“Who needs a necklace when you have a badge?!?” Thursday, May 12th

Today I had a good morning class talking about music and reviewing the conditionnel passé which we learned the day before. Then we had lunch and went to lay out for a while. After laying out we headed inside to shower and get ready to attempt to see a show at the Palais. We all three got dressed in our Gala dresses and headed into town! We decided we really didn’t need any necklaces since we had our Cannes Cinephiles Badges! It was a painfully long walk to town in heels, but Jennifer and I made it (Hanna wore her flats). We arrived around 7 o’clock and decided to sit down and wait for the last minute access for the 11 o’clock show after we had walked around and watched some of the famous people walk up the red carpet.

While waiting we took some pictures and people watched. We literally caught 5 different people taking pictures of us, so we must have looked important in our black dresses. One guy even asked for us to take a picture with him, I walked away to sit by Hanna so Jennifer did (I guess she’s just nicer than I am!). Later these two older ladies who were sitting by us started making conversation. They were telling us how beautiful we are and they thought we were from England which we found to be a very big compliment since English women are gorgeous! We told them that we are from the states and they said that we will be walking up the red carpet as stars one day because we are so pretty. Then one of the ladies asked if she could take a picture of us to show her family in Paris, her son in particular, a picture of three debutante actresses!

Once they were done talking about how nice and wonderful we were these other two girls from the collège walk up and one is barefoot with dirty feet and she’s holding her broken heels and the other is complaining about something and they are both talking extremely load and all of a sudden we hear the old ladies say “The True American”or “Le Vrai Americain”. We almost lost it. We had been speaking to them in French the entire time so they knew we could understand them and they kept talking about the girl’s feet and how it wasn’t good to walk barefoot. Jennifer couldn’t take it and was laughing really hard and I managed to stay composed until they left, but then they started talking about how we need to watch out for French men because just as there are good and bad Americans, there are good and bad French.

Well once the old ladies left we only had about an hour left to wait, so we did some more people watching. One person was dressed up as the “Mirror Man” and this Chinese couple was extremely excited when the guy gave him a picture to keep and signed it. They were so excited that we had to take a picture of it because the guy wasn’t really famous. He was interviewed by the people who have been interviewing all of the street performers, but they must have thought he was important.

Finally when it was almost time, we went to the gate to wait for them to open up the last minute access. Brittany was leaving the showing of “Sleeping Beauty” and decided to join us. We were behind two people, but that was it so we had a good feeling that we were going to make it into the showing. Brittany filled us in on “Sleeping Beauty” and said it wasn’t as good as she was expecting. She ended up going in before us because someone was offering an invitation and Jennifer, Hanna and I didn’t want to split up. Luckily 10 minutes later we were allowed in as well and we got to walk the red carpet in front of the stars of the movie! (Tilda Swinters, John C. Riley, Ezra Miller and the director, Lynne Ramsay) We were going crazy taking pictures all wide eyed and excited. Once we got to our seats (we were on the main level!!) we saw that they would show glimpses of people and we said “Thank goodness the stars were getting ready to walk up behind us! So they didn’t show us!” Then the stars came in and took their seats.

As the movie started, everyone cheered for the different production companies that took part in the production of the film. It was a very cinema savvy crowd! The film we got to see was “We Need to Talk About Kevin“. It.was.AMAZING! I absolutely loved it! I won’t say anything about it because it will give it away and I have faith that it will make it into theaters! I was very impressed and after the film I hurried out to try and take pictures of the stars because they really are just amazingly talented!

After we got some pictures we headed back to school. I had to take my heels off for a little while though because I had a blister and it started to bleed and get on my shoes! Note to self: do not wear heels for 6 hours (one of which being straight walking!) We finally got back to school and even though I was so tired I didn’t want to go to bed because I was so happy but I had my first day of volunteering with amfAR the next day so I had to and I slept wonderfully!