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What Is...Bar Trivia?
Sunday Feb 13, 2005.
By Erin Brereton
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When my friend Betsy recently asked me to fill in for one of her team regulars at Schoolyard Tavern's trivia night, I quickly agreed: After all, I figured it would be a cinch. I'm quick on my feet. I read. And I was fresh off a recent stint in Florida where I logged plenty of Game Show network hours (Grandpa no likee the other channels). I pictured buzzers, note cards, daily doubles. And while Schoolyard's weekly trivia night isn't quite that dramatic, it is a hell of a lot of fun. But um, also kinda hard. I'd like to flatter myself and think that Betsy asked me to participate because she felt my wide knowledge of various subjects would be the perfect compliment to her team, but really, after the first round (in which the only question I was confident enough to answer involved a "Star Trek" character), I began to think it was because I live down the street from the bar. But I didn't dwell on that long, preoccupied with worried thoughts about why I knew the answer to a question involving a "Star Trek" character. Each set of questions is read aloud by a boisterous and personable MC as participants write down answers. It sort of plays out like a grade school test: Your team huddles over a sheet of questions, arguing over the possible answers, and then, when time is up, you trade with the table next to you and they grade you. Bonus questions serve as extra credit so that, in the same whacked way fourth grade worked, you can miss half the questions on a test and still score an 85. There were seven rounds, which seemed to get increasingly harder as the evening went on. (Unless of course you find matching ship captains up to their vessel easy…sha wha?) Yet despite the heightened sense of competition in the air (frustrated, one table left mid-trivia round in a huff), everyone is surprisingly friendly…until the skillet cookie round, when all contestants battle for a bubbling dessert that is apparently as difficult to win as it is prized ("Oh, the skillet cookie round!" Betsy hissed to me as it began. "We've never won this.") True to form, the question carnie soon announced another table had won, though after a tough battle we did come in second overall, scoring a $25 gift certificate to the bar. Big money, no whammies, indeed. The night is an event: With $5 sandwiches or 1/2 price appetizers and drink deals, the teams hunker down and settle in for the night. Of course, Schoolyard isn't the only bar to offer weekly trivia: Others do too, such as Ginger's Ale House which has trivia on Sunday nights, and The Local Option, which has trivia on Wednesday nights. Many have a small fee (Schoolyard charges $5 to enter) but the payoff is so much more: the chance to win a gift certificate, show your friends all the useless crap you know and, with luck, to funnel a life's worth of learning into nailing a giant, steaming cookie. Makes that college diploma your mom framed look silly, doesn't it? Although the Schoolyard Tavern (3258 Southport) trivia nights are typically Tuesday, the one I attended was on a Monday—call the bar to check on its next one at (773) 528-5226.
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Erin Brereton is our resident urban cowgirl on a bi-weekly search for life on the cheap.