Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Many people don’t know that the Steinbeck book title Of Mice and Men comes from a phrase coined by the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns. The relevant late stanza of Burns’ poem “To a Mouse” requires a bit of translation:
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
When Burns uses the compound word “thy-lane” to mean “on your own,” he identifies with the mouse whose winter nest has just been unexpectedly upturned by the speaker’s plow.
The simpler our needs, like those of the mouse, Burns suggests, the easier it is for us to recover from unexpected challenges. When we seek to exert control, and to set ambitious schedules for ourselves (I’m guilty of the latter), then mishaps can quickly become seeming disasters.
This week I’ve been meeting with couples to help them plan their wedding days. A registered minister, I get to officiate three weddings this summer, including my first same-sex wedding this coming Saturday. The people I counsel during such meetings usually look to me for some wisdom about ceremonies and relationships. Sometimes I start to offer the new couples reflections on my own wedding day, but I quickly realize that the perspective of that day seems so remote to the eager young betrotheds whom I seek to advise. What can be learned from a 1963 or 1992 wedding story? For our part, Kate and I were joined by seven parents, five of whom participated by reading original poetry or stories during the ceremony. The patient congregation seemed to enjoy the talent show.
As atypical as that day was, my parents’ wedding day may have been even more unusual and ambitious in a different way. Davey Marlin-Jones and Mary Ternes married at 10 (joined only by a minister, and a couple friends who served as witnesses and offered a toast). Then the newlyweds watched the afternoon showing of Lawrence of Arabia, a 222 minute long film, not counting the overture, intermission, and exit music. Then they rushed on to a fancy Italian restaurant before running out the door to see She Loves Me on Broadway.
My mom enjoyed the movie, but slept through most of the play (because of exhaustion, rather than because of the quality of the production, which won Jack Cassidy a Tony). Only when my mom told me this story last week did I understand the importance of the production’s title song, “She Loves Me,” being played on the record player so often in my family home during the early 1970s. The song triggered memories of a happier time.
Well, as the poet and divorce statistics remind us, our best laid plans “gang aft agley.” While my mom slept through the original production, my son Jukie and I endeavored to see the Davis Shakespeare Ensemble’s excellent presentation of She Loves Me this past Thursday. Well, we saw most of it. Late in the play, Jukie decided to “harmonize,” rather loudly, with the actors, necessitating our quick exit, just before the character Georg was joyously to sing the show’s most famous number. I missed it.
Walking the greenbelts of Davis with Jukie yesterday, I wistfully whistled “She Loves Me,” wishing I could share my theatre experiences – and so many others – with my late theatre director father. Reviewing the song again via YouTube (for we have the world’s songs available to us from any smartphone), I reflected on these lyrics, thought of my wife Kate, and remembered that not all plans go awry:
She loves me
And to my amazement
I love it knowing that she loves me
She loves me,
True, she doesn’t show it
How could she,
When she doesn’t know it.
Yesterday she loathed me, ah!
Now today she likes me, ah!
And tomorrow, tomorrow…
AAAAAAAAAAAh!
Not tomorrow, but a week from tomorrow, Kate and the bookend kids return from Chicago. She just saw a production of Godspell (written by Academy Award-winner Stephen Schwartz, who once lived in my basement), and we will have many stories to tell about music, theatre, and what Schwartz in a song title once called the “Gifts of Love.” We should all welcome such gifts, I think, as well as the gifts of poetry, theatre, and music. The arts can play the important role of helping us remember and relive the emotional highlights of our lives, and thus allow us to cross the gulfs of distance caused by distance, time, and death.
Tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the effect of time on data, Central America, guitars, the Wonders of the Modern World, ashes, dark shadows, books that should remain closed, the presence of God, Asian leopards, sitcom families, stature casting, pinball machines, overalls, deer hangouts, causation badges, hotels, my frostier cribbage (incomplete anagram hint), Liverpool, 12 multiplied by a number with a bunch of zeroes in it, Percy, Pearl, the population of American cities, Frederick Douglass Boulevard, geology (hello geologists), poetic mononyms, showering, basketball and football, only daughters, balloons, Ireland, and Shakespeare.
I hope you can join us tonight – we always have more fun when you are there.
Your Quizmaster
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Here are five questions from last week’s quiz:
- Mottos and Slogans. What product unveiled in 1967 used the advertising slogan “Other potato chips just don’t stack up”?
- Newspaper Headlines. Yesterday the New York Times Editorial Board called for the federal legalization of what?
- The United Nations. The number of past and current Secretaries General of the United Nations is equal to the atomic number of oxygen. What is this only positive Fibonacci number, aside from 1, that is a perfect cube?
- Pop Culture – Music. What’s the M name of the Canadian reggae fusion band that has the country’s top hit this week, titled “Rude”?
- Sports. Thai, Burmese, Indian and French are all sub-categories of what specific sport?
P.S. Poetry Night returns to Davis this coming Thursday with a celebration of the Blue Moon Literary and Art Review. Join us at 8 PM for poems and stories, an open mic, and then the after party right here at the Pub (starting around 10).
