That Time Someone Called Me Brigitte Bardot By Shannon O’Connor

 I’ve been thinking about Brigitte Bardot since she died, and a memory popped in my mind. 

When I went to Russia, when I was sixteen, in a hotel room on a school trip, Brigitte Bardot appeared to me.

We had just arrived, and I was sitting in the room, and we thought we locked the door, but we didn’t realize we had to lock it from the inside and the outside. A guy walked in, and looked at me and pointed and said “Brigitte Bardot!”

We shooed him out of the room. I didn’t know what Brigitte Bardot looked like, and those were the days when nobody had cell phones, or even the Internet, so we couldn’t pull up a picture of her or a bio or anything.

The floor my friend and I were on in the hotel was the one where the prostitutes worked. We saw them hanging out in the hall with their puffy hair and their desperate faces, laughing at us when we walked by. I called the it the whore floor, and it wasn’t funny because horrible things could have happened to us, but nothing did.

I eventually found out what Brigitte Bardot looked like; she looked nothing like me at sixteen. I had short puffy dark hair and freckles. 

I had no resemblance to the blonde bombshell Brigitte Bardot. I eventually watched movies of hers from the Sixties, Contempt, A Very Private Affair. She was the French Marilyn Munroe, only she never died and become immortal, she lived and became a fascist racist against Muslims and the LGBTQ community.

I came to the conclusion that the guy who broke into our hotel room that day called me Brigitte Bardot because that was the pickup line he used for the women, or prostitutes, to get them excited. All women would want to look like Brigitte Bardot, especially Russian prostitutes in a dreary Moscow hotel at the end of the reign of the Soviet Union, their country not knowing what the future would hold, hoping things would get better, just a breath away from the edge of a cliff.

I wasn’t a Russian prostitute, and his outburst just confused me until this realization just now. 

Now that Brigitte Bardot is dead, I can say that someone called me by her name once a long time ago in a Russian hotel, even thought he was probably a pervert, I never forgot this, because I don’t forget things that are quirky and weird, and will one day make a good story.

Shannon O'Connor holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College. She has been previously published in The Rye Whiskey Review, as well as Oddball Magazine, 365 Tomorrows, The Ginosko Literary Review, and others. She is the chairperson of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union. She lives in the Boston area, and has a large collection of berets.