It's Friday. On Fridays he says he gives everyone a score of seven as code for zero, so we can go home at the end of the week and tell our parents we got a seven. Even though we really got a zero.
He gives lots of people sevens.
This morning we give ourselves the morning off training. Instead we climb the Eiffel Tower and look over at where we live, Montmarte. Just like in Moulin Rouge
Quotes from today:
“You are funny and we love you a little bit, but you are not clown. You have to listen to the flop. You listen to the flop: you start to be a beautiful human who is being bad. If you keep being funny you are a comedian. Only the clown listens to the flop.”
“Between a horrible character and a clown the distance is not so far. The difference is a beautiful pleasure.”
“I teach with what character you can be happy all your life…the poetry of one person when the person has to discover his clown; that is what I teach.”
The two exercises today:
Come out and start the show “Alright, yes, we are about to start, ok, bon, no problem, the show is about to start.” A kind of continual beginning, when nothing actually starts but we believe you and you are happy to be with the audience.
You have only seen this kind of dancing once on television and there was no sound and now you are a child coming out to show your family, your mum and dad and cousins how well you can do this dance. 
possibly the best thing about the Eiffel Tour is the sign on the toilet door
As well as the excercises today, Phillipe has a special way to demonstrate the kind of pleasure he wants to see. The clown is asked to choose someone who (in another life perhaps) they are attracted to (sometimes several people). The attractive people are sent behind the curtain to wait for when the clown flops and then the clown is sent back to be kissed by the attractive people. There is a lot of squealing and hilarity and clowns invariably come out bright, breathless, sparkling, delightful. We, the audience, love them. Then they continue to attempt the exercise.
Today was my most vulnerable day.
Naming someone I find attractive in front of forty people is on the edge of palpitating humiliation. The audience is cute and encouraging and I have seen how lovely it is to watch someone else in this position, so I do go for it, but it’s gut twistingly harder than I imagined.
It’s a moment of physically understanding a theory that I already knew: that the clown is an optimist, so the clown knows she doesn’t have much of a chance but she thinks, today she is lucky, today she might get the thing she wants. The clown isn’t held back by humiliation into hiding her wishes. It’s both aweful and good to be put here.
Then in the dance exercise I have a moment (probably less than 30 seconds) when I am looking and looking for eye contact from the audience, but no-one is looking at me. It’s that moment and the memory of that moment that make me cry for a second with Christy in the café afterwards. To suddenly, sinkingly think that whatever I am doing is so horrible to look at that everyone has turned away, to have no idea how to get people’s attention and to want it so much: it’s devastating.
But still, I trust the process. I’m completely prepared to put myself in his hands and to keep turning up. Three people say nice things to me afterwards and a whole cavalcade of us go out for dinner together, under the wing of the Quebecer who translates to English for us and then the Argentine translates to Portuguese for the Brazilians.
Christy makes a serviette rose for our friendly waiter
We dance up the escalators and fill up the streets and the boys do their slapstick moves and I feel like a crew of teenagers; boisterous and absurd and taking up too much space.
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