Dear Friends,
When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., I assumed that vibrant culture belonged mostly to large cities. Big cities like mine had the museums, the used bookstores, the music venues, repertory movie theaters, and the strange conversations in lobbies and on sidewalks. I loved all that, and when I first imagined living in a smaller city, I worried that I would have to give some of it up.
This past weekend proved me wrong.
On Friday evening at The Sofia in Sacramento, I attended an “In a Nutshell” storytelling event produced by my old friend the comedian and author Keith Lowell Jensen. Taking on the theme of “Cults, Crackpots, and Swindlers,” the four storytellers, Glynn Washington, Johnny Taylor Jr., JP Frary, and Holly James, shaped lived experience into timing, revelation, and surprise. They knew when to delay, when to interrupt a pattern, and when to let the audience complete the thought just before the punchline arrives. One story circled its ending so patiently that the punchline felt less delivered than discovered. My daughter and I left feeling we’d seen a master class in narrative economy.
On Saturday, I joined poets, musicians, and friends of the Sacramento Poetry Center for the Save the Press fundraiser in the park-like garden of Bob Stanley and Joyce Hsiao. The cause was wonderfully concrete: helping transport and restore an early 1900s Chandler & Price letterpress (the kind that needs to be painstakingly hand-fed paper, ink, and moveable type) so that SPC can make broadsides, posters, and fine poetry-art pieces. I performed a poem about this: poetry, often accused of floating too far above practical life, will soon have not only weight, but also gears, rollers, ink, and transport costs.
That afternoon featured a poetry pub quiz (Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson were cousins?), delicious food, about 100 poets, and the beloved Davis poet and dancer Allegra Silberstein. This 95-year-old Poet Laureate Emerita of the City of Davis has attended most of the nearly 500 readings I have hosted over the last two decades. At Poetry Night, the smiling nonagenarian always reads last at the open mic, and people clap for her the longest. Surrounded by poets and music in a Sacramento garden, she again reminded us that communities form around the people who return. As Walt Whitman said, “To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.” Allegra is both.
And then on Sunday, I hosted Stories on Stage Davis at Sudwerk. There, actors read fiction aloud in (or, in this case, outside) my favorite brewery, though literature has almost always needed rooms, venues, voices, food, and listeners. The printed story returns to the air, or, in Sunday’s case, the gale-force winds. The actor lends breath and timing to the author’s sentences. The audience, many of us with beverages nearby, receives fiction as a communal event rather than a private errand.
Across these three days, the categories kept crossing. Comedians became memoirists. Poets became fundraisers and preservationists. A garden became a literary salon, and a brewery courtyard became a theatre. I love these porous borders. A city’s cultural life grows stronger when people stop guarding their genres and start sharing their chairs, microphones, mailing lists, and Saturdays.
I grew up in Washington D.C., in the shadow of the National Mall, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the 9:30 Club. Now that I live in Davis and move often between Davis and Sacramento, I recognize that these communities are making the culture we live in. They ask us to attend, to host, to introduce, to clap, to buy the book, to fund and move the press, to pass the hat, to bring a friend or a daughter, and to thank the people who set up the chairs and stick around to stack them afterwards.
What an unusually warm Wednesday evening we will enjoy tonight, especially those who join us outside for the pub quiz at Sudwerk! Expect 31 questions on a variety of topics you should know something about, this week with questions on conveyances. Today’s pub quiz reading copy comes in at 810 words, one of my slimmest.
In addition to topics raised above and below, expect questions tonight on the following: abducted fiancées, alien invasions, atomic numbers, beloved beaches, bells, bored boys, city councils, conflicted interiors, convicts, cookies, cooling towers, cowbells, cryogenic police states, disaster brinks, emotional songs, fashionistas, foster kids, international assassins, intermission distractions, jackals, jazz notables, limestone conflicts, literary addicts, London sights, magical buses, maritime provinces, new market pioneers, oranges, pet foods, piano movers, playfulness, political campaigns, prehistoric wanderers, practitioners, relocations, riots, San Francisco schools, schoolteachers, segmented classrooms, sensory nerves, slender transformations, sonar surveys, Southern California teenagers, stolen boxes, stripes, submariners, substitute teachers, suits, swamps, the European Union, underwater tunnels, unlikely twins, unwelcome weights, war games, watchdogs, current events, and Shakespeare.
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Thanks to all the new players joining us at the live quizzes and to all the patrons who have been enjoying fresh Pub Quiz content. Certain friends have upgraded their memberships recently, which I really appreciate.
We are now past 100 Patreon members, including people who have upgraded their paid memberships! You know who you are, and I salute you! I also incidentally salute Cathy, Christine, Bobby, Esther, James, Damian, Jim, and Meebles! Thanks also to new subscribers Prescott, Bill and Diane, Tamara, Megan, Michael, Janet, Jasmine, Joey, Carly, The X-Ennial Falcons, and The Nevergiveruppers! Every week I check the Patreon to see if there is someone new to thank. Maybe next week it will be you! I also thank The Original Vincibles, Summer Brains, Still Here for the Shakesbeer, The Outside Agitators, John Poirier’s team Quizimodo, Gena Harper, the conversationally entertaining dinner companions and bakers of marvelous and healthy treats, The Mavens. Hello to Bill and to Jude’s dad. Thanks in particular to my paid subscribers on Substack. Thanks to everyone who supports the Pub Quiz on Patreon. I would love to add your name or that of your team to the list of pub quiz boosters. Also, I sometimes remember to add an extra hint on Patreon. I appreciate your backing this pub quiz project of mine!
I also want to recognize those who visit my Substack the most often, including Elaine, Michael, Luna, Jean, Ron, Myrna, Maria, to whom I send sustained compassion. S
Best,
Dr. Andy
Trivia from Last Week:
- Current Events – Names in the News. Olympian Ryan Lochte has joined Missouri State as an assistant coach in what sport?
- Sports. The NFL has announced the two teams that will compete in this coming season’s Monday Night Footballopener. Name just one of them.
- Shakespeare. Hamlet contains the Bard’s best-known ghost. What play contains his second-best known ghost?
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For over 50 years, Meals on Wheels Yolo County has prepared and delivered freshly cooked meals to seniors in Yolo County. in 2026, MOW Yolo County is providing approximately 1,200 aging adults in the region with the nutrition and social engagement they need to eat well and age well – safely and with dignity. Join the Mavens in supporting Meals on Wheels Yolo County!
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Both these institutions do a lot of good and are in need of financial support in these dangerous times. Planned Parenthood provides primary care including contraception, hormonal therapy and sexually transmitted infection screens and treatment, as well as pregnancy counseling.
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