Recipe for an at-home Edith Piaf marathon: Start by pre-ordering the DVD of La Vie en Rose, the fantastical re-imagining of Edith Piaf's life on film, if only for the moody scenes of Paris in the early last century and the utterly astonishing performance by Marion Cotillard -- and not in that order. Cotillard plays (lives, breathes) Piaf from late teenhood to death in her '60s, and makes most Oscar winners look like they're phoning it in.

"Je Ne Regrette Rien" is a rousing, main-street-parade of a song, but it -- and Piaf's other iconic melodies -- tend to grab the spotlight and obscure the, well, obscure stuff. Get yourself any of the four volumes of her earliest recordings on the DRG label (starting with Edith Piaf, Vol. 1: 1936). This is barely-out-of-kneepants Edith, singing the soundtrack to a frightened nation at war.

At first, Piaf: Her Story, Her Songs sounds like a terrible idea: It's a documentary that revolves around the world's greatest contemporary Edith Piaf impersonator doing her eponymous one-woman show. But interwoven with singer Raquel Bitton's concert is footage of a lunch that brought together friends and family of the late songbird in a bistro near her grave to dish -- very candidly, and with lots of wine on hand -- their own memories of Edith. Utterly charming.