Shrew-Taming and Trivia

So as a direct result of seeing the play on Thursday night, Eve and I watched 10 Things I Hate About You and I now have half a dozen versions of Cruel to Be Kind on my ipod. I am now, predictably, sad again about Heath Ledger. But I'd forgotten that the hilariously irate English teacher was played by Daryl "Chill" Mitchell. I really liked him in Ed (one of my very favourite tv shows ever), where he plays a bowling alley manager who's in a wheelchair. At some point - I don't even remember if it was before or after a really moving episode they did about his life in the chair - I found out that he had actually been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 2000. He's still acting (in NCIS New Orleans) and clearly thriving, but it was weird to see him standing in the movie. In the play it was a short little black kid that Eve likes - they had to give him a box to stand on behind the teaching lectern. He did a great job.

World Trivia Night was fun and edifying and crushing to any pretensions of wide-ranging knowledge, as usual. Predictably, other than a couple of Shakespeare questions, the one answer I knew that nobody else did was Hannah Montana - not even just tv-related, TWEEN tv-related. I was not proud of that. Okay, I was a little proud. The last category was called Badly-Written Questions, and every question had two answers. We tanked it badly, but it was very clever and kind of mind-blowing. Apparently, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes died on the same day (well not exactly, but it's recorded that way). Anthony Hopkins obviously played Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, but I had to rack my brains to remember that he also cooked human flesh in Titus. And then there was the question about a woman whose father was decapitated in a movie-set helicopter accident and grew up to become a successful actress. We figured it had to be twins, or at least sisters. Nope - it was Jennifer Jason Leigh and Katey Sagal. Both born in L.A., both actresses, both lost fathers to horrific movie-set helicopter decapitation accidents. How does that happen, and who came up with that question?

After two weeks, we're finally all home, which is nice. Eve has a horrible rash on her feet and can't really walk, which is not, but at least I'm not dealing with it alone. In general, I feel better than I felt at the beginning of last year, and even the bad days last week mostly ended better than they started. So that's good.

Got a reminder of 2014's post on Facebook today, and I can't help feeling like I can't quite hit my stride like that here anymore, and wondering why.

Comments

StephLove said…
You know more about cinematic cannibalism than I do. No amount of brain wracking would have helped me there.
Lynn said…
I looked up that thing about Jennifer Jason Leigh and Katey Segal, and yup, totally true. What are the odds?? I think they mentioned that the badly worded questions had each been used in the regular weekly trivia rounds (or maybe past WTNs) intended to have one answer, but then another answer was shown to be possible. I think this question must have intended to mean Jennifer Jason Leigh, whose father was killed in the helicopter crash on the set of the Twilight Zone movie - it was very high profile, I even remember it happening. But Katey's father was also killed in a helicopter crash on the set of a TV show he was directing - someone out there must have actually known that fact, answered with Katey Segal instead, then proven it was a plausible answer. Some people just know more stuff than me. Well, lots of people :).

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