Serge Lutens - Fleurs De Citronnier

You don't need to speak a word of French to understand Histoire de Melody Nelson -- one needs only to look at the front cover (with its nearly pornographic portrait of a half-naked nymphet clutching a rag doll) or hear the lechery virtually dripping from Serge Gainsbourg 's sleazily seductive voice to realize that this is the record your mother always warned you about, a masterpiece of perversion and corruption. A concept record exploring the story of -- and Gainsbourg's lust for -- the titular teen...

January 24, 2001: Picture Eloise in la-la land and you have an approximation of 10-year-old Fleur, the heroine of Diane Leslie's entertaining debut novel Fleur de Leigh's Life Of Crime, a poor little rich girl saga served with twists of poignancy and humor. Fleur, you see, is a product of 1950s Hollywood, the offspring of wealthy but always climbing show biz parents. A former studio mogul now a producer of television game shows, her father, Maurice, (never call him Morrie) is obsessed...

Fleur de Leigh in Exile finds fifteen-year-old Fleur in diminished circumstances. She transferred mid-semester to Tucson's Rancho Cambridge West — the cheapest boarding school in all the United States — where frail students convalesce in the arid clime and dine on the mess hall's "adobe melt." "Think of yourself as a conquistador," her B-movie actress mother urges, but Fleur's eyes are widened to the evils of prejudice and the burdens of combating it.