My friend Nissim invited me to dinner in the Eiffel Tower one Bastille Day in the mid-70s. Even though I’d been living in Paris for several years, I had never gone up the Tower. The line for the elevator was l-o-n-g, and for some reason which I can no longer even kuhnjure up, I didn’t want to wait, so I announced that I would take the stairs. Which I did, arriving slightly breathy and dewy. That was the only occasion on which I went up the Tower.

Which may or may not explain why I didn’t know that there was a post office on a higher level. Twenty-some years later, my friend Ward, on his first trip to Paris, speaking little French except Oui, discovered the post office and sent me a huge Art Nouveau card in an envelope franked with a superb Champs-Elysées postage stamp – and a Tour Eiffel postmark. So bravo!

Andrea’s Le Courk Eiffel wasn’t quite fini in time for the Festival, so she perched a wine bottle at the tippy-top, where Steven Leslie will put the observation deck next week. Speaking of observation, the tower came in for a lot of it, per the French Basketeer blogspot: Hundreds of photos were taken, many questions were posed, and more than a few people grabbed parasols from the bin, took a quick souvenir snap in front of the tower, then put the parasols back and left. I quickly tired of taking photos of people taking photos….

You can see a gallery of Steven Leslie’s sculptures at oneofacork.com – from Cork In The Road, a 6 ft urn made from 3,500 corks, to his original Eiffel Tower, 8 ft 9 in and currently living in style in Panama. Vive l’esprit de cork!

Photos courtesy of French Basketeer.

Alyson Kuhn, the editor of Felt & Wire, once interviewed a romantic young man who flew over to Paris to surprise his girlfriend at the top of the Eiffel Tower – and propose. They lived happily ever after.