THE MOST ANNOYING QUIZZO EVER

This story goes out to my Philly Chicas.

I'm all about making new friends. One time, a lady on a plane asked if we knew each other because I looked very familiar. When I replied no, she answered, "Well, that's okay. I have friends I haven't met yet." Nice sentiment.

I'm saying this because last night, we decided to schedule a Quizzo night since I'm leaving for Albany on Tuesday (got the confirmation).

So by the time Jill and I got there after viewing Elizabethtown - much better than the critics have said it is - we found Megan and Christine at a table with two people we didn't know. Turns out there was no other available table and instead of leaving after dinner, these folks decided to stay and wanted to play Quizzo on our team. Okay.

So after yet another "_insert celebrity/sports figure/random person name_ is best friends with my second cousin!" team name, we settled in for a game of Thursday night Quizzo, hoping to better our below average placements as of late.

Let me stop here to explain the team names. We used to be "Honk if you Heart Butt-Sex," a name not so much vulgar as funny because it's related to a very funny story. But we weren't doing so good with the name. One of the times we came in 3rd, our name was "Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em." After more amusing names that bordered on embarrassing personal stories and running out of embarrassing moments to create the names, a few weeks ago, Jill blurted out, "My second cousin is best friends with George Clooney!" And finding this funny, we made it our team name. Needless to say, team names after have all been on this theme, including: "Babe Ruth is my second cousin!", "George Clooney dated my aunt!" (another Jill gem), "My second cousin won the chess championship in Atlana when he was twelve!", "Nancy Kerrigan is my best friend's second cousin!", and "The Olympic Bronze medalist for Ice Dancing is my second cousin!" You get the idea. I'm waiting for "I once stood behind Seth Green in line at a deli!" to come up.

Back to the story...

So these two people are very nice - one guy, one girl. We make friends. We go through the first round of Quizzo. The guy keeps giving us bad answers, though he was right about one of them. He's a very close talker. Very intense, you know, with the non-blinking eye contact. But he's harmless enough. And drunk. The girl, on the other hand, is sweet as can be and chatting up a storm with us. We're cool.

Now the entire time, the four of us are thinking these two are together. They have good body language, leaning in to chat, smiling at each other the whole time, you know. After a while, it becomes clear that the four of us are playing and the other two are watching with mild amusement, mostly wondering how we knew Bella Lugosi was the answer to one of the questions. The girl is really trying to be very helpful. The guy is drunk, blurting out wrong answers, and then decides to disappear for a while. Which is fine. We girls bond over the next two rounds of Quizzo.

I should mention that Christine has three packs of cigarettes in front of her and Megan and Jill were allowing these friends to bum cigarettes off of them. Very communal that way. We're nice people.

All of a sudden, some random chick who's very drunk comes over to Chris and asks to bum a cigarette. True believers in cigarette karma (as the above implies), she graciously offers one to the girl, who, intense herself, strikes up a conversation with Chris. It's polite and nice, you know, the kind when meeting new people. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the guy comes back and he steps in to talk to the chick.

What we understand is that she's been playing Quizzo with some friends of hers at the bar. And we quickly turn our attention to the third round, kicking ass, I might add. So us five girls - me, Jill, Chris, Megan, and new girl friend are playing along while the dude and the random cigarette bummer (I'll call her CB) are talking. No big deal.

So we find out the girl and the guy live in the building together or go to school together or something like that. And she says after the third round that she has to leave soon because she's got class in the morning. She decides to stay for the last round, but decides afterwards to peace out. She tells us that she's happy she met us and would it be okay for her to come next Tuesday for Quizzo and the girls proceed to tell her it will be great, especially since I'm not going to be there, they'll be a person down anyway, blah blah blah. She leaves and we're happy to have met her.

As she does, she has to interrupt the guy and CB and tells him she's leaving, he hugs her, tells her he'll talk to her later and she leaves with the, "love you" line.

We're sort of confused.

Then again, I have some good guy friends who end conversations with me like that, too. So okay. We thought they were together. Now we find out they aren't. Fine. Whatever.

I should mention that at this point the way we were sitting. Here's a diagram - I'm procrastinating, okay? And a set designer. This is what I do.



