Guest Article

By Gwen Moore

The Strike: The Stiletto-Grève conundrum

The New Yorker that I am, I have little hesitation in taking the Paris Metro to get to work each day.  While some of my less cosmopolitan friends from places like Michigan, Texas and California shun all forms of public transportation as being, of all things, too pedestrian, I am glad to count myself as a member of the masses, particularly on such a reliable system as that enjoyed by Paris.  If Mike Bloomberg can take the Lex Ave line from 59^th Street to City Hall, then I will happily ride the Metro 1 line from the Hôtel de Ville to La Défense each morning.

But the strike is trying my patience.

Under normal circumstances, I go to great lengths to defend Parisians when my fellow Americans trot out those well-worn and long-ago-inaccurate stereotypes about body odor and the like.  But riding with an Ohioan friend the other day during strike traffic as we headed out for a little shopping, I found myself engaging in the ultimate act of willing suspension of disbelief, as I prayed that several of my neighbors on that particular Metro 9 line train to Havre-Caumartin were just coincidentally all that repulsive.  Forced by strike circumstances to be within three inches of the shoulders of five different strangers, I silently wondered at what point the World Health Organization would declare an epidemic of dandruff.  How much worse does it have to get?  If I wanted to be subjected to this degree of inadequate hygiene, I could be back home sharing a train car with Mets fans on the Flushing No. 7 to Willets Point.  Yuck.

How much worse does it have to get?  If I wanted to be subjected to this degree of inadequate hygiene, I could be back home sharing a train car with Mets fans on the Flushing No. 7 to Willets Point.  Yuck.

It seems like this strike may be with us for a while, so perhaps it is time for those of us who are going to at least pretend to be civilized while riding the Metro during a strike to develop at least a modicum of decorum.  Can we agree, for example, on whether or not stilettos are allowed?  In the three-inches-shoulder-to-shoulder strike mob, I find myself in a terrible predicament: with my three-inch stilettos, I hover above the rest of the crowd, my feet towering above theirs and thereby avoiding being pulverized in the crush of footwear.  However, as unfair as this may be, I also occasionally and entirely inadvertently step on a foot here or there, as I am being pushed to and fro.  On the other hand, if I were in flats, some other woman packing stiletto heat would be inflicting that pain on my poor feet.  What to do?  This is the same conundrum wrestled with by owners of Hummers, those beastly smog-producing monsters that run over hatchbacks at will, but are also guaranteed never to suffer as much as a fender-bender on the road.  So can we all just agree—either no stilettos or all stilettos.  Either way is fine with me.

The worst part of riding the Metro during the strike is all of the touching.  As a New Yorker, I naturally don’t have the same sense of personal space as most other Americans.  That is to say, I can handle a crowd.  But the strike brings a totally new dimension to the miniscule amount of personal space French people normally require (or allow).  Getting onto the Metro last Thursday morning, as we crowded into our once-every-40-minutes Metro train, a grown man, taller and wider than I, placed his entire bodyweight on me.  His shoulder, back and butt were on the right side of my body.  I found myself leaning into the pole trying to support his weight and mine.  After two stops, I finally put all my strength into standing up straight and firmly placed my right elbow into the small of his back and gave him a long jab.  That did the trick nicely.