Travel on the Atlantic Coast from the Chesapeake Bay to La Vendée in France!
- La Vendée on Bastille Day
- Did you know? The Chesapeake Bay Crater
- The Comité Tricolore at work!
- Our Cultural Corner
- Bastille Day: A Great Venue for Sponsoring
- Les Expressions Françaises: “Tirer des plans sur la comète ! »
La Vendée on Bastille Day.
Save the Date for the Comité Tricolore’s biggest event of the year!
Bastille Day 2022 will introduce you to a beautiful and culturally rich area of France with a strong culinary tradition!
La Vendée and the Chesapeake Bay have in common the charm of their coastline, sense of wilderness and a way of life based on the bounties of the sea.
La Vendée is a land of oyster fishermen with a culinary tradition of seafood including mussels, clams, fromentine oysters, and crabs.
We have planned an exclusive seated dinner.
Tickets will be available mid-May.
Enjoy a delicious selection of dishes curated by the best local chefs, participate in our silent auction filled with wonderful items, and sip a glass of wine while listening to some fantastic live music.
Bastille Day is the annual fundraiser for the Comité Tricolore.
All proceeds from the evening will help sustain its charitable mission through the year.
Do not miss the chance to join the sponsors who participated in our event last year. For sponsoring opportunities, check out our article below on "Bastille Day: A Great Venue for Sponsoring".
The Chesapeake Bay Crater
One of the largest meteor impact craters on Earth is….here
About ten years ago a major study was published summarizing the work done by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program and the U.S. Geological Survey proving the fact that the Chesapeake Bay was formed by the impact of a meteroid that fell from the sky some 3 million years ago!
The impact left a crater of close to 55 miles in diameter, one of the largest on earth, and created a tsunami that totally transformed the landscape of our area, the course of our rivers, and our flora and fauna.
If you want to know more Wikipedia has a list of external links to the scientific data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The Comité Tricolore at work!
The Comité Tricolore met this month in person for the first time in two years and welcomed two new members:
Opera Lafayette, an important fixture of the Washington DC music scene presenting many unknown and often newly rediscovered French Operas.
And the National Capital Club de Pétanque that meets every Wednesday and Saturday at 1:30 PM at Virginia Highlands Park are in Arlington, Virginia.
Cultural Corner
Our members are an active part of the Washington, DC cultural scene!
May 17th- Malgré-Nous (Against our Will) movie at the French Embassy.
June 2nd and 3rd -Opera Lafayette Silvain at the Kennedy Center.
May 17th: the Alsace Washington DC Association is organizing a special evening on the topic of the Malgré-Nous (Against our Will), those Alsatians and Moselans who were enrolled into the German Army against their will during World War II.
Benjamin Steinmann, a young Alsatian film director who was moved by the stories told by his grandmother about this tragic period in the history of Alsace, decided to make a documentary movie about this topic and he will present it himself at the Maison Française of the French Embassy on Tuesday, May 17th.
To register click here.
We are pleased to announce that the Opera Lafayette has joined the Comité Tricolore.
June 2nd and 3rd – Opera Lafayette presents Gretry’s Silvain, a 1770 work set in the New World. Silvain was both a favorite opera of Marie-Antoinette in France and the first opera performed in New Orleans in 1796. Surprisingly, the opera’s story of family conflict and reconciliation also upheld the rights of peasants to use land owned by the nobles and still has resonance today.
Jean-François Marmontel, Libretist
Ryan Brown, Conductor
In French with dialogue in English, and with English supertitles
To get tickets to this Opera Lafayette premiere at the Terrace Theater of the Kennedy Center click on this link
Click here for more information regarding this performance,
and here for the next Opera Lafayette productions.
Bastille Day: A Great Venue for Sponsoring
Do not miss the opportunity to join the sponsors who participated in our event last year !
Contact Steve Schieber at steveschieber@gmail.com
Les Expressions Françaises:
“Tirer des plans sur la comète!»
Most French expressions websites link its origin to the apparition of a bright comet in 1882.
Rocketstem.org considers it “one of the brightest and most spectacular comets of the entire 2nd Millennium,…it was first sighted, not by astronomers, but by casual observers of the sky, including sailors aboard ships, during the first week of September 1882”.
The ephemeral and yet striking experience reminds us of the unrealistic plans we make, extraordinary yet as fleeting as the sight of a comet.
It can be loosely translated as ’pie in the sky’, or ’chasing rainbows’.
