Tough love from Blues Legend Memphis Earlene was yesterday.  Today it’s time for Franco-Therapy.

Everything’s better in France, especially if you’re an Older Woman, according to Scarlett, my fashion consultant.  Everything improves when translated into the French version.

She’s back in town, after spending winter  in  the Bad Girl’s Trailer Park, an exclusive afterlife hangout with branches in Palm Beach, Venice Beach, and France.

” You can’t sing the Blues in French,” says Scarlett.  “We have L’existentialism instead.”

She takes one look at my new hideous drivers license ID.

“Pretty ugly, ” I say.

She corrects me.

“Jolie Laide, ” she says, and tells me what to wear.

After a winter in blue jeans, boots, and and big gray sweaters it feels strange to be wearing a skirt, ballet flats, and one of those ladylike cardigans.

“I look like a housewife,” I tell her.

“A French housewife, ” she says. “Imagine you’re Isabel Huppert and God is Francois Truffault.”

American housewives run errands, clean house, and engage in self-improvement or community betterment.  

French housewives take lovers and go to the market to buy French bread.   They are already perfect, like cats, and this is the best of all possible worlds.  

“Tres jolie, ” Scarlett says. “It’s Spring, after all.  This is the closest Washington comes to Paris.  Renoir painted this sky.”