Impossible Conversation

The French version of the magazine Vanity Fair has a feature each month called "Conversation Impossible" which consists of a short story that imagines an impossible conversation that -- obviously, since it's Vanity Fair -- has connections to pop culture and current events. For example, a discussion between Steve Jobs and the French author of La Théorie de l'Information Aurélien Bellanger where Jobs isn't really dead he's actually working for Samsung to try to give them a chance, or a meeting up of the ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan (who claims to have explained the secret of love) with the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. The editor of Vanity Fair Michel Denisot is apparently a big fan of the GrenobleWMD and asked me to do one of these stories. The only thing is that he wouldn't pay me and it wouldn't show up in the magazine. Also, I wasn't allowed to pick the topic. It seemed like a fair deal to me...

The topic? At first they thought it would be a riot to have Tammy Wynette involved as the impossible party as a joke. When they found out that she actually really was dead, however, the joke no longer made sense and there wasn't much that they thought I could do with her. The next plan was a random encounter on a commercial flight between Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Charles Lindbergh. Something like they were both brought back to life somehow and got to experience how flying had become so normal and could discuss their roles in its humble beginnings. Two problems: (1) putting them through modern airport security would probably make them too depressed and they would in turn think that flying had actually become worse since their time; and (2) part of the schtick of the whole impossible conversation thing is that it should be two people that would never meet. However, the two had actually met and -- according to Wikipedia -- "researchers have implied that during his stay in the United States, Saint-Exupéry became intimate with Anne Morrow Lindbergh", Charles Lindbergh's wife. I probably could have actually done something interesting with that, but Lindbergh's a pretty dry and uninspiring subject, and Bill Bryson recently wrote pretty much all you'd ever care to read about him in his most recent book.

So, finally, the agreed-upon topic was (shamefully) decided to be Neo from The Matrix meets Jesus of Nazareth at a Miami Beach resort. The premise is that Neo is widely seen as the Christ-figure in the Matrix world and so they'd have some things to discuss related to how they were both born to save their respective worlds, they were both betrayed by someone from their inner circle, both were killed and then came back from the dead, etc. The meeting in Miami Beach part is because French people really like Miami for some reason.

I told Michel that I could make it happen. Just give me a little time to research who this Nazareth character is...