Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
I have stuck exclusively to non-fiction, but I’m trying something new with this week’s newsletter.
We loved that our Bikram hot yoga class was taught by a husband and wife team. She was tall and impossibly flexible with her long dark hair packed into a bun, while he was short and muscular with a blond mustache that I overheard one of the women in class call “unfortunate.”
She led the class, but he was able to keep up, certainly more easily than the rest of us. He told me once that his wife let him film her as she worked through the specific Bikram sequence of 26 poses and two breathing exercises in their living room. In the heat of the studio, he would quietly name each pose just before she assumed the relevant position, as if proving to the rest of us that he had memorized his lines.
Sometimes he would comment out loud. When she would say “Dandayamana-Bibhaktapada-Paschimotthanasana,” pronouncing the words as if she had spent the day studying Sanskrit, he would sometimes inspire polite laughter with his translations: “This is the ‘Standing Separate Leg Stretching Pose.’ When I first learned it, I called this the ‘Collapsing on the Floor Separate Leg Stretching Pose.’”
She once told us that they could bring their daughter in a car seat because the heat in the yoga studio would ease her to sleep, providing the two parents their only opportunity to do some “adulting” in public. The moms and I would check on little Luna sometimes, smiling at the beads of sweat on her brow, as if she had been working hard on growing and on inspiring her parents’ smiles.
* * *
The pandemic changed us. When I first returned for hot yoga, as my bones creaked, I noticed across the prescribed social distance that our instructors’ smiles were gone, first obscured behind masks, and then still absent after they had taken steps taken towards unmasking. Luna sat at a little table in the corner, herself wearing an aquamarine surgeon’s mask, coloring in COVID-19 symptom list fliers.
Hoping to protect themselves, the instructors kept their distance even from one another, as if they weren’t breathing the apartment air they shared with little Luna every day. The yoga studio seemed hotter than it had been before.
One of the moms gave our yogis a welcome back card that was taped open on the mirrored wall above Luna’s coloring station. It shared a haunting Rumi verse:
Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;
How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.
Luna’s mom increasingly seemed fixated on her own horizon. Soon she would stop making eye contact with any of us, or with her husband. Then one week, Luna and her mom stopped attending, leaving only the dad to teach our classes. He had shaved his mustache.
Last week, maskless Luna, seemingly having grown twice her previous size, was back in our studio, wearing earbuds and fixating on her phone. The little table and the moonlight card were gone from her corner.
We were surprised to see Luna’s mom arrive in civilian clothes and a fresh manicure. Luna removed her earbuds and insisted to her mom that the session wasn’t over.
“Let’s go.”
“But they miss you. They want you to lead them. We all do.”
After they left, our instructor said, “Let’s try Supta-Vajrasana, also known as the “fixed firm pose.”
All of us had trouble. It was so hot in that room.
Poetry Night takes place on Thursday, October 5th at 7 at the Natsoulas Gallery. We have a famous physicist who is also a poet in Lisa Rosenberg as well as a poet whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry in Amy Glynn. Find details at the website Poetry in Davis.
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s Pub Quiz will feature questions on the following: perfect fruits, the definitions of a furlong, moon rings, ekphrastic novels, Kurt Russell, empty squares, Oscar-winners from four different decades, unlucky shots, posthumous film appearances, uses for wool, animated film favorites, famous channels, microbes, seven-letter H words, memories, long place names, sports stories, badgers, California colleges, cathedrals, conspiracies, billboards, standard issues, unexpected vacations, seasonings, notable edicts, California cities, drink choices, mayors, taxi choices, Chinese proverbs, singer-songwriters, current events, books and authors, and Shakespeare.
Thanks to the far-flung Original Vincibles, as well as to Quizimodo, Summer Brains, The Outside Agitators, Gena Harper and others who support the Pub Quiz on Patreon. Sometimes I will share a bonus Pub Quiz question there, such as a bonus question last week about Dianne Feinstein, whom Kate and I saw with Barbara Boxer in Sacramento in 1992, the Year of the Woman, the year we got married. I appreciate your considering supporting this Patreon endeavor!
Best,
Dr. Andy
P.S. Here are four questions from last week’s pub quiz:
- California Lakes. California’s largest man-made lake, covering a total surface area of 47 square miles, and which sits on the upper Sacramento River, was established to generate hydroelectricity. Name the lake.
- Superfans. Mariann from Brooklyn is evidently the number one superfan of what media personality?
- Pop Culture – Music: Female Artists. What singer-songwriter who has earned 15 Grammy Awards (about half as many as Beyoncé) was named by Billboard as the R&B/Hip-Hop Artist of the Decade (2000s)?
- Sports. Born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1943, what NFL quarterback led the Jets to win one AFL championship and one Super Bowl, their only championships?