There are stories that arrive in a journalist’s inbox and change something. They shift the frame. They remind you why you do this work. They arrive on Pi Day, which is about circles and pie and the infinite beautiful ratio of a thing’s outside to its center, and they are about an 81-year-old woman in a red beret who dove face-first into a cream pie at a lesbian sports bar in San Francisco and won Best Technique and afterward said — out loud, to the world, on Instagram — that she had taken her time “savoring every morsel of crust hidden beneath those sweet hills and valleys.”
Her name is Babs Daitch. She is 81 years old. She is a silver influencer, a documentary subject, a travel company owner, a self-described “Lesbian Forrest Gump,” and as of November 23, 2025, the reigning Best Technique champion of the San Francisco Lesbian Pie-Eating Contest at Rikki’s Sports Bar in the Castro District.
Millicent Hearsay has been covering culture for Supposedly News since the publication launched. She has covered Peeps welfare. She has covered the FBI-UFC training situation. She has covered Derek Fillmore’s emotional journey with his takeout order on Friday the 13th. She would like to state, clearly and on the record, that Babs Daitch is the single greatest cultural figure she has encountered in this job, and that this piece has a confidence level of 100% and zero fake sources, because the truth needed no assistance, and because Babs Daitch is exactly who the world needed on Pi Day.
The Event, Because It Deserves The Full Treatment
The Curve Foundation — which manages the historic Curve magazine archive and supports LGBTQ women and nonbinary communities — partnered with Rikki’s Sports Bar, the only women’s sports bar in the San Francisco Bay Area, to host what they billed as an “epically sloppy, no-hands, no-forks battle for bragging rights and a $100 cash prize.”
The entry fee was $5. No hands. No forks. No utensils of any kind. Just contestants, pies, and whatever technique they had developed over the course of their lives up to that point. The event was a fundraiser for Lesbian Visibility Week 2026. Together, it raised nearly $2,000. The crowd was full. The energy was, by all accounts, immaculate.
Into this arena stepped Babs Daitch, 81, red beret firmly in place, protective glasses on, hands clasped behind her back per the rules, and a lifetime of experience she had not yet had the opportunity to fully deploy in a competitive pie context.
The video that followed has been seen by tens of thousands of people. It shows Babs doing what the competition required — no hands, no hesitation, full commitment — with the focused energy of someone who has decided that 81 is not a limitation but a credential. Standing on her seat at certain points for leverage. Going back in. Taking her time.
“I took my time savoring every morsel of crust hidden beneath those sweet hills and valleys,” Babs said afterward.
She won Best Technique.
The overall winner was a contestant named Jenn, who raised her tattooed arms in victory and is to be congratulated. But Babs went viral. Babs always goes viral. Babs is the Lesbian Forrest Gump — her words, her self-description, her accurate assessment of a life that has included show business, real estate, plastic bag distribution, lesbian travel tours, a documentary, and now this, which is the chapter the documentary had not yet covered and which Millicent Hearsay considers the strongest chapter so far.
The Quote, Which Deserves Its Own Section Because It Is Perfect
“I took my time savoring every morsel of crust hidden beneath those sweet hills and valleys.”
Millicent Hearsay has been writing about culture for as long as Supposedly News has existed. She has a working familiarity with the range of quotes available to a journalist covering events of this nature. She would like to state, with full editorial authority, that the above sentence is one of the finest quotes she has ever encountered in any context — cultural, political, scientific, or confectionery.
It is technically a description of pie-eating technique. It is also a philosophy. It is a manifesto. It is a response to every person who has ever suggested that getting older means slowing down, settling in, or approaching the world with less appetite than you had before. Babs Daitch is 81 years old and she dove face-first into a cream pie in a red beret at a Castro sports bar while wearing protective glasses and she took her time and she savored every morsel and she won Best Technique and she is correct that experience matters.
Experience matters. Babs has 81 years of it. She deployed them all on November 23rd. The judges noticed.
