Trivia Night @ Limelight

For once my ragtag group of local associates got motivated to do something on a weekend night besides sit in the Firehouse and wait for a fight to break out. While sitting in the overcast drizzle pool side yesterday the idea was hatched to attend Trivia Night at the Limelight. My boy Jordan, Syd's old man, used to be a regular there and said it was a pretty fun and laid back time. Basically team's can be any size, the only ask 16-20 questions over a two hour period and you can be out of there by 11 PM even if it goes a little long. Sounds pretty alright to me, so I was eager to check it out. And based on my propencity to know something about everything, the rest of the poolside smokers were also eager for me to go.

The plan called for everyone to meet up about 8 PM to acquire a table, space becomes limited if you don't get there somewhat early. Considering this is a bar, getting there early isn't exactly a bad thing. The team we had planned on fielding last night consisted of the following people and their specialities:

Joolie: Celebrity gossip
Mike: Sports
Erika: Obscure Entertainment
Eric: More than you would think he knows (his words)
Jordan: Punk Rock, Reggae, Sports
Me: Music, TV and Film
Sydney: The runner and scribe for the team.

Prior to game time a bit of drama broke out back at the casa de Eric and it forced us to go with a smaller team. Losing Eric could have proven to be costly, but we were still confident about our chances. And Joolie maintained her position as a player, opting to follow through on her committment rather than address some domestic issues with her beau. This turned out to be a very beneficial move considering that one of the questions was related to the movie Gramma's Boy, a movie Joolie recently watched and loved.

The game play throughout the night was exciting and dramatic. We started out of the gate pretty strong, but somewhere towards the middle we began second guessing our answers and made some slips. Jonas Grumby is the Skipper from Gilligan's Island's real character name, a Whale Shark is the largest fish in the sea and Allen Iverson scored 40 points in his first 4 games as a rookie. What saddens me about this run is that I provided the Professor confidently to the group on the Gilligan's Island question, Joolie and I have been watching tons of Sea Life documentaries and had nothing on the Whale Shark question (the team pushed for the embarassing answer of Tuna) and I'm from Philly and told the team that I never heard of AI performing a feat like that. So now I'm feeling pressure to rebound our team and it's not the best feeling in the world.

Right before halftime we regained our composure, I wound up performing in a music quick answer match with 1 member from all teams and came in second earning us 15 much needed points. And we got a couple of gimmie questions, to give us the illusion we were still in the hunt for first. When the game came to an end, all the teams were told how many points they had to wager on the final question, just like Jeopardy. We weren't in the top three much to our dismay. But we had 195 points to wager and we decided to wager them all and go for broke. The question had us line up country of origin for dog species, and originally we needed to get 4 of 6 without being provided anything but the dog breed. We were confident, both Jordan and Mike are into dogs, but then the host decides to give us the 6 countries of origin and we have to get all 6 matches correct to win. Getting them all right turned out to be easy. Way too easy. That's why every team practically got the answer right. We were done. Toast. At the hands of the trivia master. Fucker.

All in all, this was a good time and I'm anxious to work it into the monthly rotation. The Limelight has cheap beer specials during the trivia contest and the food there seemed alright from what I saw on Mike and Erika's plates. Everyone else was happy about the evening as well, so I should be able to get a couple players to return in the future. I give it 6 months before I'm a trivia night legend in this town.