In the waning days of the Roman Republic, before the rise of the Empire and the Caesars, politicians often attempted to appeal to the general population by the free public provision of bread, grain and other foodstuffs, as well as the increasingly-regular provision of entertainment, such as gladiator shows, in the capital at Rome and other major cities.
Taking a page from my own lengthy and expensive education, I figured that if provision of bread and circuses was effective two thousand years ago to pacify a generally illiterate population who were energetic and often teetered on the edge of rebellion, why reinvent the wheel? I thought it time to embark on our 4-day weekend plan, while I’m in charge of our girls during Christy’s scrapbooking retreat, as a full exposition of bread and circuses time.
We started Thursday morning with a trip to the recently expanded Wiesman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, which is showing, among other things, the installation Sympathies, which appears to my untrained-in-modern-art eye to be a large pile of metal shavings (as well as metal shavings nailed to the wall) with the phrase “Caution: Metal has sharp edges.” There are no photos of Lillian, as I spent most of our time at this installation peeling her back from jumping into said pile.
After this, it was bread time, a trip to Smashburger, which might be Ella’s favorite restaurant. Smashburger is a fairly new chain in town, so when a very tall guy came in for the first time and asked Ella, before ordering, “Is Smashburger a good place to eat?” Ella was able to come back with “Smashburger is good to eat because Smashburger is great, and Smashburger starts with a big red S.” This seemed to convince this visitor, who ordered. Looks like she may have a future in marketing.
Today was the actual circus. Perhaps timed with Minnesota Education Association Weekend, a random school holiday that exists only in Minnesota, the Zurhah Shrine Circus was in town. I have a bit of a moral challenge with circuses, but the girls seemed to be at a good age to go (defined as the fact that they like large animals and beautiful dresses and gymnastics and further defined by the fact that Lillian is still under 2, and thus is free, and tickets are buy-one-get-one free, so Ella went free with me. $21 to the circus and $15 to Ticketmaster/Target Center later, we were on our way.)
We arrived early for the ability to go onto the floor and see the animals up close. Ella and Lillian really liked the elephants – there were 4 female and 1 male elephants who, when not being pressed into carrying people on top of themselves, were really quite personable to small girls. The performers also mingled about and were genuinely quite nice to our girls.
We took our seats and sang the national anthem, but then the lights went out and Ella was a little nervous. We made it through the 7 tigers, an aerial gymnast and 5 elephants, but at the clown show in the dark with just a spotlight, Ella lost it. She took full advantage of Target Center’s acoustics to scream her lungs out, so we beat a hasty retreat for the exit. After she was calmed down a little, we went back to watch from the balcony, but at the first loud music, Ella was done. We headed back to the car just as intermission started, which only seems fair, given the buy-one-get-one free tickets.
We are now back home for lunch before heading to St. Paul to the Science Museum. I have made stir fry for the girls for lunch and they are hand-feeding me some of their pita chips, so I think they’re catching onto the whole bread and circuses thing. In fact, now that we’re about 33% into this plan, I’m thinking this bread and circus thing could handle for some of these 99 percenters. Maybe I’ll head back downtown with a bag of mini donuts and some glow wands and see if we can smooth this whole thing over. I’m predicting success.
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