In a small French village outside Camembert, Walter Lotringer, 43, has orchestrated a unique cultural event. The inaugural ‘Festival de Mardi Car’ – a three-day celebration of the ‘auto’ culminating in a parade during which local men roll their Fiats decorated with colourful paper through the village square – is set to commence on Saturday 3 October.
Though the event is expected to attract over 20,000 Fiat enthusiasts and bring the equivalent of $100,000 into the town, not everyone is happy. Lotringer’s festival has alarmed fishwives and parlour maids alike, who believe the celebrations planned by the dishwasher repairman will detract from the original ‘Mardi Gras’ scheduled for the following weekend.
“‘Mardi Car’ means ‘Car Tuesday’,” says the Truffe’s French correspondent, Adrian Fernand. “The fishwives are enraged because their own three-day festival of obesity, the Mardi Gras – literally, ‘Fat Tuesday’ – has been eclipsed by the funny car show.”
C éline de Sylvère, 82 kg, has created an anti-motor vehicle club that aims to raise public awareness of obesity at the expense of public awareness of cars. Along with a band of twelve compatriots, De Sylvère has spent several weeks putting up posters that display the Fiat branding with a strike through the letter 'I'. “Since the launch of the book French Women Don’t Get Fat, we obese French women have been swept under the rug," she explains. "Unlike fat Australiennes who celebrate their expanding waistlines everyday in the KFC, we as a minority have only three days per year – the Fat Tuesday carnival – over which to display our girths.”
Frederic Lotringer disagrees. “I am a happy-go-lucky guy, yes?” he said. When asked to comment directly on the demise of the Fat Tuesday celebrations, he laughed, spat on the ground, did a crab dance, then removed a crepe from his trousers and ate it.
Though Lotringer’s actions have outraged more than 0.02% of the population, the French government have failed to act on the issue, Nicolas Sarkozy remarking briefly at a press conference, “One has only to look at my own woman to see that French women do not get fat. Fat French women simply do not exist; like impotence and Medusa, they are a myth. If you want to find a French-speaking person of expanded arse size, you may try Qu ébec.”
The heavily Francophilic blogosphere has exploded over the topic, with such luminaries as memoirist and dead feminist, Simone de Beauvoir posting regularly on their Twitter sites. “The problem lies not in whether a woman is fat," de Beauvoir's most recent post began. "But only whether she presents as an object of decoratio [sic].”
Mardi Car celebrations continue unhindered and plans for Fat Tuesday have presently been put on hold. Amidst the doom and gloom, however, there is hope: Damien Eames, Marketing and Communications officer for Sydney’s New Mardi Gras said the festival would be happy to accommodate an obese French women’s float in the 2010 parade. De Sylvère remains skeptical, "So this man would like a float for beauties of Rubenesque proportions. So he will have to pay for this pleasure; we are of little means and dependent upon our husbands who are but humble dishwasher repairmen and sommeliers. Sigh. Hiccup. Sigh."
Get the ladies to Sydney: click here to donate to the Truffe’s ‘Accesse internationale d’obese’ fund.
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