ONCE THERE WAS A SHEPHERDESS
By Andrew Paul Grell
[I began writing this story the evening before; this morning while walking our dog, Cyrus King of Persia, I happened upon a pack of about a dozen lost French tourists seeking Third Avenue. They appropriately gave Cyrus, a jaunty Maltipoo, their seal of approval. I was able to tell them ‘c’est Avenue A, marche ouest, prochain Avenue Un, prochain Deux, prochain Trois. To their ‘thank you’s’ and ‘merci’s’ I was able to pump out an il n’est pas de quoi.]
It would have been more successful if it started in the second grade, when we little South Park-style deviants still had some ability to easily absorb new languages. All of us would probably have been welcomed into Ecole Normale or the Sorbonne. But still, we were granted an invaluable gift.
In 1968, the Department of Education of the City of New York rolled out an experimental program to teach French to fourth-graders. It was fun; vocabulary first before grammar. Every night for homework we would cut out pictures from newspapers or magazines for each new word and paste them into our marbleized-cover French picture dictionaries. We sang songs, dancing on bridges, plucking feathers, and my personal favorite, “Il était une bergère.” Nine-year-old Andy loved that little French girl with her sheep; I would dream about the cheese she made from their milk.
For all of that work, we had a platform for learning more French, but few of us pressed on. In Junior High, I picked Hebrew as my language to ensure a high Regent’s Exam score since I was already taking Bar Mitzvah lessons. Almost two decades later, the city began using High Schools in the evenings for adult education courses, $20 a pop. I took French and Magic. To this day, I can still perform the Professor’s Nightmare rope trick and I know how to use a thumb-tip and flash paper. But my French was only marginally advanced.
Then Minitel, a cute little dial-up computer terminal, like Lafayette made an appearance in New York, and ever since, I regretted every year that slipped by without me boning up on my French.
Charles De Gaulle never had a telephone in his office, but everyone else in France did. At some point in the 1970s it became prohibitive to keep printing new phone books. So everyone was offered “Le Minitel,” originally to look up phone numbers, later to provide seminal versions of what we experience today as the internet. It was financed by companies paying to sell and advertise on the little boxes, and also by dial-up fees for people to connect to chat and game services. Erotic chat and game services for a large part, with “animateurs” stoking the flames. It was the internet before the internet. In 1987, a Minitel chat service, CTL, quietly opened a New York office, handed out some terminals to media-connected people, and released Minitel emulation software for PCs along with a local dial-up access phone number. Eight people at a time could dial in, but from France, any number of users could connect, as long as they paid the tariff — think of 900 numbers in the United States. Limits never applied to me, of course; I had a collection of GODs (Global Out-dial) and could make it appear as if I were connecting from anywhere and I could connect on the premium levels and gain points people could use to avoid the tariffs. I was a fairly popular guy. But the catch was that I could barely speak any French at all by that time. Fortunately, everyone in France who took High School English can speak it almost perfectly. I made a friend whose handle was the title of a book I loved, “UBIK,” who turned out to be a science fiction translator who connected from time to time to verify idiomatic English. Another was the daughter of the inspiration for the Paratroop Commander, pivotal in the French Algerian war movie “Lost Command.”
Gradually I became almost effective in broken French, a dog-eared copy of Shorter’s next to the keyboard, and Minitel shorthand (A+ for A plus tard, GB for Gros Bisous, HOF, for Homme or Femme, etc.)
About that time, a flight from Newark to Charles De Gaulle, round trip, was about $225, including a meal. People (including me) would fly from one side to the other just for weekend parties. We put each other up in our homes. It was a social networking heaven. I had my fun and laughs, but I was never able to leverage my experience with this early social experiment to anything in the tech or dot.com upswings. My big contribution was teaching friends in France and Finland how to connect a Minitel terminal directly to the X.25 network and go anywhere they wanted, but that was just for fun. The farthest I got was connecting Minitels to a videotext service provider; somewhere there is a piece of paper showing that I have a one-half of one percent stake in that early dot.com company.
And here I am today, well-paid for my computer and math skills and tricks, but always thinking about what could have been, just about able to direct French tourists to the subway.
