Fifty years ago today: The “percent”

It happened just 50 years ago today and it was just a French high school celebration which took place one hundred days before the end of the school year and what was the baccalaureate. “Perecent” was the phonetic writing for “Père 100” or “Father 100”.

On this occasion, my buddies students kind of dressed up and paraded through the streets of Cluses, my High School. We then boarded a bus and went to Thonon, on Geneva Lake's south shore, to enjoy a copious lunch with more wine than we could handle and most of us were all blasted by the end of the afternoon.

We also carried with us a symbolic casket meant to hold the corpse of “Father 100” that we threw into the lake and watched it float away in the sunset before returning to the dreary Cluses boarding school...