Learning about French Culture in Windsor (Canada) and in Detroit at Moliere plays, at the art institute, and other activities with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
Thanks to my
high school’s French club in Detroit, Michigan, I felt like I made a trip to
France every week for an hour before school started on Wednesday mornings. The Club was open to students who had
completed one year of French with a “B”
or better average.
I was elected Social Chairperson for my ability to come up with activities to do on a weekly basis. On easy planning weeks, we would play Milles Bornes™, the French card driving game, and learned all the vocabulary and insults that went with it. We also played Parlor Games, the French play these at rallyes at home, like 21 Questions, Simon Says, Who am I? and I Spy in Franch.
We went to see Molière’s (1622 – 1673) Tartruffe with the third- and fourth-year French class that was performed by the drama department at Wayne State University. Before going to see the play, we read the play in French, so we could understand what was being said.
When many of us became advanced French students, we wrote a play based on Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and performed it before the junior French classes and the high school’s drama classes in the school auditorium. I was the lamppost lighter, who chose to light up the world or dim it.
Despite a heavy homework load, I arranged trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts (DIA) to see:
-the Detroit Industry Murals (1932 – 1933) by Diego Rivera
-Martha and Mary Magdalen (c.1598) and The Fruit Vendor (c.1635 – 1620) by Caravaggio (1571 – 1610)
-The Wedding Dance (1566) by Pieter Breugel (1520 – 1569), called Breugel the Elder
-The Visitation (1640) by Rembrandt (1606 – 1669)
-Ruisdael’s (1628 – 1682) Jewish Cemetery (1654 -1655), Canal Scene (late 1640s), and Landscape (1665 – 1668)
-The Nigerian sculpture collection
-The medieval knight armor hall
The DIA had docents at the time from the University of Michigan, who gave tours for free, if you reserved ahead of time.
Going to museums is a French national sport, so we planned several trips to the Detroit Institute of the Arts, which we traveled to by city buses. We also visited the Detroit Zoo, the Botanical Garden, and the Aquarium and learned all the French vocabulary to describe what we saw.
Sometimes I had to stretch my imagination for activities to do like planning a baseball and picnic outing on Belle Isle. Belle Isle is an island in the Detroit River between Detroit and Windsor, Canada.
The island has a French name which reveals Detroit’s French heritage. The name Detroit is derived from D’étroit, meaning “from narrows," because the Detroit River is indeed narrow.
On other occasions, I would contact the French consulate in Detroit to get films, posters, maps, and brochures for our club. We all learned about Loire Valley Châteaux, Paris, the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera), and Normandy from these films.
We organized dinner parties at club members’ homes and tried our hands at French onion soup, crêpes, and tarte tatin (apple, upside-down cake). I was more of a taster than a cook then and was happy that several French Club members knew how to cook. I am a good French cook now thanks to a lot of practice from both necessity and pleasure.
I liked organizing lunches in French restaurants in Windsor, Canada for about thirty to thirty-five people usually at a fixed price.
The restaurants would have us arrive early and gave us a choice between two main dishes such as roast chicken or ratatouille. We would start the meal with vegetable terrines and French onion soup. Cheese, salad, and chocolate mousse or ice cream would follow the main dish. Water or sodas accompanied the meal.
Long walks around Windsor followed the meal down Oulette Street to the flower gardens by the Detroit River before boarding the Detroit-Canada bus to go back through the tunnel and our life in Detroit.
We danced to Jean-Michel Jarre music on the Boblo Ferry Boat as our last club activity before college.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
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