Eye on the Ball: Battle of the brainiest
If you know Ali and Keith Bavaro, Bill and Olive Congdon, Walter Schumann, or the Havens House, you would have aced the local part of Shelter Island Library’s “Battle of the Brains” contest held on February 24.
It was part of the Friday Night Dialogues series and yes, believe it or not, many of us are here and hanging around Shelter Island at the end of February.
To keep from going insane, we’ve created the February Follies. Last Friday, for the second year running, thanks to the library, we enjoyed one of my favorite evenings and somehow dug up 38 people who wanted out of the house. They came to take part in our team trivia night “Battle of the Brains,” which I hosted.
The library doesn’t charge for the event and provides snacks, drinks and prizes for the winning team. Not a bad deal for some winter fun that begins with all competitors turning off their cell phones and putting them in the middle of the table.
That’s when participants turn on their brains and enjoy a couple hours of conversation, heavy thinking and laughter. This all happens because when you arrive you either join a four-person team or are seated with your pre-arranged team. Either way, the mood, the questions and conversations create the laughter. It’s also a matter of trying to figure out which team member you trust the most and how you go after them when they are wrong.
I love watching the discussions, especially after seeing teams put down a correct answer then decide to change it because someone thought of another. One of my favorite lines of the evening came when we gave the correct answer and someone said, “I had that one, but big mouth over there talked us out of it.”
But everything with this crowd kept with the tone of the evening — having a good time.
We were all over the place as we asked 50 questions on topics ranging from local happenings, sports, literature, history, geography, science and entertainment. Our goal in designing the questions was not to delve into what you might call true trivia. With true trivia, the answers are so insignificant that no one really cares. Instead, we wanted to examine general knowledge -— those things you should know, but often can’t come up with on the spot. When all four players have the same problem, it makes for interesting dialogue.
In my Monday morning quarterbacking session after the competition, I realized that another goal was to pose questions that someone in the room knew the answer to. This year, the group got all but one: “What President’s picture is on the $1,000 dollar bill?”
No fair pulling out your wallet and checking out your bills. Google, it!
The questions must have been a little harder this year since the winning team had only 29 out of 50 correct. To me, this looked like a bright group of contestants but sometimes you never know.
Last year’s defending champions were back and competing but they were knocked out by four new champions who did a better job of surviving the tougher questions. Congratulations go to this year’s winning team: Linda Hacker, Cathy Kenny, Tim Bohen and Tullia Limarzi.
Because of the success of last year’s “Battle of the Brains” contest, Southampton’s Rogers Memorial Library asked if I would do the same thing there.
Of course, I agreed. I look forward to simple fun evenings where I don’t have to pull $100 bills out of my pocket to have a good time. Southampton will also be free and the date is set for Monday, May 15 at 6 p.m. Call the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton at (631) 283-0774 and reserve a seat. I hope to see some of you there with a team that will make Shelter Island proud as we visit the south side.
I will leave you with a question that no one answered exactly correctly. Go back a couple of weeks in your Reporter and find the profile on Ali and Keith Bavaro. In that profile, if you truly read it, you would know that they were both asked what exasperates them the most. They both had the same answer. What was it?
Read your Reporter!
