The 'Big Yawn of the Week'

Of all the people in the photo, only Patrick the waiter
is a club member.

News About the 'Café Metropole Club'

Paris:- Saturday, 3. June 2000:- Judging from the emails I have received concerning last week's proposal by Jay Barrios to simply call all club members simply 'Members,' I second the motion because the general comment would have been 'no comment' if anybody had bothered to write.

By this, I guess many members were getting very high and wild with dreams of ever more elaborate forms of memberships and outlandish titles, and simply being 'members' has gotten you all in a snit.

Being in a snit is a personal affair, but I don't think being in one is any reason to boycott a club meeting - if this is what happened last Thursday.

For me, it was hard to tell if there was a boycott going on - or by some freak of nature, no Café Metropole Club members happened to be in town.

A belated email did arrive, from a member who was in Paris on Thursday. In it he wrote that he was so confused - is the club's meeting day Thursday or Friday? - it is Thursday!

Actually, the club member didn't know the day of the week he was in town was Thursday; he said, "It didn't feel like Thursday, it felt like Ascension."

I will accept this. It did feel like Ascension on Thursday. All the department stores were open, but a lot of other things were closed. After the loyal member's gaff, he felt so bad about it that he spent the whole weekend reading all of Metropole's past issues.

While welcome, I wouldn't suggest doing this because it would be like too much of a 'good thing' - like an all-day lolly-pop. It looks great when you start out but after several hours of it, all you want to do is hope the unlicked part falls off the stick. Any sort of accident causing this will do.

As club secretary I don't want present and future members to worry that your club in Paris is going down the chute. These Ascension Day absence-of-members meetings happen - just as there were meetings in January and March without any members being present - to stir things up with far-fetched 'Things of the Week.'

This week, for this 'Club News' I am facing an empty pot full of ideas too, so without further blah-blah, here is the regular 'boiler-plate' stuff and nonsense:

The Café Metropole Club, is a club for the weekly online Metropole Paris magazine's readers who happen to be in Paris on a Thursday and are in the vicinity of the club's café meeting place at the right time of day.

Readers of the online magazine who have not yet attended a club meeting, can become 'members of the club by taking the trouble to induct themselves into it in the privacy of their own homes.

After readers - with or without being 'members' - have managed to arrive in Paris and arrive at the club at the right time of day on the right day of the week, they can sign the unofficial members' booklet. Generally, this has no effect on your universal rights as human beings.

The club has a long and illustrious history and a great number of 'real' members after 34 whole meetings. As of recently, the club has dispensed with overburdened complicated procedures and overly-bombastic titles. There is no 'club song' for you to learn, for example.

Simplification, I feel, should be the club's goal. Take its 'dress-code' for example. The club's unwritten and unofficial rules state quite clearly that the club has none.

Nevertheless, and despite dozens of photos of members at club meetings, some prospective members have wondered about the informality of the club's café waiters. Let me assure all who are reading this that the café La Corona's waiters are correctly turned out and do not wear jeans while on duty.

Members of course are not waiters - while they are attending club meetings - so it is certainly not necessary to wear formal white jackets with black trousers and bow-ties. In fact, I cannot unrecommend doing this strongly enough!

Club meetings are complicated enough with their 'Things of the Week' without members being called away to serve other tables.

In the name of the Révolution, in the spirit of republicanism, and with respect towards constitutional monarchies, I now propose to dispense with all notions of excessive grandeur. Welcome to the club, members, even if your are wearing grease-stiff stand-alone jeans!

With last week's abolition of all highfalutin titles, medals, decorations and all the other baggage of whatnots, I suggested we also ban semi-official forms of address such as 'garçon,' 'sir,' 'madame,' 'comrade' and last-but-not-least, 'groupie.'

Nobody has objected, so this proposal is assumed to have everybody's agreement.

The club's secretary is often occupied with bullying and cajoling new members into putting their inscriptions into the members' booklet or making notes of a meeting in progress. Members therefore often simply introduce themselves to each other. There is no 'rule' against doing this.

At Café Metropole Club meetings all members are invited to propose their 'Thing-of-the-Week.' If all present actually hear one of these being uttered, they can propose their own - so we can have multiple choices.

Since the chance possibility of all members actually hearing a 'Thing-of-the-Week' all together at the same time is very remote, anyone who thinks they may have heardone - even if they said it themselves - should bring it to the secretary's attention, if they can get it for a split-second.