trivia report

Isn't this feature boring by now? I'm more interested by "lunch report." Well Bryan, Marya, Mia and I went to Buttermilk for trivia on Monday and set up under the now-established name "The Real People." I'm not sure how we got this name but it's based on the television show. This was one of my favorites as a child, along with Love Boat. Since it ran from 8 to 9 and my bedtime was 8:30, I had to cut a deal that I'd put my jammies on and have my teeth all brushed by the time the show was over so I could go straight to bed at nine. It makes me laugh that I loved the show so much but perhaps it presaged my later interest in anthropology in college. And hey, Fred Willard was on there, he later came into his own in the Christopher Guest movies. When I was seven we went to Florida and I actually got to see one of the hosts, the "cute" one (Skip Stephenson), in a personal appearance at Circus World. My first celebrity sighting! Though it doesn't make the list since it doesn't count if you have to pay to see the person. Which begs the question, if you're walking in Times Square and see Carson Daly broadcasting TRL through the MTV window, does that count as a sighting? Um, not that I looked.

Back to trivia: it's quite exciting because we finally tied for second with such luminaries as "Steve Gutenberg Bible" and "The Neuticles," who both win consistently. However "Suspicious Package" had us all beat by two points. I think what really did us in was the visual identification round, which was all hockey players. Now, Bryan is extremely masculine of course, but this knowledge was just too esoteric. He did get two of them, which is terrific. I could only come up with "Bobby Labonte," which is the wrong sport. As usual there was a lot of second-guessing and guesses vying for dominance against other guesses, only to find that the other guess was the right one. There was an amusing category where he read the capsule reviews of movies from the Sunday NY Times TV section. I screwed up and guessed "Coffy" as the movie starring Pam Grier as a vigilante nurse, when it was simply the more notorious "Foxy Brown." I thought I was being so clever. But redeemed myself on the next question: a bad western starring Gene Hackman and Sharon Stone. Apparently this information had been living in my ass all along because at the very last moment, when the answer card was being collected, I managed to pull it out! "The Quick and the Dead"! Many thanks to Mia for the assist: she knew it had "and the" in the title, which proved very important info. Buttermilk trivia is on vacation next month.