Second Place is the First Loser

Well, now you've all seen it, so now it can be told. No Ken Jennings, this girl. And yes, I can hear the little speech from the Weird Al song right now, only in my head it sounds like Johnny Gilbert, not Don Pardo:

"That's right, Al, you lost. And let me tell you what you didn't win: a twenty volume set of the Encyclopedia International, a case of Turtle Wax, and a year's supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat. But that's not all. You also made yourself look like a jerk in front of millions of people. You brought shame and disgrace to your family name for generations to come. You don't get to come back tomorrow. You don't even get a lousy copy of our home game. You're a complete loser!"

Okay, this is not actually how I feel about it. If I was really worried about disgracing my family name I probably wouldn't have gathered 50 pals, colleagues, and acquaintances to watch the show from a bar in the East Village last night. Honestly, I'm happy with how I did. I didn't finish in the red, I didn't get anything egregiously wrong, and I didn't swear on camera.

I'll save the detailed show commentary for another time, since you probably watched it if you're reading this now. But I do have something funny to impart, namely that I suspect my Jeopardy appearance was cursed. Here's why.

So they called me, and booked me for a taping, and I bought my plane ticket, made my reservation, etc. And then circumstances beyond my control forced me to postpone the trip for a month. It was actually a better time to go, and I had more time to study and shop for something cute to wear on the show, so I had no complaints about that.

So I got there, a month later than I'd thought, and the day before my taping, my parents and I decided to go to Disneyland. It rains in southern California 12 days out of the year, and that day was one of them. We soldiered on, though, and rode all the rides in the rain (no lines for anything!!), and had a blast. And then on the way back, the car we'd hired got a flat tire in the middle of the freeway, about five minutes from the hotel.

And then there was the taping itself - bar none, the singular most fun thing I've ever done, even if I didn't wind up taking home sixteen grand. (By the way, I'd be remiss here if I didn't give Ed Angleton some mad props. He was a Jeopardy powerhouse with reflexes like a cat.) So I can't say much about the taping, except that I would have liked a category about pop music, or the Bible, or African capitals or something I'm, like, good at. C'est la vie. It was still awesome.

I returned to New York, and my parents returned to Montana. The week of the air date approached. My parents checked their local listings. No Jeopardy. The NCAA tournament was pre-empting it. After, of course, they'd told everybody in northcentral Montana to watch! But some well-placed phone calls got them an "encore presentation" on Saturday. So if you get KRTV, that's when to watch.

As for me, the show was airing exactly when it was supposed to, so I started rallying the troops to gather for a viewing party. For a venue, I found this awesome bar on St. Mark's place that sold lambic (the best drink ever) and had a big TV and friendly management that was happy to accomodate us.

And then I got to the bar last night to find that it had been shut down literally the day before. Something about their liquor license, I believe. So I put up a little sign on the door and a coworker found a new venue with a smaller TV and staff that I think was a little blown away by the crowd, but it all ended up working out in the end.

So maybe not cursed, but definitely this is the kind of stuff that would have happened if Clark Griswold ever appeared on Jeopardy!

Now I get to see life through the eyes of someone who fought the good fight and lost. And there is one fundamental truth I seem to have forgotten about my beloved quiz show - namely, a lot of people watch this show for the smug sense of superiority it gives them. Myself included. I think I am now getting karmic payback for all of the times I heckled contestants for not knowing that the capital of Mongolia is Ulaanbataar, or that "Waterloo" was the Abba hit that won them the Eurovision Song Competition and launched them to stardom...because right now I feel like everybody in the entire world knows James II. Everybody. Everyone except me. It's like knowing the sky is blue. It's a wonder they even let me on the show with such an egregious gap in my knowledge bank, if you ask the various online message boards.

So yes. You ARE smarter than me. But I did get some lovely parting gifts, and I got to hang out with Alex Trebek, and you didn't. So there. Well, actually, maybe you did...and if so, kudos. Jeopardy rocks. I'd feel that way about it even if I'd lost horribly and gotten every question wrong. And I'll keep on watching the show for as long as Trebek's doing his thing. I may tone down the Sean Connery impressions, though.

That's Just L.Wrong

If you're a fan of South Park like I am, you're probably already aware that big whiny crybaby Isaac Hayes has allegedly quit the show because South Park dared to make fun of his religion (as if they haven't made fun of every single other religion ever by this point). And then Comedy Central pulled the planned rerun of the episode in question, bowing to pressure which indirectly came from even bigger, whinier crybaby Tom Cruise.

