Another busy week of volunteering, pubbing and ‘ladies who lunch’-ing, plus some quality time with Bagpipe Guy (wink, wink) but none of that’s important.
We won the Quiz! I am not making this up. (Okay. The aforementioned ‘quality time’ was very rewarding – for me. Never mind, that’s all you’re getting on that subject.) We actually won.
Bald Rob transported down from Strange-o and came with Pinkie, Terry and me, so it was Cheese Boy and the four of us. Romeo and Juliet apparently started shagging (again) and forgot the time.
Our team name this week was ‘An Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman, A Jew and a Bitch’. As I’ve mentioned, most of the teams take Quiz Night very seriously. And they have boring names like ‘the Scooby Doos’, ‘the Scary Fairies’, and ‘Forgotten’. Cheese Boy told Leyla, the Quiz Master, that we should get extra points for coming up with a different clever and really hilarious name every week. The Irishman, the Englishman, the Jew and the Bitch strongly seconded him.
I really don’t think the quiz was easier this week; we all just seemed to be ‘in the zone’. There were a lot of ‘American’ questions, which I aced confidently. Even the picture round, which we’re terrible at, went well. One of the pictures was President Ford, but you had to name whom he succeeded. Quite a few teams screwed that one up. There was a ‘real football’ question- Name the team in Washington, DC. I showed everyone the pictures on my mobile of me and Mike pouring beer on the infamous ‘Redskins Suck!” jacket.
Another was ‘Which US President served the longest?’ I immediately said ‘Franklin Roosevelt’, then I worried that maybe I was absent the day we studied John Quincy Adams or James Polk. One of the team members from the team everybody despises started taking the piss out of me. “Do you know that one?” he smirked. “Sod off” I replied in my best Italian Jewish American Princess persona, “Of course I know.”
A later one was “President Harry S. Truman loaned those losers who are not Americans 65 million dollars in 1949 to build what in New York City?” (I paraphrased a bit there.) “Well?” asked the Scotsman, the Irishman, the Alien, etc. “Hoover Dam” I replied straight faced. Then, “God, you’re dumb. The Hoover Dam is in Nevada or Wyoming or one of those goddamned wilderness states! It’s the U.N.” And there was a question on ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.
A British question – ‘How much do inmates in HMS Prisons earn each week?’ I cracked up the table by immediately saying “I’ll ring Bald Chris to ask, shall I?” Yeah…not funny; but it was last night.
Pinkie got the anagram in like a second; it was ‘Playboy Mansion’. We got the connection round (usually we’re clueless) and I got all five of the Michelle Pfeiffer leading men. This was pretty amazing since I know almost nothing about the cinema. I’m still haven’t seen more than the first twenty minutes of ‘Titanic’, and I finally saw ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Gone With the Wind’ last year. I think Humphrey Bogart (he plays Rick, if you haven’t seen it yet) should definitely get an Oscar.
It was another of those bittersweet memories of my former life that seem to insinuate themselves in my ‘new life’ without warning. When Jerry started to really deteriorate, he liked to watch movies to pass the time. He didn’t feel like talking and he was too uncomfortable to even lay by the pool. He really, really had the hots for Michelle Pfeiffer; she was in the top three of his “Hottie Index”, along with Maria Shriver and Sade (don’t ask). So he was usually dozing in Morphine LaLa Land with a Michelle Pfeiffer film playing on the big screen telly. I guess snippets snuck into my subconscious. So Jerry helped us win the Quiz, pretty decent of him considering that I spent his birthday night with (really topnotch) Bagpipe Guy… playing Scrabble. Really, J.C.; you always did have a very vivid imagination.
So we won. We were all hugging and kissing, and Pinkie was crying. (She cries at the drop of a hat or like when characters on Coronation Street bite the bullet). It was only a quick glimpse, but I believe Bald Rob’s antennae are hidden in his ears. We each won a free drink and 30 million quid. Well, okay, it worked out to five quid each, but it was the thrill of victory, not the vast amount of lolly.
BooBoo, who was home swotting for her exams, rang to congratulate us and we all started texting our phone lists to share the news. I texted Kilt Guy and Cheese Boy rang Sandra, who mumbled “Um Brgggle Spifle Slurp…not now…we’re shagging again, but well done anyway!”
As we motored back to Weybridge, high on our success (plus the copious amounts of alcohol consumed), I did have to point out to the blokes that given the fact that the average British guy spends 972 hours every single week watching ‘footie’ on telly at their local, they don’t seem to know very much about it and stare blankly at each other, hoping one of them will come up with anything to write down.
“If this was an ‘American’ quiz, and the questions were about ‘real’ football, I would know absolutely all the answers, because Jeano knows football” I told them modestly.
Oh, to be in England 