Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I suppose Roger Ebert was a hero to all of us who were steeped in one particular struggling industry, such as journalism, and would wish to transition successfully to new challenges and opportunities provided by the cloud-based communities where so many of us spend so much of our time. When I met Roger Ebert, he was portly, loquacious, and generous with his time, especially to a pushy teenager (me) with a bunch of questions and comments. He and Gene Siskel gladly signed the document I thrust before them, a misprinted payroll report that we were using as scrap paper at the Washington DC’s Tenley Circle Theatre, where I worked the summer of 1984, the year of the visit and DC photo op of Siskel and Ebert.
As we know now from the obituaries, Ebert turned his love of the novels of Thomas Wolfe to a career as a high school and college sports reporter. Before long he moved to writing screenplays (unsuccessfully) and reviewing movies, first for the Chicago Sun Times (the lesser of the two city newspapers), and later, concurrently, on television with Gene Siskel and others.
Impressively relevant to today’s college students, Ebert had a third act as a blogger and tweeter, offering both sustained arguments and cutting quips on topics that internet-obsessed readers cared about: not only films, but also video games, Macs vs. PCs, and Democratic politics. My father started reviewing films in DC and Detroit around the time that Roger Ebert did in Chicago, but he never felt the need to transition to the digital age. At his funeral, my father’s students (at UNLV) spoke of having felt that “a library has burned down” because of my dad’s encyclopedic knowledge of film and theatre. We all might have felt some of that with the death of Roger Ebert, in part because of the many ambitious means (his blog, Twitter, etc.) he used to share his insights, especially after losing his voice (and much of his jaw), to cancer. We should all be so adaptable, and so appreciated. One editorial cartoon showed Siskel in heaven telling the arriving Ebert that he had, indeed, saved an aisle seat for his old frenemy. Another showed a theatre marquis telling us with large letters that “The Balcony is Closed.”
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on Roger Ebert, Margaret Thatcher, People Magazine content, nuts, belligerent people, cowherds, butterflies, highs and lows, bending it, neuropathies, baritones, galaxies, storms, weights and measurements, ensemble dramas, colorful songs, Guinness, ocean engineering, mad brie, high points, fictional Roman generals, magnesium, the American poet William Carlos Williams (as this is National Poetry Month), lethal remedies, cruelty, Saturday Night Live, Ireland, bears, social security, words that start with the letter K, toys, first novels, superheroes, left-handed pitchers, and Shakespeare plays that even I haven’t (yet) seen.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will be guest-hosted by local trivia enthusiast Nat Sternbergh. A teacher at Da Vinci Junior High, Sternbergh has loudly recited Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to an unwilling audience at The Louvre, he has played that beloved character Gandalf on stage, and he has been paying attention to my memorized Quizmaster patter for weeks, knowing that some day this night would come. I have no idea what he will be bringing as swag. Perhaps furniture? In any event, as an actor, he will surely be up to the task this evening, and I hope you will be receptive to his amplified antics.
Tonight during the Pub Quiz hour I will be giving a poetry reading at the Mind Institute in Sacramento; I will be joined on stage by three other poets for whom the topic of Autism is centrally important. If it weren’t such an important cause, I might have declined the invitation, but I anticipated that you folks would understand, and appreciate a different take on Quizmastering. See you next week!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
1. Comic Books and Authors. Donald Duck has appeared in more films than any other Disney character and is the fifth most published comic book character in the world after Batman, Superman, and two Marvel superheroes. Name one of those superheroes.
2. Film. What violent ensemble film starring actors who have been nominated for a total of ten acting Oscars was moved to a January 2013 release out of sensitivity to those shaken by the shootings in Aurora, Colorado?
3. Children’s Literature. Who wrote the 1964 children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
4. Books and Authors. How did T.S. Eliot famously describe April? You should expect another poetry question tonight, as it is National Poetry Month.
5. Current Events – Names in the News. Wouldn’t it be sad if you received a monkey for your 19th birthday, but then when you traveled on tour to Germany with that monkey, German authorities put your monkey in quarantine because your monkey didn’t have all its papers? This exact thing happened last week to what celebrity?
P.S. If you are wondering what show to see this coming weekend, I hope you might consider Nightingale, an original play presented by The Davis Shakespeare Ensemble. You should also consider April 24th, the day that Dr. Andy will hold his fundraiser radio show on behalf of KDVS. More to come.
What a life this young man had waiting for him!