For some context: A couple of weeks ago, for the first time ever, we had a family games night where both Kennedy and Mallory had their boyfriends along to play. They decided on an outdated game of Scene It that Mal had picked up from Value Village (presumably because, by now, the kids are tired of losing to me at word-based games, lol), and we split into two teams on the opposing couches and dug in to play. After every game we'd shuffle the teams, and after Mallory's boyfriend played one game opposite her, he apparently said, "I should come back on your team. I'll be your good luck charm."
Mal pointed out to him that he had only been on a winning team once and he replied, "So who is the good luck charm?"
Mal said, "Haven't you noticed that my Mom has won every game?"
"Oh, so she's the lucky one?"
"No," said Mal, "she wins everything because she knows everything. That's why she works at a book store."
I didn't hear this story until the next day, but it made me smile ironically for two reasons: 1) I was on the winning team 4/5 games, but it's not like I answered the most questions in any of them. And 2) It was just the week before that someone came into the book store and said to me, "I'm looking for Angels and Demons. You know, by the Da Vinci Code guy." My mind totally blanked and I said, "Let's just check the kiosk to see if it's in stock before we go looking for it." I could not remember the author until I searched it, and since it turned out that I looked competent for checking first when we didn't have the book in stock anyway, to be fair, anyone who can't remember Dan Brown's name shouldn't be working in a book store. All this to say: I am perfectly aware that my reputation as somebody who "knows everything" is totally undeserved; yet I don't entirely mind the misunderstanding.
So this week, Lolo's mother and sister are visiting (Ken's 50th birthday was last month, and since Lolo's sister's 40th birthday is this Sunday, and this visit had been planned months ago, Lolo decided to wait and have a combined birthday party for them; no comment from me on the appropriateness of this...), and her mother, Barb, has a very good friend who lives a half hour from here. The friend, Henny, and a couple of her friends have been enjoying going to a Trivia Night at the local pub ever since it started, but try as they may, they can never beat this one table of retired teachers who win every week and are annoyingly smug about it. Henny invited Barb to come play and improve her team's knowledge base, and Barb said, "I'll do you one better and bring my daughters along." When Lolo was invited, she said, "I'll do you one better and bring Krista along: she's our ringer." I agreed to go for the fun of it, but recounting to Lolo my Dan Brown story, I stressed that my failing brain can't be relied upon to be anybody's ringer.
We got to the pub and Henny and her friend Barb (another Barb: these three women are all in their seventies) were already there and all ready to go: Henny obviously enjoys being the expert on the way the game works and she explained it to us as she gave each of us a pen and a piece of paper. When I asked what they were for, she explained, "When we don't know the answer to a question, we write it down on this paper so we can go back and think about it if we have time." Okay dokie I thought, but I never did write anything down: I either know something or I don't.
Meanwhile, Lolo and her sister Ellen had come out without eating first, so they ordered a bunch of food and were shocked when everything came on tiny side plates: this was definitely not enough food for dinner, but the game started and the waitress stopped waitressing. Lolo was hungry and totally ticked off.
During the first round, Henny had control of the answer sheet, and as she didn't immediately know the answer to most of the questions, she'd start writing them out on her blank paper while us younger players were trying to whisper the answers to her across the table. She'd then pass the paper to whoever was whispering, but take it right back: this is her game and we were just there to help. Fair enough.
One of the questions was, "What year did Wayne Gretzky give the teary press conference announcing his trade to the LA Kings?" The other Barb said, "I'm pretty sure it was 1988 because I remember we were on a trip out East at the time." I started shaking my head and said, "I moved to Edmonton at the end of 1988 and Gretzky was definitely still an Oiler then. I know I saw him playing as an Oiler a few times and I know he wasn't traded until '91 or'92." We were both 100% certain of our answers and Barb ended up putting 1992 as our answer and I was smugly satisfied: don't ask me to be on your team if you don't want my knowledge.
Another question was, "What seminal hip hop group was the subject of Straight Outta Compton?" Lolo is definitely the music expert at the table and she started scribbling on her blank sheet, trying to figure it out. Throughout this round, I kept turning to her, saying, "The only seminal hip hop I remember is Run DMC and the Beastie Boys" and we both knew it was neither of them. She was jotting down Dr Dre and Ice Cube -- she was narrowing in on the answer -- but when she looked over at our answer sheet, someone had written "The Flip Top Group" in that space. Lolo got mad, lol, and she said, "Who wrote this? I'm working on the answer, and that's not anything." The other Barb said, "Well, we should put something, even if it's just a guess, it's better than nothing." And Lolo took the paper, scratched out the Flip Top nonsense, and wrote in "NWA".
When it was time to mark the answer sheets, Lolo and the table at large were pleased that her answer of "NWA" had been right. The table, and I, were less than pleased when the answer for the Wayne Gretzky question was "1988". I was not only wrong, but I bullied an old woman into writing my answer when her own had been correct. But not all was lost: with a score of 17/20, our table won the round. The round was followed by a break, and as one of the retired teachers was a smoker, he came by the table to offer Henny and Barb a baffled congratulations, and after he left, Henny was crowing about how good that felt. And then the bartender (the man who runs the trivia game) came by with a platter of devilled eggs; our prize for winning the round. Henny and Barb were flabbergasted and called the bartender back, asking him if this is the prize every week. He said yes and Henny sat there shaking her head in wonder: she had no idea that the retired teachers were enjoying free devilled eggs every week. No sooner were we done the eggs than the bartender came back with a serving platter of frites for us. "This too?" said Henny in amazement. The bartender winked, and then came back with a platter of calamari (which was three times bigger than the tiny plate Lolo and Ellen had been served at the beginning of the evening). As Henny had also ordered three servings of crab cakes (as is their habit every week) before we knew there would be free food, our team entered the second round feeling full and delighted.
