Pi Day 2025

2025-03-14T20:39:25Z

There's a small meat market not too far away called Roxie's where I shop every month or so. It's primarily a butcher shop with a side of deli, seafood store, and green grocer thrown in in about that order.. Least, they are an "other food stuff" shop, carrying a small selection of oddball products, many of them from local companies

Shopping there is always an adventure. First, because the butchers are all armed with black grease pencils and anything selected from the meat case is likely to be snatched out of your cart and marked down before you get to the cashier.

(there's supposed to be a photo of the pie here, but I can't figure out how to do that on Dreamwidth)

If this sounds like a sales gimmick -- they must inflate the prices if they're going too mark everything down, right? Wrong -- it isn't. The prices there are already significantly cheaper than the large chain supermarket across the street.

The other thing that makes shopping there an adventure is that a small but significant portion of their offerings are remarkably inexpensive but also very specific. If they were electronics, I would say they had fallen off the back of a truck. I'm not saying that here. But you can frequently find Oui brand yogurt, which sells in the supermarket for about three bucks each, at two for a dollar. But it's only one flavor of Oui, and it's never anything mainstream like Blueberry or Lemon. It's always something like Cappucino Crunch or the non-dairy coconut-based yogurt. Needless to say, when you see something you like, you grab it. Also needless to say, given how unusual some of the offerings are, you may not know you like something until you get it home and try it.

Several years ago, I saw they had these meat pies for super cheap. I didn't know anything about them, but they were made in Massachusetts and seemed like an easy supper for some busy people. I took it home and stuck it in the freezer. We ate it a month or two later and it was fabulous. It was a variation on a traditional Canadian Tourtierre, spiced just right and not greasy in the least.
The next time I was at Roxie's I bought more. Except this seemed like something they just stocked normally. And it was... until it wasn't.

I tracked down the company (Landry's) who has a charming website which includes a map of stores which sell their products. None of them are near me. So for a couple of years, every time I went into Roxie's I would poke around and see if they had come back, and then ask one of the staff if they were going to be getting them again... it's been about 3 years. They're not coming back. And every once in a while I look at the map and think "Am I really going to drive more than an hour round-trip for a meat pie?" and every other day, the answer is "no". But today is Pi Day, so after a couple of calls to make sure the market had them in stock, Mina and I drove down to Bridgewater and bought every one that they had (which sounds epic but it was only 3). Tonight we will hail the conquering heroes who braved the wilds of Bridgewater and celebrate Pi Day with a big slice of meat pie.

And tomorrow I'll have a slice of the leftover cold for lunch. Because it's good that way too.

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"Triumph of Love" thoughts

2025-03-11T01:25:07Z

We went to see a dress rehearsal of Triumph of Love at the Huntington. I liked most everything about it except the play itself...not even, because I thought the translation (it was originally in French) was lovely. I think there is a core element of the plot -- and one particular scene which is meant to be romantic -- that made me really uncomfortable.

Includes spoilers for a play written 300 years ago
Triumph of Love was written in 1732 by Pierre de Marivaux. It's a 3-act comedy that is a descendent of commedia (that's not speculation; there's a Harlequin character in the play) and was appropriately first performed by the Théâtre Italien in Paris. Before the dress rehearsal started, the play's director, Loretta Grieco (who is also the Artistic Director of the Huntington) came and told us a little about her experience with the play when she was fresh out of grad school and how much affection she had for it. She also mentioned that when she was appointed Artistic Director,

The premise of the somewhat absurd plot involves the beautiful princess Leonide whose uncle (now dead) usurped the throne from the rightful king. After her uncle died, the crown passed to her father and eventually her, but she is determined to abdicate in favor of Agis, the rightful heir who has been raised in anonymity to protect him. Agis' guardian is a scholar/philosopher (Hermocrates) who espouses a rather dim view of love. He, his sister (Hesione), and their two servants (Harlequin and Dimas, the gardener) live in solitude on a country estate, rarely interacting with the outside world. Leonide and her maid arrive disguised as young men. Hermocrates wants them to leave, but Leonide needs a few days to hang about and make Agis fall in love with her. In order to do this she maintains her disguise as the young gentleman Phocion to seduce the sister, reveals herself to be a young woman (but not the one she actually is) to Hemocrates, and (eventually) a different woman to Agis. She bribes Hermocrates' two servants to help her out. With their assistance and that of her maid, she fools everyone and gets everyone to fall iin love with her up until the end when all three of them realize that they are in love with the same person. She convinces Agis that she did this all for the love of him and the desire to restore him to his throne and they go off together.

The production is very good. I have no idea what the original Freench is like, but the translation was clever and lyrical. The single set is evocative, has some nice magic tricks, and is lit beautifully. The lighting deserves mention on its own; it transforms the single set (a garden) throughout the day, which adds visual interest and creates this hyper-realness which supports the emotionalverqaciy of the actors -- who are all great. Seriously. No exceptions.

In the commedia we often stress "BE the joke, don't TELL the joke" and these people had that down. They were earnest, they were real people doing ridiculous things because they were in love. And, with each of the three, Leontyne really has to work to break down their defenses. And that is my biggest problem with the show. Hermocrates and Hesione are the vecchi and we're used to seeing the vecchi get their comeuppance. The problem here is that while Pantalone is unctuous and greedy and the Dottore is bombastic, pompous, and obtuse, in Triumph of Loveneither the Scholar nor the Spinster are villains. Yeah, they are the obstacles to Leontyne seducing Agis. Yes, they both teach a philosophy that says people are better off without love. Yes, they have been telling Agis since he was born that the Princess Leontyne wants him dead to secure her place on the throne... but all of that is pretty reasonable behavior, and it's pretty much the fact that Leontyne enters first and does her exposition (explains her side of things) that makes the audience side with her.

By seducing Hermocrates and Thesione, Leontyne doesn't just trick them, she hurts them badly and with no obvious remedy. If this were an i Sebastiani scenario, the vecchi wouldn't be siblings and at the end of the play – their passions now awakened – they would go off together as an 'appropriate' pairing. But with no likely objects for their affections, their forced to retreat back into the world they had created before Leontyne arrived... a world that she has just destroyed.

At the end of the play, I felt real pity for the 'villains' and pretty much thought the 'hero' was a narcissistic psychopath.

Worse, when Agis says he doesn't know why he should trust her and that she has been toying with the affection of everyone here, she pretty much uses the same defense Richard III does with Lady Anne when he woos her over the corpse of her husband (whom he has killed). "This is your fault. If I wasn't so in love with you, none of this would have happened!" The actual language used is so full of red flags that it's almost hard to read the text...:

AGIS: Don't touch me! Let me go!
LEONIDE: I will not let you go, I will never let you go. If you refuse to listen to me you are the most ungrateful of men
AGIS: Me? Whom you deceived? Ungrateful?
LEONIDE: But I did it for you, it was for you that I deceived everyone. I had to. Every fals word I have spoken is proof of my love. My heart's desire is honest. My love is true. You're wrong to insult me. And all the love you have for me – you can't see that now, but you do love me. And you will respect me. You will even ask my forgiveness. I know I will get through to you! [...] I did everything and anything I could to mislead them, to delude them, to seduce them. Because making them love me was the only way I could get to you, and you were the only object of everything I have done here. I was inspired at every turn by your eyes, your hands...your mouth...

Creepy right? That's the language of a villain, certainly by modern standards. My mid 18th-century theatre is weak compared with my knowledge of the eras before and after, but I either I'm missing something or Marivaux's underlying point was to side with the philsopher and prove that love just leads humans to do some really screwed up things.

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Pi Day 2025

"Triumph of Love" thoughts