Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Returning to the San Francisco Writers Conference every February is like returning to summer camp. Encountering many of the same friends that I’ve made there over the last 19 years, I get to teach lessons learned from previous talks to new writers, and I get to orient the new campers, the first time attendees, on approaching the process of writing, marketing, and selling a book.
My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I got to attend sleep-away camp only one pivotal summer, but I learned a lot from that experience about interacting with kids who were not oddball Waldorf types like myself and all my friends. At the World Community Camp (what I have jovially since called a “hippie training academy”), I was also introduced to vegetarianism.
Those lessons about expressing compassion for all sentient beings through our dietary choices resonated with me, and I have been a vegetarian ever since. My family didn’t know what to make of my dietary restrictions, just like they didn’t know what to make me for dinner. Some vegetarians define that term loosely by eating fish or chicken, but I myself have not.
Nowadays vegans have lapped vegetarians in the self-congratulatory self-righteous department. You might not have known I was a vegetarian if you have never dined with me (and in recent days I have enjoyed many 6 PM meals with Mavens), because don’t I bring it up all the time. I have a vegan coworker who I lunched with today, and he will work the word “vegan” into most conversations.
After ten or more years of this, I once said out loud, at a meeting with all of us there, “Wait, you are a VEGAN?! I had no idea!” Now I don’t joke about that anymore. At least he doesn’t do CrossFit or host a podcast, two other topics that practitioners will bring up unbidden in almost every conversation.
Sometimes I return to familiar topics the way that Chaucer says a tongue will return to a sore tooth. Tell us more about your radio show, Dr. Andy, I hear someone saying. You haven’t mentioned Poetry Night for thirty seconds. What’s the latest with Kate? Have you taken any long walks lately? Any new signups on your Patreon? Do you have a funny story about one of your students or about one of the celebrities who lived in your basement in the 1980s? People rarely request these topics, nor need they, for I will volunteer them myself.
At a writers conference, people instead bring up their book projects. Sometimes the conference program will indicate the time for the no-host bar and add the admonishment “NO PITCHING.” Everyone there wants to pitch their books, and sometimes the agents need a break. Some agents will flip over their nametag on their conference-provided lanyard to indicate that they are off duty.
But I do love the laughter that comes from the Eclipse Bar and Kitchen at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. I even made it a primary subject of the conference poem, which I wrote on Saturday night after the open mic (58 people signed up) and performed this past Sunday morning.
Peals of Laughter
Hear the deep resonant chimes of The Ferry Building clock tower bells.
Il est huit heur!
It’s always 8 PM somewhere, the beginning of a night out,
or so say the answering bells of tourists on rented electric scooters,
scaring both the nocturnal rats and the diurnal pigeons,
before stopping to stare
at the new floodlit Embarcadero Center pickleball courts.
Hey, those weren’t here at last year’s conference!
The writers notice everything.
The only sound that is more joyous
than tourist scooters or pickleball cheering
is that of the laughter of authors, or so I keep hearing,
for my Hyatt Recency room 334 is right above the hotel bar.
Every February I hear the authors gather there at breakfast
and enjoy eggs over laughter.
Every February I hear the authors gather
there at lunchtime over martinis,
some of them the best martinis they ever had,
sharing business cards, unsolicited pitches, and outrageous laughter.
As we all can hear, the authors gather there late into the evening,
long after I finished writing this poem,
to sound the third floor rooms laughter alarms,
the alarm clocks no one wishes to snooze.
To the smiling authors staring up at a Hyatt ceiling,
higher than the belfry of Grace Cathedral;
to the joking authors
attempting auctioneer-speed elevator pitches
in elevators they discover ascend too quickly to the VIP rooms
that are imagined to be briming with agents;
to the thunderous back-slapping authors
visiting the Hyatt atrium Eclipse Kitchen and Bar,
every hour is happy hour.
Risible writers, I consider your insistent words
a revolt against silence.
Jocular journal keepers, I consider your comical words
a revolt against mediocrity.
Mirthful wordsmiths, agented and unagented
synthesists who can create anything,
lead the revolt against weekday jobs,
for on this weekend,
lit by the low, faux moonlight of a moonlit bar,
the only traffic that slows us down
is that of hopeful authors who traffic in inspiration,
who traffic in community,
and who traffic in our February palace home’s
raucous, echoing, creative, literate, and irrepressible laughter.
I hope you enjoyed the weekend. To commemorate it, I wrote at least one pub quiz question about U.S. presidents, even though most of the early ones seem less heroic today than they did when we were reading their illustrated biographies as children.
In addition to topics raised above, expect also questions about the following:
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on snacks that go well with tea, winds, Rocky Mountains, keyboards, Oscar-winners, monologues, shooting guards, waves, vibes, popular TV shows, salmon, years, clouds, ceremonies, U.S. states, musical films, forests, European countries, Nebraska, bees, pies, long songs, horses, American sports, newsmen in the shed, billboards, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to the Brooke, Jeannie, Becky, Franklin, and More Cow Bell. I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of supporters. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
The rain has stopped for the day, so I look forward to performing tonight’s trivia contest outdoors. Will you join me there?
Best,
Dr. Andy
- Film. What British actress had important supporting roles in the following 2010 films: Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1, and The Kings Speech, for which she was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress?
- Countries of the World in 2021. True or False: The three countries in this sentence, Poland, Ukraine, and The United Kingdom, are arranged in order by population from lowest to highest.
- Desserts. What coffee-flavored Italian dessert is made of ladyfingers dipped in coffee, layered with a whipped mixture of eggs, sugar and mascarpone, flavored with cocoa?