An Eyewitness To Gerard Depardieu's Plane Peeing Incident

I feel sad to be boarding this plane to Dublin after the most incredible tour of lovely Paris. I've seen all the key landmarks that one could expect to see—the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre. I drank wine at a sidewalk cafe while the sun set. I sat by the Seine and listened to the locals walk by and converse in that poetic language.

This is the country of Joan of Arc, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Edith Piaf, and…oh my God. Was that Gerard Depardieu? Is Cyrano de Bergerac sitting a couple of rows in front of me? Maybe if I lean into the aisle a little bit…yep…that's him. He's gained a little bit of weight, and he's definitely not the young, romantic lead that I remember from "Green Card," but that is definitely him. I need to take a picture for my Picasa slide show.

This is going to be amazing. "So that's the Eiffel Tower, that's Notre Dame, and not like it's a big deal, but that's Gerard Depardieu on my plane." A complete success of a trip if I do say so myself. So if I just angle my camera, maybe make a loud coughing noise, he'll turn around. Or maybe I should just get a profile shot, and I can Photoshop his nose to look like Cyrano de Bergerac. That flight attendant didn't have to be so rude about turning off my cell phone. It's an iPhone. It's on plane mode, and I'm just trying to take a picture of a French legend, a French landmark, if you will.

Now she's talking to Gerard herself! The woman that just gave me a false smile and told me to put my phone away is giving the celebrity Frenchman the same fake smile and disparaging him in some way. He seems upset, and he has every reason to be. That stewardess is obviously French. Doesn't she understand she is talking to one of her country's greatest assets? He was Cyrano. He was in "Green Card." He was in…um…there have to be more French movies. I feel like he has had at least a cameo in every French movie that I have ever seen. He must have played a Musketeer at some point.

He's a star and apparently really has to use the restroom. I had no idea they locked bathrooms on planes. It does seem a little strange. Sometimes you really have to go, and from the amount of alcohol my inebriated Cyrano has seemingly consumed, he probably really needs it.

I am baffled by this flight attendant. Hasn't she had one glass of wine too many and all of a sudden really had to go? Haven't we all been there at some point in our lives? Hasn't Monsieur Depardieu earned his right to use an AirFrance lavatory in a moment of drunken desperation? I do feel slightly bad for her. I mean, for all I know, she had been as star struck as me to see an icon of her country sitting on her plane. After all, isn't he like Jack Nicholson here? She must have been excited, and now she has to tell all her friends, "Mon Dieu! Zen I told eem that ze bathrooms were locked! It was tre horrible!"

"Je veux pisser!" Well, okay, now he's just making the plane his pisser. That's…unsettling. Does being a celebrity really grant you the right to urinate on a plane? I can understand the bravado of demanding to use the bathroom, but pissing on the plane? This will probably be my best travel story to tell when I get back home. If I could just get my phone to turn back on quicker…if I could just snap one photo of this to sell to some French tabloid, I could probably retire. But, yes, at this moment, I definitely feel worse for that poor flight attendant. "Zen he pissed on ze plane. Sacre bleu!" This will make an amazing workplace story for her though.

Are we really taxiing back to the terminal? I guess they have to clean the plane now, because urine is urine, even if it is Gerard Depardieu's urine. Maybe I can introduce myself to him while we wait for a non-urine soaked plane to whisk us away to Ireland.

"Pardonez-moi, Gerard. But I do believe that they should have let you just use the pisser. Perhaps I can buy you a cafe au lait to help sober you up, and you can pose for a couple of great vacation snapshots?