreign culture. ![]() And they didn't know the difference between haute cuisine and oat bran. "Je m'appelle, Bob!" They were dressed in shorts and matching shirts marked: "Paris, Texas" and "Bush '08." Instead of Manolo Blahniks, they wore Crocs. "Howdy!" shouted Bob to the porter, in a Texas drawl. ![]() Like a French Cinderella, she knew she had arrived.īut on this day someone else was checking in: Bonnie Jones and her husband, Bob. And then, stepping out onto her terrace in her Manolo Blahniks, she squealed with delight at the glorious sight of the Eiffel Tower. It was here, in the next-to-last episode of HBO's "Sex and the City," that Carrie Bradshaw made her grand and giddy entrance. And no address is more stylish than the posh hotel Plaza Athénée. 6, 2008— - Ah, Paris, breathtakingly beautiful, irresistibly romantic and of course, oh so chic. ![]()
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