Youngster wrangling

A recap of the first ever BQT bar mitzvah. Hoo-boy. I was entertaining the kids only, BTW, no grown-ups, and it was a more deconstructed Big Quiz Thing format: wandering the room asking random questions, plus a finals round. A few observations…

— Boys like trivia more than girls, but that's hardly surprising. Also, it was something like an eight-to-two male-female ration, so the excess maleness was inevitable. The few girls who (briefly) participated went straight to the BlackBerries to google answers, which was more funny than anything, since they didn't even stop to think about whether their answers made any sense (no, Sex and the City 2 isn't the new movie based on a time-traveling video game).

— Children these days are very aggressive. Most of the kids were cool, but there was nothing I could say to keep a few hyperactive screamers from not yelling wrong answers in my ear and grabbing things from my pockets (who knows, maybe I have poor youngster-wrangling skills). One kid whipped me in the head with a lime, which was annoying, but not as annoying as the other kids who kept telling me to kick his ass. It wasn't stipulated in the contract, but I'm pretty sure I would've lost my fee if I'd beaten a child.

— That said, I think a lot of the kids loved it. I was competing with a Ping-Pong table, one of those arcade basketball-shot things, and some pretty delicious nonalcoholic drinks, but I had a really eager crowd around me at all times. It dovetails with something I say a lot about the BQT public show: It's not for everyone, but the people who like it really like it. Sort of like licorice, or the Grateful Dead.

— The DJ company hosting the event seemed great, though I do question the music choice of "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" when the grandparents came up for the candle lighting.

Regardless, it was fun, and an extremely educational experience—I'm definitely using condoms for the time being.

The second BQT bar mitzvah is this Saturday, again in Westchester, but this time adults will be taking part, EDP will be joining me, and it'll be a more traditional format. And I'll be on alert for all flying citrus fruits.

In the thick of bar mitzvahness

Going to try to keep this quick, since I'm under the gun prepping for a private gig tomorrow—the first of two BQT bar mitzvahs in Westchester in a two-week period. No, I'm not being invited to shul, so no throwing candy for me.

Writing trivia for kids is a significantly different task than writing it for adults (and extremely easy to screw up), and as you'd imagine, I have more experience with the grown-ups. As I troll through my question archive, there's a degree of guesswork as to what the youngsters will pick up on or not (do they know who Ronald Reagan is? do they care about Star Wars? will I be scorned as four years behind the curve if I reference High School Musical?). But there's enough in there that I always find plenty of material with that special Big Quiz Thing better-than-averageness.

Still, many questions have to be tweaked for under-18 purposes. Take this one:

Q: In advertisements, the green one is the only anthropomorphic M&M that is what?

Good one; clever, kid-appealing subject matter, not impossible. But then there's that word: anthropomorphic. I have no idea when I learned the meaning of that one—I knew personification early on, but anthropomorphic might not have come to me till college, when I spent some of my earliest cybersurfing hours reading stoner commentary about the Krofft Brothers. So to be safe, the question is now…

Q: In advertisements, the green one is the only talking M&M that is what?
Yeah, yeah, none of them talk in print ads. But you get the idea, and so will the newly made men.

There's also the simple fact that crafting a game for kids forces me to look into some new cultural corners for fresh questions. This guy's dad tells me that he's a big fan of the Alex Rider books, which I had never heard of. A few minutes on the Interwebs tell me that Alex Rider is a teenage spy in a series of of novels by Anthony Horowitz, expertly fulfilling a very common young-male fantasy (apparently, there was also a 2006 movie that complete slipped under by radar).
A few more minutes, I have a nice question for these bar mitzvahgoers, one that can also be a prime entry some night for you seniors. Working efficiently over here.

Anyway, wish me luck; kids can be ball-breakers when it comes to competition. If they beat me with my own clipboard, you'll hear about it here.

Calendar: Bar mitzvahs and Boston

Just got official word about two forthcoming BQT events, both biggish news…

(1) We're doing a bar mitzvah, our first (if you don't count my actual own bar mitzvah; for all I know, my haftorah was indeed full of trivia questions in Hebrew). Since the early days of the quiz, people have jokingly suggested we'd be hot stuff on the candy-throwing-and-Coke-and-Pepsi circuit, but I was always wary of this. I have vivid memories of many bar/bat mitzvahs, with overhormoned teenagers running around suburban banquet halls like idiots, melting candles into parfait glasses and trying to get to second base with that one girl who was developing early. All good stuff, yet not fertile ground for an organized game. But this gig looks excellent: The mom assures me her son is a quiz nut, the crowd will be modestly sized, and I'm a pro by now. Should be fun (and yes, as always, e-mail booking@bigquizthing.com to set up your own private party).

(2) We're going to Boston! I mentioned it in the last calendar, but it's official: On Thursday, January 28, the Big Quiz Thing will be performing at Club Oberon, in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Yeah, okay, not literally Boston, but ten minutes on the T, you nit-pickers.) I spend a lot of time in that city, due to the presence of both my quizette and my family, so it feels like a natural move, and EDP is joining me on this trip so that we can show them how it's done—judging by the number of bars with quiz nights, trivia is a bigger deal in Boston than in NYC. Oberon is great—it's run by the American Repertory Theater, and is currently hosting The Donkey Show, which was a big hit here some years past (and, of course, was based on this, which is appropriate considering the venue name). I'll have a press release here tout suite, but in the meantime, tell your friends: Club Oberon, 2 Arrow Street, Cambridge, Thursday, January 28, 8pm, $10.

Think we should hit another city and know of a venue that would be appropriate? Say the word.