Tinseltown Trivia
Walk into a typical bar on Trivia Night pretty much anywhere on the East Coast and you’ll probably hear questions about history, current events, pop culture. Most likely you’ll even have a smarty or two on your team. Huh, nice. Not so much in L.A. Here’s a conversation that went down last night between a team member and I during our ‘meeting of the minds’:
Announcer: Which is the first state to put its website on its license plate?
Our team collaborated.
Me: Is it Vermont?
Female team member (a tad condescendingly, even): No, silly, Vermont’s not a state.
I frantically looked around for someone to share the best joke I’d heard all week with me. A glint in someone’s eye, a supressed laugh, anything. Literally, anything. But I got zilch.
Me: YOU know Vermont’s a state, female team member. You know that, right? (I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. Surely she just said something without thinking. Like when I said I went to go see that ‘joke movie’ last week. I just temporarily forgot the word ‘comedy’, that’s all.)
You knew, you knew, (I all but pleaded with her.)
Her: (laughing, as if it was funny and not oh, so sad) I didn’t, I really didn’t. I never was very good at Social Studies.
Now I could have given her the benefit of the doubt (again) and thought perhaps she temporarily forgot the word ‘GEOGRAPHY’, but I just couldn’t do it. Once bitten, twice shy.
You know what, I give up. Why do I live here again?