Well, that's one side of the story. Conflicting accounts are everywhere, though personally, it wouldn't surprise me on either count, because I'm pretty sure Tom Cruise has it in him to be that obnoxious.

But the consensus seems to be that no matter what the cause, Isaac Hayes isn't coming back for the forseeable future. I'm not sure what the South Park boys will do without the dulcet tones and love life advice of Chef, so I sure hope they find a way to keep him on the program in some form.

Kip came up with the most brilliant idea ever, I think, for making this happen. Chef should remain on the show, just as he is, with no explanations offered for any changes in the character. Obviously, though, if he's going to be on the show, he'd have to have a new voice - and we think he should have one that is very obviously NOT Isaac Hayes, and bears no resemblance whatsoever to Isaac Hayes. We suggest William Shatner, in fact. Who better to fill the void left by soul-singin', deep-voiced Isaac Hayes than the original Golden Throat himself?

Of course, it looks as though the South Park folks might have something similar actually in the works. I, for one, can't wait to see what they have cooked up.

I Was Charlotte Simmons

Friday night, while Boyfriend was doing some work-related chores, I plowed my way through the final 300 pages of Tom Wolfe's last novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and I have to say I eventually wound up feeling a little disappointed with it. Understand, I'm not saying it wasn't worth reading, but there were a few things that got under my skin a little.

(Warning: If you are planning to read this novel and you don't want any portion of it at all spoiled for you, stop reading my blog now. I'm going to keep this as vague as possible, but by necessity I have to say some things about the plot's resolution. I will try not to ruin it for anybody else who doesn't mind a little bit of spoiling.)

Okay, did you stop reading if you don't want anything given away? Good.

I can see now why everyone mentions this in the same breath as Prep. They do have markedly similar female protagonists from middle-class backgrounds who voluntarily plunge themselves into an elite academic setting and have trouble reconciling that it's not just the best minds, but also the best wallets, who inhabit such places.

If you know my background at all, you know that this is sort of where I come from, too. (My experience in high school was so frighteningly like Prep, in fact, that I spent a good deal of time staring at Curtis Sittenfeld's picture trying to remember if I'd ever spoken to her.) So Charlotte Simmons grew on me immediately - the titular character's cockiness and naivete at the beginning of the book cut a little too close to the bone, if you ask me.

I think it's a credit to Tom Wolfe that I did feel such an emotional attachment to the characters. I found myself watching them on the verge of making stupid decisions, trying not to yell out warnings to them like I do when I'm home alone watching bad horror movies. (I literally did do this when I read the final cockfighting scene in Roots.) And when someone, particularly Charlotte, did something that I knew would have devastating consequences, I got mad at her for being so dumb - until I remembered that at that age, I probably wouldn't have acted differently.

One of Wolfe's main points in the novel is that the desire to develop your intellect can never completely suppress your desire to belong, and belong well. During my early teenage years, I was chunky, brainy, awkward -- an easy target for a certain type of good-looking, athletic pack animal. To be honest, I pursued prep school in part because I wanted to find more people like myself, and find someplace where the things I was good at would be respected and admired more than the things my popular peers were admired for.

Well, as I'm sure you know, you can find people of the popular-cruel sort everywhere, and when I got to boarding school, I was still chunky, brainy, and awkward, and those same folks were still good-looking, athletic, and cruel, they were just a little book-smarter and had more money. And I daresay I got a little more good-looking and athletic after college, and certainly I'm much more personable than I was, and I know now how to deal with people like that (and that nobody is absolutely one or the other). So I read Charlotte Simmons with some mild chagrin - how could she care so much about what these assholes thought of her? How could she let herself be seduced by such an obvious ...frat boy? She was there to get an education, not to fall in with the groups like the ones she shunned in high school! And then I remembered how I was back then - I would have bent over backwards if any of those boys had looked twice at me. I would have been seduced too. So I guess Wolfe kind of nailed it.

What he didn't nail was the ending. Throughout the book, Charlotte has three suitors, and part of the suspense, obviously, is in figuring out which one she finally ends up with. And yes, of course she winds up with one of them - in fact, the one I wanted her to wind up with. But it happened in such a contrived, deus ex machina sort of way, that it left me thoroughly disappointed in the book as well as in Charlotte herself. (Granted, something needed to be done to put an end to the book - by this point it's been 660 pages and no resolution is in sight.)

