Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
My son Jukie and I saw a fascinating musical at the Veterans Memorial Theatre Friday night. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is based on the last novel Charles Dickens started to write. Dickens would have finished it if he hadn’t died in the middle of the composition process. Insofar as we have no indication of how Dickens planned to finish this half-written novel – complete with male impersonators and exotic socialites from Ceylon – Rupert Holmes faced some challenges when adapting the novel into a Broadway musical.
Holmes decided to involve the audience, having members of the audience indicate by applause and, later, tallied interviews with individual audience members, which of the play’s characters they wanted to function as the detective, the lovers, and the murderer of Edwin Drood. The challenge to the actors, then, would be for different actors to perform the impassioned revelatory solos at the end of the play, when they had no way of knowing beforehand if they would be called upon to triumphantly conclude the play. The Davis Shakespeare Ensemble should be commended again for putting on such a thrilling show, with phenomenal acting and singing. Great fun!
I enjoy such challenges. Although I have been known to consult separate calendars for work, family, poetry, and internship activities, and although I use multiple applications to help me track projects and action items, I still highly value surprise, improvisation, and thinking on my feet. At a February writers conference I was asked to give a talk for an absent presenter (which I gladly did). A decade ago I was asked with a few days’ notice to teach a literary theory class that I had never taken or taught before, and I brought up the English Department’s averages on course evaluations. And the Pub Quiz itself gives me a chance to work with the material you give me to entertain on the fly. The microphone can sometimes be a dangerous thing.
And although I can write a passably-good poem on any particular subject given an hour, I have not yet attempted to freestyle, that is, to write poetry while speaking it from the podium, the way some of our best jazz musicians and rappers can do. Some performers take an especially ambitious approach to improvisation, such as the Sacramento band Instagon. Here’s how the Sacramento News and Review once described this local cultural force:
Approaching the concepts of Jazz and Improvisation using Chaos Theory, Instagon (founded in 1993), has a unique approach to the practice of being a band…it doesn’t practice! Instagon happens as a new ensemble EVERY time it happens, and it happens regularly…never the same band twice, ever…no rehearsal, no practice, everything in the instant.. and then gone.. hence “Instagon”… In the 17+ years so far, Instagon has appeared over 525 times and had well over 500 members of the “group”. Founded by conceptual artist LOB, Instagon plays many many different styles of music and sounds and has no boundaries as far as genres…but tends to mostly play a style called “Garage Jazz”. Instagon always promises to be an experience for both the band and the audience…and it always delivers to move and shake the audience and rock the night away.
Do you leave room for discovery and surprise in the way that you perform? I recommend that you investigate where a little chaos theory could make your life more exciting.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on species of fish: are they real, or did Dr. Andy make them up? Expect a four for four question on that. Expect also questions on the following topics: Latin American affairs, artificial intelligence, Best Buy, bushels of what, the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble, the best sportsman in the world, topics on which Musk and Wozniak agree, population losses, big planes, a tale of two cities, desserts, glands, corporate mascots, frightening robots, pounds of transition, a close look at binomials in bookstores, Napoleon’s schemes, visits to England, young actresses who hatch glue skis (anagram), X names, award shows, cassettes, verbs that have different definitions depending on how they are pronounced, guns, animals that are fourteen times better than a good dog, distant earths, ovalbumin, your daily bread, and Shakespeare.
We were off the hook crowded last Monday night, which I loved. You may want to arrive earlier this evening. I will do the same.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. According to the slogan, and starting with the letter F, what is “Australian for Beer”? Foster’s
- Countries of the World. According to a June 2015 Pew Research Center Poll on Global Attitudes and Trends, what country whose name starts with the letter P has the highest regard for The United States, at 92%? Hint available. Hint: The country is the 12th largest in the world, with over 100 million people. The Philippines
- Newspaper Headlines. According to a headline in this morning’s Fortune magazine, “Lockheed Martin is about to get even bigger by buying Sikorski.” The company Sikorski is famous for manufacturing what product with four syllables in its name? Helicopters
- Four for Four: People born in 1928. Which of the following people born in 1928 are still alive? Noam Chomsky, Jack Kevorkian, Hosni Mubarak, Shirley Temple. (YNYN)
- U.S. States. The second most oil-rich state (after Texas) is also the state with the lowest unemployment. What is this 19th-largest state by area in the U.S.? North Dakota
P.S. What should be the prize for the Pub Quiz participant who submits the best contribution to the new Guide to Davis? See http://www.guidetodavis.com/how-to-participate/ for details.