Bardot is in Detroit for a film festival and in an interview on radio she says: "Every woman shares a nightmare, that she will wake up one day, on a stage in a theatre, with a packed audience, and she is naked. But there is another nightmare, even worse: that woman might live an entire life without knowing what it is like to be on that stage. I was the first on stage to be recorded and to be seen in a theatre. I was lucky to be born right on time."

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A Belgian producer heard that Bardot couldn't take a shower for three weeks in the summer of 1963, when Cannes had a break in its water mains. The itching was driving her crazy, said Bardot, and this gave the Belgian an idea for a movie called The Itch. He asked Bardot to be the star. Bardot told the Hollywood Reporter: "This fool from Brussels wanted to do a Warhol imitation where I would spend a whole movie pouting and swearing because my underpants were new and itchy, and he offered almost a million dollars for me to do it. That was all the plot. Me in itchy underwear. My agent was oooh la la, one million dollars, and I fired him. I saw the Belgian a year later in Cannes, and when nobody was looking I took a long pee on the backseat of his convertible. I was arrested but the Mayor hushed it up."

Bardot was not conscious of her build but understood that men would gawk because of her breezy attitude. There is something about the ratio of a woman's waist to her hips that simply ignites some deep part of a man's brain, she found out, and that ratio is 70 percent, where the waist is 70 percent of the width of the hips for perfect child-bearing. In a series of dramatic photos in a boring American suburb, Bardot demonstrates The 70 Percent Solution. 

Memory is  a map of limits, showing who you never were and now will never be. You have a lifetime to explore that empty map and leave behind the contours and experiences by which other people will remember you. "I've got to make an impression of something other than my ass," said Bardot, after her scene with Jean-Paul Belmondo in which she scandalously asked if he liked her bottom. "I am going to outlast my ass and I don't want that to be the first thing everyone remembers of me. I don't worry about a legacy or anything like that, but I don't want to be known for my butt. I thought about getting Eisenhower's face tattooed on my ass, but was afraid it would be seen as a political act." 

Driving across the country, Bardot ran into a tiny town whose opera house had burned down. It was erected by a small population of French immigrants. She ended up straying in Wilson for three weeks, and made a lasting impression on the townspeople who found her polite, conservative, and an accomplished cook, especially of apple pies.

"I wonder about loneliness and how different it is for a man and a woman. Does a lonely male destroy himself with anger that he gets no hug or kiss? Does a lonely female look for something to grow, a garden or a bookclub? Why does anyone think they will end up as anything but lonely? Isn't his the destiny of a life, to see its end, alone?"

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Brigitte's hands evoked wonder everywhere she went. Always graceful, swirling, traveling, Bardot's hands were the the most sensitive part of her body. She would wear gloves in summer. She didn't like to touch metal. She claimed her hands gave her an uncanny sense of balance: she never stumbled or fell, and when she shot for artists she would simply follow the whims of her limbs and fold herself up in her hands. "If some people are guilty of having groping hands in their eyes, I am the opposite: my fingers see for me and my hands tell me where to go, pointing me to whatever it is I wish to grab."