Live from Union Square

On yet another sweltering Saturday, here's a little something to fit the modd: With the help of the brilliant William K. Scurry (sometime member of Team! The Musical), B-Cutie Nicki and I spent a marinatingly hot afternoon in Union Square, quizzing New Yorkers on all things trivial. The results were pleasingly mixed. Watch:

"Answer a trivia question, win candy!"

That was my refrain, again and again this morning. I journeyed to Union Square, with erstwhile B-Cutie Sweet Nicki and my man Bill Scurry (member of Team! The Musical) to record a short film that will be all over the Interwebs anon. Simple concept: I was wearing jacket and had a fake microphone, Nicki was in a BQT T-shirt, Bill had the video camera. And Nicki was holding this sign on a stick:
And yes, we had a bag of candy—Peppermint Patties, Twixes, Blow Pops. We wandered around for an hour or so, our clarion call reverberating through the sunny pathways of the venerable center of protest. We were a bit disappointed that almost no one seemed to flock to us—pretty much the only hyperenthusiastic folks were the core of junkies who hang out under the George Washington statue. They sucked at trivia, but with the exception of the dude who kept shouting at me to ask something about "Nazis!" or "Zyklon-B," they were plenty friendly (a woman offered me a rose made from duct tape). There were also a lot of infants in the park, and they (nor their parents) weren't much help.

We meet a bunch of people who run a Catholic quiz website. A British Shakespearean actor who didn't know any Shakespeare trivia. A couple of nurses with a McDonald's bag and a hankering for candy. Here's a guy who said he loved sci-fi movies but needed a lot of help finishing the title Planet of the BLANK.

We got a lot of bemused, silent stares, though I couldn't always tell if that was from people who wanted to play but couldn't summon the nerve, or from people who just thought we were nuts (it was pretty unconventional, but that's how I like to roll from time to time). Regardless, the footage is excellent, and it was a great way to show off both the BQT brand of trivia and my own quizmastering skills. Stay tuned for the video.

Finally, we encountered a dude who's a former Disney animator and third-place finisher in some kind of "fastest caricaturist" contest (appropriately, he was wearing a Flash T-shirt). He sketched me and Sweet Nicki in record time…
Really? My face is that pointy?