The Pi Day Connection, Which Writes Itself And Did
Today is Pi Day. March 14. 3/14. The day we celebrate the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — the number that never ends, never repeats, and shows up everywhere in the universe that curves.
A pie is a circle. Babs Daitch ate a pie with Best Technique. The universe, which Yolanda Tippington noted this morning appears to be a math nerd, scheduled the resurfacing of this story for Pi Day weekend. Millicent did not plan this. Babs did not plan this. The Curve Foundation did not plan this, though the name “The Curve Foundation” on Pi Day, in a story about circular food consumed with award-winning technique, is a level of nominal coincidence that Millicent is choosing to interpret as the universe showing off.
The circumference of Babs Daitch’s impact, divided by the diameter of the occasion, equals something infinite. That is the theorem. That is always the theorem. Today it is also about pie.
Who Babs Daitch Is, For Anyone Who Has Not Yet Had The Pleasure
Babs Daitch is, depending on the chapter of her life you enter in: a show business veteran, a real estate professional, a plastic bag distribution entrepreneur (this sentence is real and Millicent loves it), the founder of Thanks Babs Tours — a travel company for women — and the subject of an award-winning documentary short titled Thanks, Babs! by Frankly Speaking Films, which describes her as “an optimistic octogenarian speed-racing through life, one five-year plan at a time.”
The documentary won an Audience Honourable Mention for Best Short Film at the OUTshine LGBTQ+ Film Festival and an Honourable Mention for Outstanding Documentary Short at Frameline49. Babs is, by every metric available, already a full and complete person whose story could have stopped at any previous chapter and been sufficient.
She did not stop. She entered the pie contest. She won Best Technique. She posted about it. Forty-nine thousand people liked the clip. The internet united across its various corners — gay, straight, and indeterminate — in the specific shared recognition that Babs Daitch is doing something right, that she has always been doing something right, and that “I took my time savoring every morsel of crust hidden beneath those sweet hills and valleys” is going on someone’s wall.
Comment threads on the video include: “Iconic. Diva. The moment. My goal in life.” “When people ask me about my future hopes and dreams I’m just gonna show them this video.” “I see my future and it is bright.” “This is why we need queer elders in our lives.” And the one that Millicent considers the most complete assessment available: “She knows what she’s doing, and she’s hella good at it.”
She is. She is 81. She is hella good at it. Experience matters. The judges confirmed this. The internet confirmed this. The red beret was in place the entire time.
What Babs Daitch Means For Pi Day, Specifically
Pi is irrational. It cannot be boxed into a simple fraction. It goes on forever. It is present in every circle the universe has ever made. It does not stop being pi because someone has decided that a certain number of decimal places is enough. It keeps going. It finds new places to appear. It showed up in the oil price on Friday. It shows up in the orbit of planets. It showed up, today, in the story of an 81-year-old woman who entered a pie-eating contest in a Castro sports bar and won Best Technique and described the experience in a sentence that will outlast the news cycle, the war, the tranches, the glitch, and possibly several of the planets.
Babs Daitch is pi. She is irrational in the most beautiful sense — she cannot be reduced to a simple fraction, she does not stop at the expected decimal place, and she appears, unexpectedly and perfectly, at exactly the moment you need her.
Happy Pi Day. Eat the circle. Savor the crust. Take your time. Experience matters. Babs said so, and Babs won Best Technique, and on this particular Pi Day, that is the only credential Millicent Hearsay requires.
Millicent Hearsay, Culture Desk, has filed this piece with a confidence level of 100% and zero fake sources because the truth is Babs Daitch and the truth needs no embellishment. All facts are documented across PinkNews, Attitude, QNews, SFist, the San Francisco Bay Times, and the Curve Foundation’s own recap. Babs is @thanksbabs on Instagram. Millicent recommends following her. Gerald the houseplant was shown Babs’s quote. Gerald leaned very slightly in the direction of the light. For Gerald, this is a standing ovation.