Happy Pi Day!
Mr. D and I used to celebrate March 14th in high school; he even won a constrained writing prompt once, where each word in his essay contained the same number of letters as the digits of pi–3.14159… The only phrase he remembers from it now is “audibly delicious,” but how could we ever forget the holiday?
It was uniquely our own, a quirk of our nerdy math-and-science school; a day to eat pies and march onto the football team, where we would all assemble into the shape of the Greek letter.
Our high school math teacher visited us for dinner a few nights back, and although I never took his discrete math class, he taught kids about fractals and the Fibonacci sequence and all kinds of cool shit. I wonder if celebrating Pi Day was his idea.
Mr. B now works as a “freelance mathematician” who spends his extra income on hobbies like “drugs and alcohol.”
“What’s your drug of choice?” I asked. When he said weed, we all smoked a joint after the kids went to bed. A bit loose on wine, he told us the story of our former principal, who started quite possibly the greatest public high school in a state so notorious for its education system that it’s not uncommon for families to relocate to better school districts beyond our borders. Long after we graduated, the principal was fired for sexual harassment. His story reminded me of my all-time favorite parable, the Ballad of Anthony Weiner. (If anyone ever asked me who I would most want to have dinner with, dead or alive, it would easily be him.)
After dinner, I texted another high school friend about my newfound gossip, but apparently it was already old news. “I think our principal might be an Anthony Weiner!” I wrote. “Doubt he texted dick pics, but just as a metaphor for a brilliant educator/politician who also happens to be a creep with women.“
My friend replied, “I know about [the principal] from when I was in Catholic School. He was dismissed from St. M’s under similar circumstances. That’s how our high school came to be; he brought half of the staff. That’s why the school was so good: they started off with a core of experienced teachers and a leader they believed in. I’m reminded of the Dave Chapelle bit where there’s a superhero who saves people, but in order to save them he has to rape someone. Our stellar high school experience and education was born from a charge of sexual harassment.”
Dave Chappelle was speaking about Bill Cosby, the ego-maniacal sexual predator.
Mr. B’s wife didn’t smoke with us. As a healer witch (nurse), she can’t take the risk. But as cannabis filled the air, she told me stories from the operating room: the vile things urologists would say about women’s genitals; the times she was groped, how her body would go stiff, how she’d hope that the doctor’s hands wouldn’t move further. #Metoo didn’t exist in those days.
Our math teacher defended the principal to the end. In fact, they remain friends. About a year back, Mr. B posted this on Facebook, and I judged him for it:
Cosby wasn’t pure evil, despite his many atrocities against women. He was nuanced, as we all are. That’s what makes Game of Thrones so good. The bad guys (with the exceptions of the Boltons) are complicated. They push little boys out of castle windows, and we somehow still come to care for them. They “rape but they save,” in the metaphoric, Dave Chappelle sense.