A Soigneur!

Two years ago I was with a friend who, after reading about Lance Armstrong’s then latest assault on the Tour de France and the pivotal role played by his soigneur, decided he needed one of those too.

I helped him write a killer ad to find one–it was pretty funny–and in the end he chickened out from ever placing it, apparently fearing the types who might have applied. Combinations of Martha Stewart, Lolita, and Richard Simmons came to his mind…and depending toward which one of those the applicant leaned, the result could have been a bit more into the realm of the weird than this friend was willing to venture.

So what is this mythical soigneur, and how the heck is that pronounced anyway? A soigneur (“swen-YUR”) is French, of course, and means someone who gives care to something or someone else. Seems to have been adopted as an official term by the cycling crowd to mean someone who is a non-riding part of the team and who does everything to take care of the team’s needs, everything but the riding. In Lance’s case, I’m sure he had a whole one of these genies to himself.

That’s what my friend wanted–not a cycling go-to guy per se–but an all-purpose someone all to himself whose sole purpose was to take care of all the extraneous things in his life that he has to contend with every day just in order to show up–and before getting the first thing accomplished. In his case it included cooking and massages–and that’s where his ad got into trouble with the weird.

And that’s what I need too, but minus the cooking and massage aspects.

Having just seen the movie Marie-Antoinette, I was impressed by the number of soigneurs, although, being French and also women in this case, they would be “soigneuses” (swen-YUHZ”) that Marie Antoinette had at her disposal. Marie Antoinette was Austrian by birth and got traded off to the French to consolidate two kingdoms. Poor thing–she ended up having to pay for that with her head, but before all that, and although they didn’t help her one bit when she needed them most, she was at least very well cared for, before the be-heading, by flotillas of soigneuses.

About 25 of them showed up at her bedside every morning just to get her dressed. Now that was a bit of overkill, I’d say–would have driven me mad as well as right back to Austria, where one assumes, the Austrians were infinitely more sensible about such matters.

But maybe just one soigneur (or soigneuse) would work for me now. Let’s see…for starters, he (or she) would have to come up with a fail-safe method for keeping me away from the computer until I am showered, fully dressed, and ready to walk out the door–even if I’m not planning to walk out the door at all.

Then, I’d have him (or her) do all of the things I think must happen before I can begin to work–feed my cats, attend the litter detail, make my bed, do some laundry, figure out what I am going to wear and do what is necessary to get it ready–like ironing–although I can manage to put it on my body myself.

I need someone to check my e-mail and send replies, check the web sites I frequent and print out anything I need to know, call whomever it is that I need to call, other than friends, although sometimes even calling friends would come in handy too…make any appointments, travel reservations, order any necessary mail order stuff, write any letters of complaint–like to Delta’s so-called ‘Connection,’ more aptly named Dis-connection–ComAir–for consistently bad performance, and then run a few errands.

And here’s where my all-purpose genie would really pay off. As it is, all I have to do is leave on a mission to one place–say the grocery store–and immediately I am launched into a paroxysm of endless add-ons to my original one-stop list.

I find myself stopping off left and right at the usual denizens of my un-doing, just because I’m already out and in the neighborhood–Costco, Home Depot, Trader Joe’s (yes, I know–it’s another grocery store), Target, Petsmart, Office Depot, the local glorified produce stand. And then there are the usual add-ons that crop up to round out the stops for just one day at an even dozen–the post office, the bank, the car wash, the hardware store…and those are just the most-frequented. There are squadrons of other stops-to-be-made on the more occasional list–bookstores (three of them), Kinkos, the garden center, the drug store, the art supply store. Any place, really, is fair game.

Good grief–I seem to be on a one-woman mission to keep the local economy not only alive but prospering in grand style. Could this be considered a philanthropic effort? I digress.

With an errand schedule like this, how can I possibly have time to work? And that’s my point. I need a soigneur–or soigneuse! Or, maybe a house-husband…no, no–on second thought, way too many complications with that. I need the American version of the soigneur/soigneuse–I need what everyone does–a wife of the old-fashioned kind who does everything everyone in the house needs without being asked or complaining, a veritable 3-ring circus act of simultaneous tricks, never losing her cool or her balance, and always delivering on time and with a smile. I need June Cleaver.

And now, if only I could just find that friend from two years ago and get my hands on that stellar ad that we wrote, and maybe a whole lot more…it would be most interesting to see what would happen next.