21 Dec Zoom Tours in 2020 and 2021
At the end of this very real annus terribilis, I want to say a few words to you, our loyal readers and attendees. Above all, thanks! Thanks for keeping Shady Ladies Tours alive by reading our blog, attending our Zoom tours, watching our YouTube videos, contributing to our fundraisers—in short, for being a fabulously loyal community. When the pandemic hit the US, in March, it seemed likely to kill the company completely. Who would have thought that 9 months later, as the pandemic continued to rage, we would be putting on our 18th Zoom tour, with audiences regularly over 100, and have gathered over 28,000 views for our videos? It’s been a hard year, but ours is a tiny, flourishing corner. And we have a lot more coming after the holidays! Want to find out more?
To start with, we have many more Zoom tours coming. I will soon post another tour of the Metropolitan Museum—one I haven’t done on Zoom and indeed only did a few times at the museum. But above all, we will continue to mine the very rich vein of women’s history in Paris, and my collaboration with my unbelievably Parisian colleague Edith de Belleville.
There will be tours on all of our company’s trademark themes: the Shady Ladies, Nasty Women, Dressed to Kill, and Scandals and Secrets. First, on Saturday January 9, there is a fashion tour: Fashion and Passion at the Sun King’s Versailles, a tour on which you will learn how important fashion was in Louis XIV’s program of aggrandizing France, and how much of France’s fabled fashion industry was founded by Louis XIV as well. Next, on Saturday January 16, we have a Shady Ladies tour, on the Women of the Moulin Rouge, the world’s most iconic nightclub, on whose stage women entertainers have created the sexy image for which Paris is known worldwide. Third, on Saturday January 30, we have a Nasty Women tour, on Joan of Arc, the woman who (at least arguably) invented France—and several other powerful women in the history of her period. And finally, on Valentine’s Day, Sunday February 14, we are offering a tour about love in that most iconic of Paris neighborhoods, the Left Bank—a tour with an amazing cast of characters including philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, artist Salvador Dalì, jazz musician Miles Davis, and the sultriest of Paris chanteuses, the “Existentalist muse” (and the subject of the Beatles song Michelle ma belle!) Juliette Gréco.
And there will be more in the later winter and spring! Here are some of the topics we are considering:
- Fashion and Passion at Marie Antoinette’s Court
- Fashion and Passion of the Belle Epoque
- Prousts’s Duchesses and their Paris
- American Women of Paris
- Women Impressionists
- Women of the Revolution
- Women Before Midnight in Paris
- Audrey Hepburn and her Paris
- The Loves of Brigitte Bardot
- Renoir’s Muse and Much More (Suzanne Valadon)
- Women of Versailles
- Rendez-vous at the Ritz
- Great Jewish Women of Paris
- The Muses of Paris and their Salons
Let me know what you think, or if you have more ideas for us! There will also be more videos, and who knows what? Accept my thanks for your support so far, and please keep watching!
Andrew L
