There’s a place in France
Where the ladies wear no pants
And the men all stare
'Cause they don’t wear underwear
There’s a whole in the wall
Where the men can see it all
Apparently my community was too uptight to come right out and say that the ladies were naked.
(That reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me. She was working at a camp for kids with Attention Deficit Disorder. One day one of the kids started pitching a fit and had to be restrained, and he just went ballistic. He was kicking and screaming every cuss word he could think of, “Shit! Fuck! Damn!” and more; she told me he was quickly able to run through just about every one even she’d heard. Eventually he ran out of curses and just stopped sputtering, realizing he wasn’t going to be able to break free, then finally exploded with the most profane possible thing he could think of: “Naked lady! Naked lady! Naked lady!”)
From the land of Mars where the lady smokes cigars
Every puff she makes is enough to kill a snake
When the snake has died they put diamonds in his eyes
When the diamonds shine it is 1999
“Oh they don’t wear pants
on the other side of France
But they do wear grass
to cover up there ass.”
Except the kids I knew would spell out A-S-S…and then squeal and roll around on the floor at fliting so closely with depravity…
I must admit to being aware of only the version of the song which imparted homicidal capabilities on the women’s dances which would only cause the demise of Semitic peoples. Children in my community in rural Mississippi in the 60s weren’t likely to have ever met or seen a Jew, I know that I hadn’t, and I’m not sure that we really knew what we were singing.
There’s a place in France, where they do the hula dance
And the way they shake is enough to kill a snake
when the snake is dead, they put diamonds in his head
red, purple, blue, and orange & yellow too
when the diamonds break, it is 1988!
. . . Apparently, that when French ladies remove either their undergarments or all of their clothing and do the “hoochie-coochie dance,” it proves fatal to reptiles and/or Jews. The only way to arm yourself against them, it seems, is to chew your underwear.
This is too funny…growing up in Oregon in the 70s, the version I heard/sang was a mix of all of these, but I haven’t seen this particular version here yet:
There’s a place called France
Where the ladies wear no pants.
But the men don’t care,
'Cause they smoke their underwear.
I was never sure whose underwear was being smoked…
