Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
One of my favorite Robin Williams comedies is the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson, and not only because I got to interview its director, the late Paul Mazursky, in person on my KDVS radio show more than a decade ago. The film lovingly depicts the immigrant’s experience, and represents New York City as a place where artists and dreamers can find their purpose. In the first scene of the film, Williams’ character Vladimir Ivanov gives directions to a tourist confused by New York City’s bus system. Soon the film flashes back to Vladimir’s first visit to New York, on the occasion of his defecting as a careworn and disoriented Russian saxophonist. Williams learned Russian and the saxophone for the role, as one does.
Last week I stood in front of my rather diminutive childhood home at 2454 Tunlaw Road, where I once displayed a Moscow on the Hudson movie poster on the wall of my basement bedroom. During my trip to my onetime hometown of Washington DC, I felt like I was living the two versions of Vladimir’s character, for on the first Saturday I was in DC I felt both annoyed and charmed that everyone but me knew that subway line repairs on the Red Line meant we had to take shuttle busses from the Van Ness station to the Dupont Circle station. On the bus, I was taking pictures madly, including of my son Jukie peering out the window as we passed the corner of Connecticut and Wyoming Avenues, the onetime site of my high school. Everyone could tell that I was a tourist.
On the subsequent Saturday, I saw a visitor from Germany who was similarly confused by the subway exodus for the shuttle busses, so I explained to her why the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority saved its subway repair work for weekends, and that the above-ground leg of her trip would afford her an opportunity to see the entrance of the National Zoo. She was grateful, and thought that her good Samaritan was a Metrorail veteran. What a difference a week can make.
All the time I spent on using public transportation gave me an opportunity to reflect on the ways that our transportation methods reveal elements of our identities. For instance, as I write this newsletter on a flight from DC to Seattle, I am discovering that although I have many songs in my iTunes library, I had actually downloaded only one to my phone: Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine.” While I myself have never tried cocaine, I am seeing to what extent the song “Cocaine” on endless loop will try my patience. What does this song have to do with transportation? I used to listen to it while engaged in a different endless loop, that of roller-skaters around the basketball courts of Jelleff Boys and Girls Club on Saturday nights in 1979 and 1980.
To adapt Clapton’s song, “When your day is done, and you want to run”: roller skating. The physical artistry, necessary balance, and speed of this pastime appealed to me, and the hours circulating counter-clockwise to late disco also provided me a way to meet girls, including the daughter of the president, Amy Carter. After looping Saturday nights from 7-11, I would roller skate the mile or so to my house past the still brightly-lit shops, bars, and restaurants of Wisconsin Avenue, sometimes wearing a cape. Is there any greater freedom? The rock and roll, disco, and rhythm and blues music, and the exhilaration of the acceleration, informed who I was, or at least who I wanted to be. With the help of a Donna Summer mix on Pandora, I sometimes recapture this feeling as a Davis bike commuter today.
I never owned a car in high school or college. I depended upon public transportation, on friends or my mom to transport me, or on walking or biking (I had hung up my skates by then). To me, the primary emotional satisfaction of owning a car came from delivering friends places, just as my French comrade Jean Gruss delivered me home in his 1973 baby blue Chevrolet Chevelle Laguna (make and model confirmed this morning via Facebook), most days after high school. Like Blanche DuBois, I depended upon the kindness of others (though not of strangers – I knew to be careful).
Yesterday I overheard that one of the presenters at the Computers and Writing Conference (where I presented a talk on the Digital Learning Environment at UC Davis) was about to drop $60 on a Lyft to get him from the Fairfax, Virginia site of the conference to Washington DC where his Florida-based nuclear family was waiting to begin touring one of the most museum-friendly cities in the world. Channeling my eminently kind friend Jean, I approached this Florida scholar named Dan and told him that I was heading to DC, and that I could facilitate the reunion with his family at the cut-rate price of nothing.
We see such an act of kindness as an everyday occasion in Davis, but in Central Florida, evidently, this just doesn’t happen. My new friend was effusive in his thanks, offering on three separate occasions to contribute towards the gas that was fueling my mom’s Chevy Trax (a peppy and comfortable compact SUV that I have never seen advertised – perhaps I should have asked Chevrolet to sponsor this week’s newsletter). I kept changing the subject to our families, our universities, and the sights around us. Ever the teacher, I professed on the history of the different monuments arrayed before us as we crossed Memorial Bridge into our grand capital city.
As Dan Martin’s effusive gratitude continued on Twitter that evening, Dan also pointed out that the Computers and Writing organizers had created a conference where people are engaged, friendly, and mutually supportive, which is true. As I read his complimentary words about me, I also realized that I didn’t quite feel like my 2010s self when I was spending so much of my DC trip waiting for or on busses and subway trains. But when I could do something kind for someone, as is expected of me as poet laureate, faculty member, or quizmaster, then I was enacting my best (Be best!) and most authentic self. Taking up the microphone and committing acts of kindness make me feel like I am still wearing that cape, fresh from holding hands with a pretty girl to the music of Eric Clapton, which for some reason I can still hear echoing in my ears today.
Happy Memorial Day! Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on topics raised above, as well as on the following: toasts on Memorial Day, mighty Mikes, the measure of a gram, sweetness, battlefronts, streams and rivers, triple-doubles, franchises, roofs, generous plans, cinematic investments, payment options, big booms, Dulles Airport, infant princesses, the history option, Africa, possibly free of merits, Yankee shortcomings, unlikely backpack choices, regrettable mistakes, favorite fruits, she don’t lie, Susan B. Anthony, unread collaborations, old poems, women in charge, comic characters, football moves, pretty women, cities on rivers, scourges to tyrants, energy hogs, expensive revivals, a topic that I haven’t chosen yet, a bathrobe and a funny hat, and Shakespeare.
I am honored to read a poem at today’s 10 AM Memorial Day ceremony at the Davis Cemetery, and my introductory remarks will answer one of the easier questions on tonight’s quiz. Even though I have given you no notice, perhaps I will see you there. If you need more poetry than that, this coming Thursday night at 8 at the John Natsoulas Gallery, Berkeley poet Susie Meserve will read from her recently-published first book of poetry, Little Prayers. Opening for Meserve will be an actor/monologist from the Davis Shakespeare Festival, an opportunity not to be missed. I hope to see you at one or both these events, and tonight for a Memorial Day Edition of the de Vere’s Irish Pub Pub Quiz!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Current Events – Names in the News. What is the name of the new president of the National Rifle Association?
- Sports. What member of the Golden State Warriors was recently scolded by his mom for a profane outburst?
- Shakespeare. Who speaks the following lines in Hamlet? “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”; “To thine own self be true,” and “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
P.S. Typically I turn my longest Facebook posts into Quizmaster newsletters, or vice versa, but this week was full enough to warrant two posts, if not many more. Facebook-stalk my most recent post if you want to see how my son Jukie did during a week of tests and procedures at the NIH.