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Hello world –
Quite literally, this is my first post – Sam and I are sharing it for purposes of sharing news with friends and offering tidbits of entertainment. Let us know if we do a better job of this online than in person – we can become blogging recluses instead of hanging out if it works better.

At any rate, I feel a need to comment on a St. Louis activity that continues to make me feel like an outsider: Trivia. I have played trivia in other cities, but outside of St. Louis, what passes for trivia is a casual affair – usually the stakes go no higher than a round of drinks, and there is certainly no serious competition, hard feelings, or outside food to the degree seen in St. Louis.

In St. Louis, first, one must be invited to trivia, or involved in an organization hosting a Trivia Night. These events are always fundraisers, which a specific set-up: you can register a team of eight people, each of whom usually pays a fee of $20. If you cannot find eight people, you can risk showing up with less than eight members, because some people show up as singles, just ready to join a partial team. They are usually members of the church/synagogue/childrens non-profit that want to support the fundraiser, but don’t believe they should create their own team. This strikes me as very strange…counting on strangers to allow you to join their team, hoping your skills are up to par (or beyond) the other team members, or that your new teammates don’t drag your score down. Other etiquette involves bringing massive amounts of junk foods: fried chicken, cakes, macaroons, cheetos, twizzlers, iced tea, two liter bottles of soda, sausage, casseroles, dips of every kind imaginable, and anything else one might think would clot an artery. [I must point out, I fail this etiquette point each time, constantly forgetting the courtesy of bringing even so much as a bag of potato chips. Luckily, my various teammates have forgiven me each time.] You must also bring paper, pens, and perhaps wear a hat. Be sure to yell out wrong answers to throw off other teams, and give shouts of “Yay!” or “Boo!” randomly, to throw off other teams about how well you are doing [nevermind that the scores are written on an easel to the side of the MC]. And if you insist on an answer that turns out to be wrong, well, you better hope these people really like you. You may not be coming back.

Despite all this, I find it a fascinating cultural event – entirely MidWestern, entirely Judeo-Christian, and with the etiquette involved, entirely unique to St. Louis. Luckily for the anthropologist in me, Saturday night’s trivia came packed with drama:

My two friends, R & J, who invited me, had done this particular trivia night the year before. That year, they opted for bringing a partial team, and added two women to their team who showed up as singles. It turns out that the team did reasonably well, winning a gift certificate for eight to tour the Schlafly brewery. The two women were very excited, and insisted on giving their names and numbers so that they could join whenever the tour was scheduled by the other members of the team. My friends, unfortunately, were very lazy, and have not, even a year later, used the certificate. They mentioned all of this to me before we walked in because there was a chance the two women would be there this year, and wonder why no one had called them about taking the tour.

That would be an understatement. By the third round, one of the two women came up, and interrogated my friends on their silence over the past year. She brusquely demanded that they call her, if it was actually true that they hadn’t used the gift certificate. Despite a great deal of disdain for R & J, she insisted that she would be going on that damn brewery tour. She rewrote her name and number for them, and huffed off. It affected our concentration, which is why, despite good effort all around, we only made fifth place out of 20 or so teams.

I have to wonder: if you are so angry with your teammates for not calling you, why would you want to invite more discomfort by spending several hours together at a brewery? Wouldn’t you rather forget the whole thing? Or demand the price of a beer or two to “buy out” your share? Why insist on spending more time with people you have told to their faces you are angry with them?

Alas, this is the mystery of St. Louis trivia. Treat the evening casually at your own risk. Bring junk food to share. Shout out wrong answers to throw other teams off. And by all means, you better share any prize you get with your teammates, even if you met them for the first time that same night.

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