She says she is a little tired from her life at 100km / h, but happy. On her face, she keeps a smirk that easily betrays her personality. Caroline Le Flour is sparkling, full of bite, she clashes. His life, however, was not always easy. She could even have stopped much too early, when it was announced to her that she was suffering from breast cancer already well established between her heart and her lungs in April 2012. Victim of a violent burn-out two years older early on, the young woman could have slipped into depression when the crab came to pinch her. After blaming the blow, the patient she was preferred to laugh about it. To the point of making it a humorous show
cleverly called “the bald smile” often acclaimed in October, now devoted to awareness. “Pink October is a very positive event, which made and continues to shake things up. Today, cancer remains taboo but we are talking about it. We have to make it known ”.
Over the months, she has already given fifty performances but still struggles to seduce the programmers. “I am often invited by associations but rarely by theaters. I think that some are afraid of not filling their room, because the subject is scary, as if it is contagious. Laughter, however, allows many messages to be conveyed ”.
For her, laughter has even served as therapy. While she was hospitalized while waiting to know if she could continue to live, Caroline decided to “make fun of everything” and to tell her daily life in writing. “In the show, I talk about my colleagues who came to see me at the hospital and complained about their failed hairstyle. Or a friend who told me it was unfair that I was dying, as if I was already doomed. All that, I wrote it in my room to laugh, without knowing that it would become sketches one day ”.
Installed in Vannes (Morbihan) where she came to live with her new companion, Caroline Le Flour continues to work in Paris for part of the week. EDF, her employer, has agreed to adjust her schedule so that she can carry out her other professional activity simultaneously. Because in addition to being a comedian and a marketing executive at La Défense, the 40-year-old works as a psycho-somatotherapist in Vannes. In her practice, she tries to show her patients that an inner strength that is sometimes unsuspected can allow humans to hold out, even in the midst of a storm.
A well-established temperament that she perhaps developed in her youth when she worked in the alpine hunters before leaving the army. Or in all the hardships she has gone through throughout her life: first a burnout, then breast cancer, and finally the announcement of the impossibility for her to have children. “I sometimes sank but I got back up. Laughter allows you to escape but also to accept what happens to us. This is not a denial, ”says Caroline Le Flour.
“Initially, it was more of a private diary”
To heal her wounds, the neo-Breton woman devoted herself to writing, without thinking for a second of making a show of it. It was the meeting with Valérie Roumanoff, the sister of the comedian Anne Roumanoff, which encouraged her to make her writings a stripping one woman show. “At first, it was more of a diary so no one had read it. My sister was one of the first to find out. She found it very funny. It was she who found the title of The bald is smiling “.
In the rooms where she performs, Caroline Le Flour speaks to the sick, to the families of the sick but also to many people who have not crossed the road of this damned cancer. To everyone, she sends the same message. Be happy and hold on. And above all, talk about it around you.