Pie-eating contest to be held after double-entendre convention.
For only twenty-five cents a day, you can help an impoverished child in the Sudan enjoy a pie eating contest. Or you could just eat some more pie, fatty.
Acquisition. This virtue could be called materialism. It represents a behavior focused around ownership of items, and considering items to be very important in one�s life. The excess of acquisition could be called Greed, while a deficiency of this virtue could be called spartan-ness, or stinginess, or even cheapness. An average of this virtue could be called moderation, or frugality, or charity, whichever you prefer.

Willy�s Loman�s sense of acquisition is in a slight excess. Throughout the play, he is scrambling to get enough money to pay all his bills and debts, and according to Linda he�s not usually very far off. In the present of the play, Willy is even about to finish paying off his house. Willy does not live beyond his means; he does not have mounds and mounds of credit card debt, but he is in debt, and one must think that he could have done things differently, saved money at one place or another, such as on a mistress. Biff represents an extreme excess of this virtue with his stealing habits.
Uriah 'n the Gypsy was the biggest fued ever ta come through Independence Pass. They burned down nigh on fifty years ago, this very night.
Uriah and the Gypsy shortly before their deadly gunfight at Independence Pass.
Independence. This virtue describes a person�s own will in making decisions about their life. It is important to distinguish Will from Capacity. A convict in prison, by nature of being in prison, has almost no capacity to control his life, to leave his cell or his prison, but he may still have the will to manipulate their lives. An excess of this virtue could be described as flakiness, by becoming non-committal in most cases that one may never be tied down, or Stubbornness, by demanding that one have his way over others. A deficiency of this virtue could be called meek, or submissive. An average of this virtue could be called decisiveness or determinedness.

Willy does not outwardly seem to be in excess or deficiency of this virtue. He had chosen some time ago that he wanted to live the life, and then die the death of a salesman, and that is what he did for thirty-four years. It was only in the twilight of his life that he wanted to get off the road, and then, arguably, he could have done so, if it had not been for his pride.

There is an interesting interplay of these two virtues in the Willy�s  life. In act two (page 1583 of the Norton intro to Lit) Willy has a flashback to a time when Ben offered him a job in Alaska, managing his timberlands. Presumably, this might have made Willy rich. He would have been working with Ben, and Ben had a knack for making money that could have rubbed off on Willy. Willy is sold on Ben�s idea, until Linda intervenes, telling Willy that he�s doing well enough in New York, and that Old Man Wagner has told him he�ll be a member of the firm someday, and she mentions Willy�s idol, Dave Singleman. Here, Willy has a choice to himself- follow his dream of being a salesman, and doing things his way, or pursuing Ben�s job in an attempt to get rich, and Willy chooses going his own way over getting rich.
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