Paparazzi
The year is 2025. I am hosting Thursday night trivia at the West Chester Golf & Country Club. The music round lineup is:
Thomas Dolby – 🎵She Blinded Me with Science🎵 (1982)
Ray Charles – 🎵Hit the Road Jack🎵 (1960)
UB40 – 🎵(I Can’t Help) Falling in Love with You🎵 (1993)
Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians – 🎵What I Am🎵 (1988)
Lady Gaga – 🎵Paparazzi🎵 (2009)
The night is over – I’ve cleaned everything up, closed out my bar tab, and I’m walking to my car. In the parking lot, I hear 🎵boom-bup-boooom-bup-bup🎵 – I recognize it instantly as the bassline to 37-year-old “What I Am” by Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians. The person parked next to me turned it on as soon as he had gotten in his car. He gave me a wave and a nod as he drove off.
He had to stop at the parking lot exit to wait for a passing car from the overflow lot. The passing car had their windows down and as it passed, I could hear a woman emphatically singing at the top of her lungs 🎵Baby, you’ll be famous, chase you down until you LOVE me🎵. What a night!
A good round of trivia is fun. Sometimes it’s just an excuse to have a drink after an exhausting day at the office. But when it’s done really well, it becomes something totally different. People lean into the hard questions. They test ideas out loud. They disagree with friends without devolving into anarchy. They offer up longshot answers knowing they might be wrong, and knowing that’s okay.
From the hosting seat, I get to watch it unfold. Curiosity without judgement. Confidence built in small moments. A room full of people thinking together – a kind of collaborative cognitive sandbox. It’s beautiful. And it’s the reason this website exists – because trivia nights like this don’t happen by accident.
If you’ve played my trivia before, you’re probably puzzling over the theme of that Music Round. It was acrostic, so there’s nothing to find without knowing the prompt:
The first letters of each of the artists spell out the answer to the question
“What is the word defined as a duel between three people?”
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