For this round Lolo's Mom Barb filled in the answer sheet, and she did a better job of waiting for everyone to confer on an answer before giving up and writing out the question on the blank paper. For the most part we knew the answers, but there were some guesses. One question was, "Khurhu is a disease of people who indulge in what dietary quirk?" I had a couple of ideas immediately, but being very conscious of having been a smug bully in the first round, I waited until someone asked me for my opinion. When I was, I said, "That sounds very much like that disease you get from cannibalism, but for some reason I think that's 'kiri-kiri'. I'm also thinking it could be extreme anemia from veganism." Everyone laughed at the idea of cannibalism, and when no one had a better answer, Barb decided to write it down; for the laugh factor if nothing else. (Before this round was over, Lolo started wondering if it might be the disease you get from eating clay -- because at least that would qualify as a dietary "quirk" -- but we ran out of time before going back and changing anything.) Another question was, "This should be impossible to answer: I was at Long Point last weekend and made a significant bird sighting. What bird did I see?" I did my best to remain silent, but I was squirming because I had just read in the newspaper last week that Sandhill Cranes had been seen in the area and people were freaking out about it. So when I was eventually asked for my guess, that's what I explained. As we didn't have any better answer, Barb wrote down "crane", figuring that the less specific, the better. When this round was being marked, and the answer for the dietary quirk did turn out to be cannibalism, everyone at our table spontaneously threw up our hands and cheered (we must have looked like freaks). And when the answer about the significant bird sighting did turn out to be a Sandhill Crane, I was mentally kicking myself for not insisting on the "Sandhill" part (I'm a monster, I know). Turns out we won this round as well, and the waitress brought us a $25 gift certificate. Nice. Once again, Henny and the other Barb had no idea that there was this prize for winning the second round. The retired teacher who smokes and needed to pass our table nearly didn't stop by this time, but he did because he had to know who came up with cannibalism. Lolo pointed to me and I obnoxiously and breathlessly said, "And I didn't even think it was the right answer". Then the bartender came and asked who came up with "crane" and Lolo's Mom Barb pointed to me and said, "And she even knew it was a Sandhill Crane." The bartender was properly impressed, explained to Barb that North America only has the two types of crane -- Sandhill and Whooping -- and since the latter would be an impossibility to see here, "crane" would properly be equivalent to "Sandhill Crane" in this context, and I took all my mental bows.
For the third round, the answer sheet was passed to me, and I took up the pen with obnoxious authority. The first question was, "What sitcom did Michael Richards star in. A bonus point if you know his whole name." Lolo nudged me and said, "You got this", so without even confirming with the table, I wrote out, "Seinfeld. Cosmo Kramer." And this is how I played the whole round: if I knew the answer, I'd announce it to the table with authority and write it down before anyone could object. If I didn't know the answer (which certainly happened often enough), I'd wait for the consensus guess and fill it in. One question was, "This national Swedish team is nicknamed the Three Crowns". I turned to Lolo and said, "Can you visualise the Swedish hockey team? I'm sure their jerseys have three crowns on them." Lolo said she certainly could not envision them, and I appealed to the table -- as obnoxious as I might have been acting, I wasn't going to bully through a guess -- and Henny started pushing for curling, saying that hockey was too obvious. She was gaining converts to her side, and I was itching so badly to write down hockey that in the end, I announced that I was certain it was hockey, and I started writing it down. Henny relented and told me to at least write "ice hockey" because in Europe "hockey" would more likely refer to the field variety, and while on the inside I wanted to point out that we ain't in Europe and our fellow Canadians marking the answers would understand me just fine, I squeezed in the Ice part and kept the peace. And, of course, "hockey" was the right answer. Like I said, I didn't know all the answers -- Ellen knew that some food dish came from Korea, and the other Barb guessed the right year for when Tiger Woods first joined the PGA, and there were some answers that we didn't guess right at -- but in the end, we won the round and the whole thing. Our prize this time was the $2/person entry fee all the players ponied up at the beginning, and added together with the gift certificate, was just $15 short of paying our bill for the evening (which Henny insisted on covering herself; to the delight of everyone.)
Overall, I know that this is not a flattering story about me: on the one hand, I really do know that I don't know everything and I'm uncomfortable whether it's my daughter or my sister-in-law saying that I'm some kind of a ringer. On the other hand, I can become totally obnoxious when I'm playing a game: too competitive; a total bully. Happily, Henny and the other Barb were delighted to have won (as were we all) and Henny even folded up our answer sheet to take home with her as a souvenir. Because Barb and Ellen will be visiting for another week, Henny was trying to get us to agree to come again next Wednesday, but Lolo put an end to that talk, saying that since she'll be on vacation next week, she's not committing to anything. Fair enough. And upon reflection I really shouldn't go back: I'd much rather go out a winner; rather leave the table of retired teachers to wonder if it's possible to beat our table of ringers than give them another opportunity to accomplish it. Monstrous, I know.