Francisco X. Alarcon
Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
In most cases public speakers don’t like people following them onstage. Star musicians are used to backup singers. Some megachurch preachers are used to the presence of gospel singers. But public speakers want the unmediated attention of their audiences.
You can imagine how distracting it was when someone came out of the audience of the Cesar Chavez Day Celebration at Veterans’ Memorial Theatre here in Davis and mounted the stage after I did, standing either next to me or behind me, swaying a little bit, and making odd noises.
It was distracting, but not surprising, because the interloper was my son Jukie, and I have grown used to his antics for years. Jukie’s greatest strength is not impulse control. Saturday he saw a wood chip on a woman’s skirt, so he reached off to remove it for her. Yesterday at the Cesar Chavez event he couldn’t figure out what was causing the smudge on the knee of the jeans of the man sitting next to him, so he repeatedly tried to brush off the discoloration. After seeing what Jukie wanted to do, I reached out my hand in a fatherly way and held onto his, and then tried to stop him from straining mightily against my grip. If something is amiss, Jukie will seek to right it, to fix it, or to remove it. When obsessive compulsive disorder is mixed with autism, the result, I find, is many new apologies, and new friends.
Saturday was World Autism Day, so we dressed ourselves and Jukie up in blue, and ventured into the world. According to all the T-shirts printed for the occasion of the big campaign kickoff event in Central Park next to the bicycle-powered merry-go-round, Will Arnold and his supporters, some of them electricians and builders, were wearing a bright shade of blue. We felt at home there.
More strangers than usual knew Jukie and me at the Will Arnold event, proving to me a lesson I learned long ago from the late Francisco Alarcon: If you attend enough events as a member of the audience, sooner or later you will be asked to stand up to speak. Francisco was the subject of my prepared remarks, a fond remembrance, for Cesar Chavez Day. I was there with some context of Francisco’s important work as a bilingual poet, author of children’s books, and a scholar, while Jukie was there to personify Francisco’s exuberance and performative moxie.
Whether we are celebrating great departed friends like Mrs. Barbara Neu or the poetry maestro Francisco Alarcon, it’s important to give room for people to speak, and to consider which of their works – their poems, their students, their magnanimity – will live after them, and which of us will have the responsibility to remember, represent, and re-create those qualities that made our departed friends and leaders so important.
We have a special event tomorrow / Tuesday night at 8 for Pub Quiz regulars. Tomorrow night at 8 at the Irish Pub I will be sharing chapters of my new Pub Quiz book with folks who are willing try out some of the quizzes in groups, and provide joke answers and other hilarity while enjoying some free beer and appetizers. Send me an email or let me know in person if someone from your team will be joining us at this free event. The book will come out later this spring.
And my book release party takes place this coming Friday, April 8th, at 7:30 PM at the Avid Reader. Please join me!
Tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on many of the expected topics, including motto commonalities, challenges in Europe, healthy rappers, engineering, small boons and big boons, numbers that are divisible by three, master builders, the attraction of flecks, book genres, singing birds, Tuesday’s get-together at the Irish Pub, aging islanders, public holidays for particular publics, the question of Affleck, German culture, recognizable queens, primer, majestic dragons, fated marriages, new talent, Native American lands, incoherence that is huge and glitzy, red tails, Young rockers, Appalachia, migrants, and Shakespearean tragedies.
See you this evening! There will be new players, so come early.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. According to the website “Funny or Die,” what U.S. state’s slogan is “Nobody Cares”?
- Internet Culture. According to John Oliver, what is the primary reason to have a landline phone at home?
- Pomeranians. Pomeranian is an adjective referring to Pomerania, an area divided between two countries. Name either country.