The Joan of Arc Puppet Show
FAMILY LEGEND has it that I was born in the back room of my parents’ tailor shop.
Of course, like most legends, it’s not really true. I was born in a hospital, but when my parents took me home, it was to the back room of a tailor shop, where we lived while they saved up enough money to put a down payment on a house. My earliest memories were of steam irons and cast-iron sewing machines, pins and pinking shears, waxy tailor’s chalk and puffy white shoulder pads.
By the time I was in sixth grade, in 1978, we lived in a nice brick house, but I still passed all my long summer days and my school year Saturdays at the shop. Like many immigrant family-run businesses, ours relied on the labor of all its family members to help squeak out its slim profit. I had the usual tasks of sweeping, making the morning bank deposit, and operating the cash register when mother was busy with other customers. The routines of the store were as ingrained in my DNA as the idiosyncratic brand of Turk-lish that my parents spoke, and for a long time I aspired to one day be a fashion designer and run a string of boutiques. With time, though, my universe tilted away from this vision of my future life into something very different.
It all started with Joan of Arc.
IT IS a cold Saturday in February and I am in the back room of the shop, hunched over a space heater and covered in a cozy blanket with a book in my hand, a biography of Joan of Arc. Monday afternoon I will be presenting an oral book report on it. I have not moved for hours. Even though I am confused by much of the book, I am completely engrossed by it.
Joan was really into this guy called the Dauphin, and he seemed to like her too, but in the end he turned into a real jerk. If I was reading correctly, Joan had visions of saints who told her that the Dauphin was destined to be the King of France. She believed this so much that she managed to meet the Dauphin when she was just an anonymous peasant and actually did help him to get crowned in the big church in Riems where all the