The final chapter reveals which guy she eventually wound up with by way of revealing others' reactions to her as his girlfriend rather than anything Charlotte herself feels about it. These are not two people who got together because they loved each other, it's two people who like what the other person does for them. Charlotte winds up becoming everything she seemed to hate at the beginning of the book, and she completely loses her identity by getting it caught up in her role to her new boyfriend. It forces the moral to be "popularity is the most important thing" rather than "to thine own self be true." In a way, it's true, I guess (especially when you're 18) but I wish more books would at least pretend it wasn't. At the end of Prep, I felt like Lee got her footing and found herself and realized that there was life beyond teenagerhood. The lesson Charlotte learns is that the right boyfriend will make her popular.

To say nothing for the fact that all three of the men in her life - the dumb jock who yearns to be seen as something other than a dumb jock, the nerdy brainy kid who insinuates himself into the girl's good graces by becoming her best friend, and the incipient alcoholic frat boy who craves only popularity and notches in his bedpost - are fairly one-dimensional. Charlotte herself is only slightly more complicated. Thing is, there are plenty of athletes who get good grades, there are plenty of nerdy brainy kids who treat women like shit, and there are plenty of frat boys who do actually see women as people and not merely as objects. Tom Wolfe does a disservice to anybody who's ever been a jock, a nerd, OR a frat boy in these three characters.

Personally, if I'd been writing the book, aside from trimming at least 100 pages, I'd have had Charlotte's eventual relationship mean something to only her, and possibly the boy she winds up with. I'd show them. I'd give them the chance to fall in love, and let the reader wonder what the campus thought of it, because it really wouldn't matter, ultimately.

Granted, in my own life, it took me about ten years of dating to get to the point where I was only minimally self-conscious about how my relationships mattered in the context of my public image. But if you were writing MY story, rather than Charlotte's, you'd have to go inside my head to do it, because how my love life reflects on my popularity is finally, blessedly, a complete nonfactor. (Ironically, my boyfriend was in a frat.)

Barbes Gets Meta

Wait, what? Blog? Zuh?

I always promise I'll be back. This time I promise nothing, suckers. If I blog, I blog. If I don't, I don't. Although there are some blog-worthy things coming up soon, and I wanted to make sure you guys weren't shocked if I DID in fact start writing in here.

Oh, right, and I can promise one other thing. I can promise that this Sunday, the
Barbes Reading Series is going to be awesome, as we present three very talented writers who happen to be curators of their own series:

Cheryl Burke is an award-winning poet and creative nonfiction writer. Her work appears in dozens of print and online publications including; BLOOM, Small Spiral Notebook, The Guardian, Reactions 5, Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache, The Milk of Almonds and Poetry Nation. Cheryl curates and hosts The Atomic Reading Series at the Lucky 13 Saloon in Park Slope, produces the Poetry vs. Comedy Variety Show at Galapagos in Williamsburg and is also directing the reading series for the Pink Ink Queer Writers Conference in June.

Elise Miller hosts and curates the East Side Oral reading series. Her first novel, Star Craving Mad, about a celeb-obsessed NYC private school teacher (Warner Books) is in stores now in the United States, Japan and Indonesia, and has been optioned for a movie by Maverick Films (Madonna's production company). Essays from her memoir, COCK-CRAZY! have been published on freshyarn.com, nerve.com, papotage.com, and smallspriralnotebook.com. Her work has also appeared in The Sun Magazine. Elise has performed at Heeb Magazine's The Shmoth, and has read excerpts of her work in NYC and Brooklyn at Fez, Makor, HERE Arts Center, KGB, Boudoir Bar, Galapogos Arts Space and Halcyon.

Amanda Stern is the author of The Long Haul (Soft Skull Press, 2003). She founded The Happy Ending Music and Reading Series in 2003 and has been curating and hosting it ever since.

Barbes is located on 6th Ave and 9th Street in Park Slope. (The F train to 7th Ave and 10th St. will take you almost right to its front door!)

The reading series has been proceeding swimmingly. New York magazine, in particular, LOVES us. (And why wouldn't they? We're cute. I mean, uh, I will stop using the royal "we" now.)