You’re thinking, “Gee, Pollstar.com, if Congress can eliminate all traces of France in their cafeteria by renaming french fries ‘freedom’ fries, and french toast ‘freedom’ toast, what are you guys going to do about all those pesky cities like Paris and Marseilles?”

Don’t think we haven’t given this a lot of thought. After all, we’re as quick to jump on the bandwagon as the next person, but changing the names of entire cities and countries in order to satisfy the current political climate is a bit more difficult than just scribbling something on a menu. We can’t just eliminate French cities from our database and still list the international tours for such artists as Peter Gabriel or Neil Young. At least, not until we find new names to replace those cities with, and therein lies the rub.

At first we thought it would be easy, and that we’d replace all the French cities with good old American city names like Lafayette and Des Moines. However, we quickly learned that this would only confuse concert fans browsing the schedules for Annie Lennox, Joe Jackson Band and Counting Crows because nobody would be able to tell the difference between Paris, France, and New Orleans, France. At least not on paper.

Then we considered searching for all the French cities in our database and replacing them with those Canadian cities that no one ever uses, like Epileptic Moose, Saskatchewan, and Diarrheic Beaver, Manitoba. In fact, this actually seemed to work. That is, until someone pointed out that listing Bjork as playing in Impotent Porcupine, Alberta, on July 16 and 17 didn’t quite catch the international flair that properly listed Parisian tour dates often inspire. In short, it was back to the old drawing board.

So, after much brainstorming we came up with a solution that should solve the current dilemma, and we have to admit, we felt like kicking ourselves in our derrières for not thinking of it sooner. We’ll just replace all those French cities with the names of famous Americans. Americans who signify what’s best in the good old USA. Therefore, until further notice routings such as Mark Knopfler playing in Toulouse, Marseille and Paris will be listed as having the artist appear in cities named Larry, Moe and Curly. And what about the other French cities? We’ll just plug in Shemp and Joe DeRita whenever necessary. Problem solved!

Of course, we still have to deal with other aspects of our operation where various references to France may seem inevitable, like those big sloppy kisses our employees give each other whenever they discover a new date for Mariah Carey or Ben Harper & Jack Johnson. Hmmm… This could take a little more brainstorming.