Photo Pest: FLASHBACK: Parisian Cemeteries (Thanksgiving 2005)

You could say I first fell in love with cemeteries at Père Lachaise on a Thanksgiving trip to Paris. Until then, I'd more often thought of them as the lame joke my mother made in El Paso when we passed Restlawn, one of the city's few non-desert landscapes, on the way home from the PX. "People are dying to get in there," would make me giggle, as if she'd said something naughty.

Like thousands of other baby boomer pilgrims I'd been weaned on classic rock, and Chiffon wanted to pay tribute to Jim Morrison. The Doors, my first LP purchase, definitely lit my fire.

An Italian fan left behind a freshly addressed post card to Jim. Twenty years later I can translate it for the first time thanks to Google. I've smoked a lot of joints but I've never changed teams. Well said. I feel that way about Joni Mitchell.

I came for the rocker and stayed for the utterly bewitching scene: more than a hundred acres of exquisite sculptures, fresh flowers, fallen leaves, ceramic decorations and stained glass, to say nothing of the friendly ghosts, eager to be resurrected, however briefly by their descendants, or curious visitors. Serenity enveloped me as I contemplated the finality of death and eternity in an otherworldly environment also imbued with French chic.

Although this tombstone did remind me a bit of Carrie's ending.

I first learned about the murder of six million Jews when we lived in Orleans. My father took me to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation in Paris which had opened only a year earlier, in 1962. Lampshades made from human skin were among the horrors exhibited. "Never Forget" has been imprinted on my brain since childhood. Nothing--not even adult visits to Dachau and Auschwitz--has had as powerful an effect on my psyche.

Some tombstones resonated more than others. A young fella, buried at the age of 27, the same year that David died--you tell me. I wept for a handsome stranger.

But the siren call of even dead celebrities cannot be denied. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas are buried side-by-side. A witty fan left behind a pair of reading glasses.

The modesty of Marcel Proust's tomb was surprising

. . . particularly in comparison to that of Oscar Wilde's.

If only I'd brought my lipstick!

Edith Piaf

Famous names appear in the columbarium, too.

A few days later, I also toured Montparnasse cemetery late one afternoon. Smaller, with fewer expatriate deaths, but no less interesting.

Serge Gainsbourg

Snow flurries reflected my camera's flash over the final resting place of the father of existentialism and the mother of feminism.

But the grave that provided the strongest frisson was that of an American actress with a pixie cut plucked from teenage obscurity in Iowa by Otto Preminger to play Joan of Arc in a Hollywood adaptation of a George Bernard Shaw play. After Jean-Luc Godard cast her in Breathless, the iconic French New Wave film, she married Romain Gary and adopted France as her home.

Persecution by the FBI for her support of the Black Panthers likely contributed to her tragic death at age 40. Read up kids, it's a fascinating story, or watch Kristen Stewart credibly impersonate her--at least physically-- in Seberg.