Screw Thursdays. I'm sure about half of you reading this are among the lucky ones who have class-free Fridays. For those of you who were intelligent in your registering last spring, Thursday is the beginning of the weekend. For the Lush and the other pitiful souls like her, Thursday is a big tease. Sure, Thursday night is fun, but Friday morning bio and anthro classes are rough enough without a hangover. Thanks for nothing, distribution requirements.
That said, the Lush is not opposed to during-the-week drinking. I take my work pretty seriously and as such, after only a couple days of classes I am completely wiped. Taking six credits will do that to you. (Yes, I know I am the worst senior ever.) So by the end of Tuesday, I am usually ready for a stiff drink... or four.
After successfully scrambling to put together a paper for Monday and cramming for a Tuesday morning midterm, it was one of those Tuesdays last week. The Lush mustered her fellow mid-week burnouts and made her way to PJ Ryan's in Teele Square - an easy stumbling distance back to both on- and off-campus abodes.
We arrived as the trivia crowd was trickling in and secured the last open chairs at the bar. Ordering our first round from Allan, the most attentive bartender around, we immediately set to work brainstorming our team name. It is strangely satisfactory to get a chuckle from the rest of the bar when your name is announced in the standings. Being the only girl on our team at the time, I had to exercise my veto power more than once for some unprintable names. We finally settled on "Team Awful Waffle" - of "Salute Your Shorts" fame (if you don't know, you didn't watch enough TV growing up) - although "Everybody Gets Laid" a la "PCU" was a close second.
Pub Quiz Night at PJ Ryan's is almost always packed, so the thin crowd that night was a clear indication that the Lush was not the only one with midterms to deal with that week. Even so, the competition was a still solid 14 teams strong, so we had to put our game faces on. Teams consist of up to six players (in theory - some unabashedly cheat that rule) and it costs $5 a team to play. The winners split $50 and the last-place finishers are treated to a round of free shots, so the stakes are high.
The Quizmaster, who some love but the Lush finds incredibly irritating and unfunny (yet fun to heckle), stepped up to the microphone at 10:05 and the first of six rounds began. All four questions and the bonus for a round are given at its outset, and teams have about ten minutes to come up with the answers or to eavesdrop for their neighbors' answers (small bar, close quarters). The cocky among you should beware; this ain't Jeopardy! These questions are random, hard and subject to the crazy whims of the Quizmaster, probably one of the most random people alive as evidenced by the recent category "Swear or Chair?," in which teams had to differentiate Swedish curse words from Ikea products.
After the first two rounds Team Awful Waffle was ranked a respectable sixth, mostly because the engineers in our group knew the six most abundant gasses in the atmosphere. The Lush was able to get a random question on some NHL stats and some pure dumb luck - who knew Denny's was the official sponsor of the Professional Bowling Tour?
After Round Two, however, Team Awful Waffle began to slide. We got every question wrong in Round Three and although we knew that topaz was the birthstone of November, we had dropped significantly in the rankings by the end of Round Four. This slide is attributable to two factors. First, as the night goes on and the beers rack up, the old concentration tends to wane. Secondly, past friendliness to another PJ Ryan's regular came back to bite us.
About two months ago, my friend Josh and I were cornered into talking to a fellow patron - we'll call him BDSM - during the pub quiz. This guy liked to talk ... but not just to talk, to share. His favorite topic? His tattoos. Poor Josh had the misfortune of asking what one of them meant - Bondage Dominant Slave Master (BDSM). Uptight, close-minded suburbanites that we both are, we were horrified. Hey, this isn't a sex column.
We had managed to avoid our sexually-adventurous friend until last Tuesday when he wandered in midway through Round Three and took up residence at the other end of the bar where he proceeded to stare at me and Josh for the rest of the night. This, too, hurt our concentration, because we were terrified.
Around Round Four, it is normally time for a big decision. Should you go for the win or just bite it and go for the free shots? Still sitting comfortably in the middle of the pack, we decided to go for it. We surged in Round Five, with our stunning ability to identify early '90s one-hit wonders, and we got every question in Round Six.
Every question except for the bonus question. The Round Six bonus has a 100 point swing, so it's pretty crucial. Debate broke out in Team Awful Waffle. The Lush was certain that Montana was the 41st state. The rest of Awful Waffle was not so sure. I would like to say they should have believed me, but people who know me can tell you that my dismal performance once upon a time in a category entitled "Pokemon or Prescription Drug?" proves otherwise. I was adamant; they went with Arizona. And I was right We finished 12th, two spots from the shots. We bolted in shame... and to avoid BDSM.
So next time you a feeling that midweek itch in your liver, head over to Teele on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. The crowd tends to be very Tufts-heavy, with a few twenty- and thirty-somethings (and former chemistry faculty member Chris Morse) thrown in for good measure. Hey, you compete with those other Jumbos for grades, why not compete for free shots at night?