Megan left after the third round. So Jill, Megan, and me found ourselves the sole players on the team remaining. In the meantime, CB and Dude move over to the table. Which is fine. Except that if you look carefully at the diagram above, we were pressed for space to begin with and we were in a small area.

So it ended up looking like this:



Now, this will come across as mean, but why not go back to her table? Hmm? Obviously they were in their own world. Except that this girl had the voice that reminded you of nails on a chalkboard. And she talked loud. And a lot. I've already mentioned he was a close talker.

You know where this is going.

So as we tried to listen to the last questions over her annoying voice and his loud drunk one, we found ourselves getting annoyed and frustrated.

And because of the way we were sitting, we couldn't engage in meaningful conversation.

The conversation stopped between the three of us as we couldn't help but listen to their conversation, passing notes to each other like we were in school, laughing at the situation and conveying all of this through our eyes and looks at each other. Over the course of a month, we've learned how to read each other's faces. And so we were kind of amused, but really really annoyed at the same time.

Wanna know what they were talking about? Well, she was going on and on about Ovid and how "beautiful" it is to be educated, what she learned at Columbia, how "beautiful" her education was, how she's fluent in French, how her father is an ophthalmologist and "likes eyeballs", her childhood, how fantastic ancient literature is.

And on and on.

And he was leaning in, touching her at times as he responded to her with, "I'm sorry, I've just never met anyone so passionate as you." Puhlease.

She kept going on about fine art, how "beautiful" it is, how she doesn't get modern art, and more things that made us want to poke our eyeballs out of our eye sockets with the pen and throw them across the table at them.

He tried to respond equally educated about his experience at Penn before she started going on about doing really well on the LSAT and how she got into law school and she just didn't know, there were so many "beautiful" things out there she was so into and not sure about going to law school.

By the way, this all takes place in the span of a half hour. I've never seen a pickup meeting go in so many different directions at once, mostly because she had verbal diarrhea.

During all of this, we were trying hard not to be obvious with our displeasure, but found it difficult to sustain any sort of conversation with this chick yammering on.

We instead focused on chugging our beers and getting the hell out of there.

Chris got up to go to the bathroom and the dude reached over to her cigarette box (she smartly put away the extras) and finding it empty, picked up Jill's pack and proceeded to give one to the chick and one for himself before taking her lighter to light them.

Um.

This was fine when he was actually talking to us. Now that he had spent the last two hours listening to her in hopes of bringing her home, we weren't feeling as gracious as we had before.

AND THEN she starts yammering about The Trojan Women and explaining to him the story. I'm slightly amused because this is all about sex. In The Trojan Women, to stop a war the women felt were unjust, they withhold sex from their husbands to earn world peace. In a nutshell. And she's going on and on about a woman's place and how the men make the decisions, so they are doomed to fail, blah blah blah. At which point, I started getting angry. But then she cuts off that thought by saying, "That Aristophanes was amusing. And a great read." He starts telling her how he's reading French literature from the 1800's, which she finds appalling, exclaiming how much she hates that literature. Now Jill and I have both taken TM's Ancient Greek and Roman Theatre class (or whatever it's called) and we're just highly amused at her critique of that amusing Aristophanes. BECAUSE EURIPIDES, NOT ARISTOPHANES, WROTE THE TROJAN WOMEN.

Now we're running for the door. The only thing we say to them as we leave is Chris asking for her jacket that the Dude has been sitting on for the last two hours. We leave without another word. We get to the door and once on the other side, start laughing and saying how annoying the last two hours were.

As I drive away, I see the dude walking with her, taking her home. I call Chris and Jill. And we laugh and say, "well, that was the most ridiculous pickup I've ever seen. And we saw it all."

That, my friends, was the most annoying Quizzo we've ever sat through. From here on out, we're just going to have to get there at 9:30 to get our own table. Never again.

Oh, and by the way, this guy is still a douchebag. And is it just me, or does he look like Sloth from The Goonies?


I fucking hate Tom DeLay. I rarely use that kind of profanity on this blog, but the Christ, I can't stand him.

Right. Off to finish up this work.