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With a burst of shimmering confetti and streamers, Cirque du Soleil's "Iris" bade a festive "au revoir" to Los Angeles on Saturday at the Dolby Theatre. The show, which opened in 2011 and is believed to have cost close to $100 million to produce, was supposed to run for at least 10 years in Hollywood but closed much earlier than expected after it had failed to generate sufficient box-office interest. Saturday evening's final performance of "Iris" managed to achieve what the show struggled to do all along -- playing to a packed house.

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We live in a contradictory age, when city slickers pay a fortune to become weekend buckaroos herding cattle in the Wyoming outback, yet disdain red meat at the dinner table in favor of some pale bottom-trash fish with a sprig of parsley in its mouth. I'm sorry, Hopalong, but this won't do. If you seek the authentic western experience you had better be prepared to sink your canines into a serious chunk of bovine.

The Santa Monica farmers market is more exotic. The Hollywood market is bigger and the new Altadena market more devoted to tiny organic farms. But the most charming place to buy vegetables in Los Angeles may be the Sunday morning market in the Pacific Palisades, a village street lined with flower merchants and fruit growers and bakers of dense sourdough breads. It's just a bit politer, a bit spiffier than the markets tend to be in town - even the strawberries seem to be arranged into neat rows.

The first campaign by Haiti's rich, conservative business families to confront President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's restored government is not a battle of guns, but of electricity, bank accounts, oil tanks and the country's economic future.

Dieudonne Lamothe finished an embarrassing last in the 1984 Olympic marathon, but no one knew he was running for his life--in borrowed shoes. The Los Angeles crowd cheered politely as the Haitian staggered across the finish line that August afternoon. Television announcers made blithe comments about the sound of his name. Lamothe was quickly forgotten as the marathon gave way to a Hollywood-style extravaganza that brought the Games of the XXIII Olympiad to a close.

Coq au vin Total time: 1 1/2 hours Servings: 6 to 8 3/4 cup diced bacon 4 pounds chicken thighs and drumsticks 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, divided 3/4 teaspoon pepper, divided 2 sliced onions (halved lengthwise and thinly sliced lengthwise) 3/4 teaspoon thyme 3 cloves garlic, crushed 1 bay leaf 1/2 cup canned, chopped tomatoes 2 cups red wine, divided 1 1/2 cups chicken broth, divided 1 tablespoon oil 5 tablespoons butter, divided 24 pearl onions, peeled 1 pound mushrooms, quartered 3 tablespoons flour 1/4 cup chopped parsley 1. Heat the pressure cooker insert and add the bacon.

Vickie Kloeris would like nothing more than to suffer the traditional anxieties of Thanksgiving: Will the turkey be moist? Will the in-laws get along? But it's hard to concentrate on such mundane matters when you've got things on your mind like giving your soup enough viscosity so that it sticks to a spoon without benefit of gravity.

Louis Malle's 1987 film is a wonderful companion piece to "Lacombe, Lucien," his 1973 drama of life under the Nazi occupation. In this superb semi-autobiographical film, a tale of innocence and betrayal set in a French provincial Catholic boarding school, Malle's grand, understated strategy reveals anti-Semitism deeply embedded in the society's social fabric. So flawless and overwhelming is "Au Revoir" that it is tempting to call it Malle's masterpiece.