Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I don’t know about you, but I don’t think much of Indiana or its governor this week. Of course, my concerns about Indiana have lasted my entire life, for I grew up on my father’s stories about trying to escape the state. A magician by training, my father traveled in ever-widening circles around his hometown of Winchester, driven by my grandfather, putting on magic shows for small and large groups. He earned his living and his early fame as a showman on stage for years, all before starting college.
His enthusiasm for magic made him pay better attention to actors he saw on the big screen (whom he saw frequently) and on stage (whom he saw rarely in Winchester). At Antioch College, in neighboring Yellow Springs, Ohio, my dad trained as an actor, a director, and a playwright, and enjoyed extended internships doing radio and television, including his own children’s television show, with puppets, in a variety of mid-western cities. The author R.L. Stine and his brother used to watch “Captain Davey’s Locker” on Columbus television when they were children.
My dad sought adventure, increasingly larger audiences, and intellectual challenges, all of these fueled by his love of the arts. In addition to writing and acting in plays, he read Russian novels, read and wrote poetry, published a book of his magic tricks, visited museums, and sought out culture in all of its available forms. Buffeted by these cultural discoveries, my dad couldn’t understand what he saw as the regrettable and self-defeating attitude in most of his fellow Hoosiers: a willful indifference to the world’s cultural offerings and to the open-mindedness necessary to be curious about new ideas.
I see this fear of difference and variety evidenced in the bill that was signed into state law last week by Indiana Governor Mike Pence. The “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” effectively protects religious institutions, businesses and associations from lawsuits for their acts of discrimination against gays and lesbians. The Civil Rights Movement taught us that we should all be wary of such segmentation, this separate and discriminatory treatment of one group as compared to another. Race and sexual orientation are separate categories, but some of the beliefs and tactics used to justify bigotry are the same. As the Atlantic pointed out in an article published last June, “the Public Religion Research Institute found that 10 percent of Americans believe business owners should be able to refuse to serve black people if they see that as a violation of their religious beliefs.”
Some might be surprised that that same survey revealed that more people in the mid-west than the south felt that such racist attitudes and practices could be thus justified, and more young people than old. Southerners and the elderly remember well the civil rights conflicts that helped first to stigmatize and then to confront this antidemocratic idea of “separate but equal.” I hope the Governor and legislature of Indiana will soon realize what the Chamber of Commerce and civil rights activists already do: bigotry and backsliding are bad for business, and bad for America.
If my father were alive, I’m sure that today we would have engaged in a long conversation about Indiana, and I would ask him to tell me more stories. He would have reminded me that Cole Porter, who grew up about 90 miles from my dad, was a home-state hero who inspired my dad and many other potential performers with his show tunes. Porter wrote the music and words to one of my favorite musicals (largely because of its title), Kiss Me Kate. I bet Porter first encountered The Taming of the Shrew in an Indiana classroom.
Speaking of favorites, my favorite person on television right now is David Letterman. My favorite crossover ballet choreographer is Twyla Tharp. My favorite 80s singer was Michael Jackson, and my current favorite standup comedian is Jim Gaffigan. What do all these people have in common? Indiana. Plus Letterman, Tharp, and/or Michael Jackson’s and Jim Gaffigan’s parents might have seen my dad performing magic in the early to mid 1940s. One of them might even have considered the magic of entertainment after watching such an entertaining Indiana magician.
So as we do with all groups, we should judge Indianans by the best of them, rather than by the limitations of the most shortsighted of them. Davey Marlin-Jones taught me to do that with every group, and thus taught me the importance of heroes. So it should be with the scrutinized and perhaps now awakened people of Indiana.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on some of the topics raised, above. My dad was a film guy, so we will see a greater than typical number of film questions. Expect questions about the eastern conference, questions of biography, national book favorites, multicellular organisms, Asians in America, the Speaker of the House, unwelcome standards, popular brands, villains, magic, Abraham Lincoln, Philadelphia, Harry Potter, American comedians, credentials to enter heaven, universities, attracting notice, first families, that which generates buzz, dinner tabs, the Mafia, big lakes, today’s headlines, the solar system, popular sports, big thoughts, Irish culture, and Shakespeare.
Pub Quiz regular Katy Brown will open for Davis Poet Laureate Emerita Allegra Silberstein this coming Thursday at 8 at the Natsoulas Gallery. National Poetry Month is almost upon us, so you should be making some plans.
See you tonight!
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. For a while, all of us had to watch commercials in which a bunch of friends repeatedly asked each other this question: Wassup?! Name the brand of beer that was responsible for this hip and urban slogan.
- Newspaper Headlines. Today Eric Schmidt said that a certain Google wearable is “not dead.” What was he referring to?
- Quotations by Women. Born in Utah in 1952, and now a Hawaii resident, what actor, comedian and politician said “The thing women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just take it.”
- Four for Four. Which of the past or current members of the cast of The View has an eponymous TV show that currently airs new episodes? Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Meredith Vieira.
- Flowers. What four-syllable flower is the symbol of the Emperor of Japan and the official flower of Chicago, and Salinas, California?