Rookie of the Year

It all started innocently enough on my honeymoon in 1976.  We were in Aspen and my ex and I had been invited to dinner by Eddie, one of his oldest friends.  I had never met him. (See explanation below.)

As we sat casually chatting around a big dinner table, the subject of movies came up.  One of the dinner guests said, “I just love It Happened One Night.”

All at the table concurred.  They discussed the plot, and the director, and the cast.

“And Eugene Pallette played Claudette Colbert’s father,” our host, Eddie announced. “What a great character actor.”

Which he was.  But he wasn’t the father.  Walter Connelly was.

This little error should have gone unnoticed and unremarked.  But it just so happens that It Happened One Night was one of my favorite all-time movies.  And you just don’t mess with those.

I knew all the cast members names no matter how minor- and the names of the characters they played.  I knew the name of the original source material, Night Bus,  a short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams that had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine.

Even the lead character had the same name as me- Ellen (Andrews) and I just couldn’t let it go.

“It was Walter Connelly who played the father,” I piped up from the far end of the table.

“No, you’re wrong.  It was Eugene Pallette.  He always plays the father,” corrected Eddie.

“No, it was Walter Connelly.”  I stood my ground.

“Wanna make a bet?” dared Eddie.

“You’re on,” I said.  “How much?”

At this point, Eddie appealed to his friend, my then husband.

“What should I do here?” he asked.  “Does she really know what she’s talking about?”

“Well, I haven’t known her all that long, ” my ex replied.  (For the record, we had met on November 12, 1975 and were married on January 20, 1976.  And we only waited that long because I was still legally married- but separated- at that time.  The day my divorce was final, he whisked me off to Las Vegas.  Kids: Do not try this at home.) “But she seems to know this stuff.  If I were you, Eddie, I wouldn’t bet her.”

He did anyway.  What a sucker.  It was for some fancy dinner, and when I won, it shifted his universe.  I mean, a girl knowing more about a movie than he did?  C’mon.

But Eddie was good sport enough to acknowledge that I had just become an asset, and so he recruited me for a future spot on his team at Trivia Bowl.

I had never heard of it.

Every year, the University of Colorado in Boulder held a national contest dedicated to  this sort of knowledge.  Sixty-four  teams, composed of four players compete for the title of champions of the world in useless information.  Most of these teams- almost all men- had been playing together from the early seventies.

In 1979, I made my first appearance.  My “toss up” percentages were great.  And, of course, my accuracy was deadly.  And kind-of singlehandedly, I took Eddie’s heretofore lousy team into the quarter finals.

I was a sensation.  The new kid in town who had rode in and blown away the seasoned gunslingers.

My efforts did not go unnoticed.  I was awarded the “Rookie of the Year” and there was an awards dinner and a trophy and everything.

And early the next year, the offers poured in for me to join other, much better teams.

This was a paradigm shift in my universe.

You see, I could always do it.  You know, remember pretty much everything I had ever read, or watched, and then recall it instantly.

It’s not the same thing as photographic memory, the ability Mr. Memory had in The Thirty–Nine Steps. (Another favorite.)  Or that thing that Marilu Henner can do with every day of her life.  (Although I’m pretty good in that department, too.)

But it was darn close.  And darn strange.  And darn useless.  Until now.

I never had an outlet for any of this stuff.  I knew tons about the movies, the Romanovs, the Windsor abdication, old vaudevillians, television, song lyrics, great English country houses, Rockefeller family trees, the birth names of movie stars, (now a completely vanished trivia category.  When you have movie stars named Streep, Zellweger, Fassbinder, Gosling, Gyllenhaal and Pitt, you know the days of Bernie Schwartz forced to become Tony Curtis are over)  and the novels of Nancy Mitford, tv dogs and horses, early Hollywood, Queen Victoria, Edward VII, who was married to who, Walt Disney theme songs.

The list is random and endless.

If a subject caught my fancy, I would read everything the library had on it.  And I was a voracious reader, averaging about five books a week for years.

And I could remember what I had read.  My memory was/is reliable and instantly accessible. But I always felt like a freak.  I did well enough in school, after all, but I never had an outlet for the volumes of trivial data I had stored on the CD-rom in my head.

Until now, the only use I had ever been put to was to answer two a.m. drunken phone calls from friends who needed me to settle bar bets.  Before there was Google, or Wikipedia, there was me.

Once Eddie even called me ship-to-shore from a cruise to settle an argument.  (What money he won on my answer was half of what that call cost him.)

Besides making me feel wanted, the Trivia Bowl served another purpose.  I got to compete with the best of the best.  Other oddballs with this gift had found their way to Boulder and it was a true test of ability.

It was not like betting some local nitwit about when is San Jacinto Day?  (April 21, my son’s birthday.  That bet was a WALKOVER.)

I had been challenged by the best and held my own.

(Even among my peers, I was still different.  Most players, with rare exception were, as I said, men.  I remember my first year at the Bowl, I was sitting in the Glenn Miller Auditorium waiting to play.  A guy came up to me and asked if I was there to see my boyfriend compete!)

Honesty- and some modesty- compels me to admit that you can always come up with a question that can stump me.  I am not, after all, Watson of Jeopardy fame.

But, if it’s about a subject I like, you might come up with one question, but I will, sure as shootin’,  come up with twenty that will stump you.

A good memory can be a blessing and a curse.  I try hard not to remember the hopes and dreams of that happy girl on that long-ago Aspen honeymoon.

I’d much rather remember “Out of the night, when the full moon is bright…”

Call me, Rickey.  I know you’ve got this one.