Two Blondes and a Fat Guy. The Drunken Mc-Stumblies. Team Hasselhoff.
They're
all here at the Eugene City Brewery on a Friday night, all trying to figure out how many U.S. state names end with the letter
A.
Catherine Tenedios is fingering the map in her mind's eye that hangs right above her pint of amber brew.
Arizona,
California, Nevada, Alabama, Georgia ...
Quick. What's taking you so long?
Ariel King - who is playing
with Tenedios and Team Hasselhoff's other member, Ryan Brown of Portland - scratches down as many states as the group
can think of. They come up with 20.
"Oh, noooooo!!"
OK, enough Mr. Bill jokes, Sluggo. The
correct answer is 21.
And that was one of the tougher questions during this Mr. Bill's Traveling Trivia Show at
the Rogue Ales-owned brewpub last Friday. A tad bit tougher than, "What color is a hockey puck?"
But that's
the beauty of it, says Bill Klein, aka Mr. Bill, who drives to Eugene from his Newport home every Friday afternoon to stage
the ever-popular trivia show he's been coordinating for 23 years now. It's a mix of the difficult and the easy, the
obvious and the obscure, and everyone keeps playing even if they keep coming up with wrong answers.
Everyone can win,
too.
"Unlike Trivial Pursuit, you don't feel stupid when you don't know the answer," says Tenedios,
25, a child therapist in Eugene. "It's more laid-back."
Brown has this theory: "We're in a group,
so it probably takes away the pain a little bit not to get the answers right."
More and more people are being
drawn to Mr. Bill, who bears more of a resemblance to actor Gene Hackman than that smashing little Play-Doh puppet of late
1970s "Saturday Night Live" fame.
The downtown restaurant regularly hosts a crowd of about 100 every Friday.
An open table is hard to come by. Last Friday, 37 teams packed every table, both upstairs and down.
"Friday is
definitely our busiest night because of Mr. Bill," says Dave Stark, the brewpub's manager. "We turned away 40
people three weeks ago. It was just out of control. We just didn't have the seating.
"It's just fun,"
Stark says. "There are a lot of people in this town looking for something different.
"And after a couple
of pints, it's even more fun."
Some wild answers on tap
No, it doesn't hurt that
the Eugene City Brewery has 35 beers on tap, eight of them brewed on the premises.
Trivia games at brewpubs and bars,
popular for years in Great Britain, are springing up like karaoke machines in the United States and here in Oregon. But then,
Americans love their trivia, too.
It probably started with TV's "Jeopardy" and peaked with "Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire?" and Trivial Pursuit, the smash-hit board game that debuted in the early 1980s. More recently,
there's the interactive DVD game Scene It? and Buzztime, the satellite-based game beamed to more than 3,000 bars and restaurants
in North America and Great Britain.
Klein has five regular weekly games up and down Western Oregon, from Portland to
Eugene to Newport. New Max's Tavern on East 13th Avenue even started a Tuesday night trivia game after some employees
saw Klein's version, he says.
"When I first started, I thought it would be a six-month fad," Klein says
of the format he developed to increase midweek crowds at the place he was bartending in Salem in 1984.
He moved to
North Carolina for a couple of years in the early 1990s. He tried his game there in such places as Raleigh, thinking a larger
population base would enable him to make a living at it. But he came back to Oregon in 1993 and resumed the event in Newport.
Today, he actually does make a living, he says, hosting his show five nights a week around the state. Not that he's
getting rich. The Eugene City Brewery pays him a flat fee of $300, Stark says.
Dressed in a tuxedo, microphone in hand,
Klein - who says he got his "Mr. Bill" moniker years ago when a bar patron tagged him with it "and
it
stuck" - hands out pieces of paper and golf pencils to each table to start the night.
Klein's "lovely
assistant," Alice Derrickson of Corvallis, one of nine female employees who include Klein's daughters Beth and Trina,
handles DJ duties (they have about 11,000 songs) and keeps score as Klein entertains the crowd.
Klein asks three questions
at a time. In the course of the evening, he will finish three or four 18-question rounds.
Teams consist of as few or
as many players as you want, and you can enter or leave the game at any time. But only one answer per question is allowed,
no matter how many heads are on your team.
A unique scoring system awards points for each correct answer. Raffle tickets
are handed out after each round for "Mr. Bill Bucks" ($1 off food-and-drink coupons), gift certificates and T-shirts.
"We're not going to make you a millionaire," Klein says after last Friday's first round as a long queue
of team representatives line up for their winning tickets. "But we've got about $50 to give away."
Klein's
game is popular "because you can play trivia as a group," says Sara Stankey of Eugene, a regular who often plays
at the Rogue Ale Public House in Newport, where her parents live. "And you can steal your friends' answers."
Sean and Amy Eilers of Springfield also are regulars, playing with their friend Gabe Greiner.
"We actually
got engaged at Mr. Bill's show," Amy Eilers says.
"In Newport," her husband says. It was midnight
on New Year's Eve.
And, no, she did not write the answer to his question on a piece of paper.
