Can't Miss It: Monday
BASTILLE DAY AT THE MARKET: Seattle's French restaurants are in Francophile overdrive tonight in celebration of French independence. Le Pichet (1933 First Ave.) starts its annual party at 6 p.m. and features Gypsy jazz until 11 p.m., when the d.j. takes over. Maximilien (81A Pike St.) has a special three-course dinner tonight for $35 and an accordion player. And Cafe Campagne (86 Pine St.) tops them all: a street fair is happening in Post Alley starting at 3 p.m. including wine and hors d'oeuvres. For those seeking more sustenance, they're offering an extravagant five-course dinner for around $80 per person.
Times and links available above; for dinners, reservations are in order.
BROKEN HOME: Literary sister to Augusten Burroughs, Susanna Sonnenberg's upbringing is a twisted mix of perversion and abuse. Sonnenberg's mother was a piece of work: she gave her daughter Penthouse at age 10, blow when she was 12, and at 14 seduced her boyfriend. By high school she was banging her English teacher and, in her new "memoir" Her Last Death, there's a chapter provocatively titles "Sex With Everyone." Literary snoops smelling James Frey tactics here are spurred on by her disclosure that some of the book is fictionalized, but for those who take joy in consuming the bounty of human misery, that shouldn't matter much.
7:30 p.m. // Elliott Bay Books, 101 S. Main // free!
PSYCHO KILLER: Turns out Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp" was really a violent drifter. Who knew? In Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin takes a turn to the dark side as a French serial killer who marries rich women and then kills them to support his family. It's sort of like The Riches, except it doesn't suck, and comes with an unhealthy dose of Chaplin's lefty, class conscious rage.
7 & 9:30 p.m. // NW Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave. // $4.25 general on Mondays
Photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr pool contributor EdgarDiazRocks.
