This week's video commemorates my return to trivia night at a local watering hole. Zavo, some other friends of North O Forbes and myself were big bar trivia players during the summer of 2004, at a local deli/pub. The prize for victory there included a case of Rolling Rock and a $25 gift certificate for sandwiches. For the better part of two months, our team had a nice little winning streak going, where every week,we could play trivia, eat for free on last week's winnings and come home to a refrigerator so stocked with beer we stashed some of it in the vegetable crisper.
In retrospect our summer of trivia success probably had more to do with the fact that our team was twice the size of anyone else playing, and most of the other people that did show up were there more for the Long Island special, and as a result too bombed by the game's final round to really care who played the father on Leave it to Beaver. In fact, the deli disbanded trivia night shortly after the summer ended. Still, we thought of ourselves as the Gale Sayers of Pittsburgh trivia; forced into an early retirement at the peak of our careers.
Last Wednesday, with a very different group of friends, I took my first crack at a pub quiz in more than two years. This time it was at a mega-hip establishment in Lawrenceville, esentially a slice of Brooklyn transplanted to Penn Avenue (and if you don't believe that description, just take a look at the jukebox). Given the clientele at this place, I was pretty sure winning the would be difficult, nee impossible. The hipster chic crowd tends to do well in questions about literature, art and other intellectual subjects where I wouldn't label myself "disturbingly proficient". Essentially, categories that never come up when you're playing a trivia geared towards a bunch of townies in a local deli.
However, my confidence was buoyed by when the host kicked off the evening by announcing there would be a whole sports category in the first-round. I try not to brag, so I'll consider this next part more of an admission, but I am disturbinglt proficient with sports trivia. And naturally, I owned the category. I answered five straight questions about sports nicknames without a hitch. With my teammates clutch answers to some other tough questions, I naively thought my sports expertise would propel us to victory. After all, how many hipsters know that Walter Payton also went by the nickname "Sweetness"?
Then the host, who looked exactly like Mark Wahlberg if Mark dressed in thrift store clothes, had liposuction and did gobs of coke (ie, dressed to slum it and was really fucking skinny), announced the final category of the night: Name that Tune('s performer and year). "Okay, we can do that," I thought. My team consisted of enough music snobs that pulling a respectable total shouldn't have been a problem. As soon as the first song blared over the speakers, I knew we were screwed. It was a smooth soul ditty with hushed vocals, and brass blazing proudly at the chorus; the kind of tune The Ladies Man wold use to seduce a woman, and we had no clue what it was. Things only got worse from there. By the time they played "Thank You for Being a Friend" all hope was lost. Grasping at straws, my teammate Nathan, offered to all of us that had no idea of the artist's name, or what year the song came out, but, the artist had red, curly hair a beard, and resembled his Uncle Randy. We ended up writing that part down as our answer, and hoping for the best. We also ended up finishing
Yet as this video shows, Nathan was dead-on in his recollection of Andrew Gold's physical features. I don't personally have an uncle Randy, but if I did I imagine he would look just like Andrew Gold. This whole story was really just a long-winded way of saying that YouTube is great for confirming these kinds of things.
