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Some people may have Defoe like fantasies of being stranded
on a desert island and igniting a hot affair with their Friday and others might
dream of going to Bangkok or Vegas (a la Leaving Las Vegas) to live out their ultimate fantasy of dissipation. "Chacun a son
gout" as the French say. Everyone has their little kink and with Passover for
some Jewish guys and gals it relates to the fantasy of the unfettered
enjoyment of matzo and butter. The movie might be called Leaving Scarsdale and
it requires only a motel room and one of those large family packs of Streit's
Matzo and a platoon sized supply of Breakstone’s. Remember the famous butter
scene in Last Tango, well this one is a combination of the wonderful moment
between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in the Bertolucci classic and l973 Philippe Noirot movie La Grand Bouffe in which a group of aristocrats take a vow
of gluttony in which they will eat themselves to death. Imagine all that matzo slathered with butter with no stop signs in the form of family, friends or
employers to report to. What a way to die surrounded by sheets of crispy unleavened bread bathed in the oily golden substance which lubricates our carbohydrate dreams. Fyvush Finkel could played the Nicholas Cage role, with
matzoh substituted for alcohol as the addictive substance of choice.
We always associate Epicurus with pleasure, but he really
believed in moderation and considered pleasure to reside in the diminution of pain. So what would Epicurus have thought about the
all you can eat buffets that are so popular with Americans. The idea of a
buffet is that you don’t have to order one thing. Buffet applies not only to
food, but to love. Open marriage and swapping are the buffet idea applied to
sexuality. Why should you have sex with only one person? Why must fidelity
be considered a requisite of true love? There’s the old expression, "you can read the menu but you don’t
have to order." But why not order? That in effect is what you do when you go to
a buffet and simply move through successions of chafing dishes, one seemingly
more sumptuous than the other. Then there are the old-fashioned midnight
buffets which used to be a requisite of most cruises, with their groaning boards of
meats and roasts. The buffet absolves you from having to make a choice, but
there’s also something lost in the process and it relates back to free love. At
a certain point during the buffet you begin to get stuffed, one food obliterates the next. Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi were the stars of a move called La grand bouffe in which a group of aristocrats make
a pact to have group sex and eat themselves to death. La Grand Bouffe was a buffet in extremis and
what it did was to kill people as well as taste. Say you can have any woman or
man you desire and you become a licensed serial adulterer. You may satisfy all your fantasies. But what happens when everything starts to taste the same?
