Dear Friends of the Pub Quiz,
Watching Gene Kelly makes me want to learn to dance like him, while watching Oscar Levant makes me want to learn to play the piano while leading an orchestra. Watching Leslie Caron makes me want to pick up a book or take a yoga class.
I suppose that I am intended to feel this way. An Oscar-winning film like An American in Paris (which my family and I saw yesterday on the big screen) will typically introduce filmgoers to characters with which they can identify, or wish to emulate, even if outside of their fantasy worlds those filmgoers can’t carry a tune or walk across a ballroom without tripping.
I again confirmed yesterday what my mom once remarked to me: Gene Kelly is athletic and adorable. And as I remember my dad remarking to me, the music of George and Ira Gershwin sustains the film. It seems silly that I would share so many aesthetic heroes with my parents, but I continue to be influenced by a childhood home that was filled with a love of film and of the music of film and stage musicals. For example, we had an eight-track tape that had the soundtrack of Singin’ In the Rain on one “side,” and the Judy Garland / Fred Astaire film Easter Parade on the other “side.”
The beauty (or, for some people, horror) of the eight-track player is that any album started on this device would play continuously until it was ejected. Whether with dolls, blocks, or even pipe cleaners, I remember playing and playing to that music for hours, the eight-track continuing all the way until bedtime.
Those were simpler times. Today, we have so many choices in the products that we consume, whether they be the shampoos on Safeway shelves or the myriad video offerings from Netflix and other curators of online content. In his 2008 book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink tells us that the world of abundance and prosperity provided by left-brain thinkers has led to thought-workers increasingly turning to something beyond consumer goods. Our world now places “a premium on less rational, more [right-brain-]Directed sensibilities — beauty, spirituality, emotion.”
Another lover of movies and music, Martin Luther King, Jr. also recognized a hierarchy of values that privileged the human over the material. He once said, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
While we reflect on Leslie Caron or Martin Luther King, Jr., let us hope to live in a world where not all our heroes have come of age in the 20th century or before.
In addition to topics raised above, tonight’s pub quiz will feature questions on the wings of energy, rebuffed slaveholders, expensive conveniences, rubber, dogmatic haloes, things that are only metaphorically broken, determined practice, cross streets, Beverly Hills, young stocks and bonds, mammalian contexts, people named after farmers, details, big cities, public libraries, old and compassionate, economic inequality, hearts, railroads in the west, snakes, fancy dancers, DVD sales trends overseas, Bible stories, Irish culture, the lifetime of Willow Smith, the attributes of greatness, oddsmakers, unusual cars, a clock’s passage of time, vitamins, human pairings, stories in the Post and the Times, chocolate, teeth, and Shakespeare.
I hope you can join us at the Pub Quiz tonight. Happy Martin Luther King Day!
Your Quizmaster
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P.S. Here are three questions from last week’s quiz:
1. Books and Authors. What is the best-selling novel ever published by the author Charles Dickens?
2. Irish Culture. Within five degrees Fahrenheit, what is the record high temperature for the island of Ireland?
3. Mascots. Steely McBeam is the mascot for whom?
P.P.S. “As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation — either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course.” Martin Luther King Jr.