Life without a Labcoat: Lightning Round!

A while ago several of us started going to trivia night at Sky Bar, pretty much the nerdiest bar in town. There's a periodic table hung on the wall, they occasionally show the live feed off one of the telescopes in the area, and it's not unusual to walk in and find a group of people sitting around playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Generally speaking, we're really not good at trivia. A couple weeks we've done quite respectably, but definitely no where near winning. Most of the time our goal is just to beat the math department because honestly, it's just embarrassing to lose to them.

While we're not good at trivia in general, what we are AWESOME at is the Lightning Round! It's a separate round, with a separate prize, and your score doesn't count towards your overall score for the night. They give you a category, and you have to list as many items as you can in that category in 1 minute.

Almost a month ago was the first time won the Lightning Round! The category was elements of the periodic table. I'd say 90% of the people that regularly play on our team are chemists. It would have been mortifying to lose this question - and as it was we only beat the geologists by a few. The prize is the killer part of this story. Each player on the team won a free ticket to a charity cocktails/h'oer d'oeuvres followed by a fashion show where the models were the contestants of the Mrs. America pageant. We were super psyched because it's just too ridiculous sounding not to be awesome, and we knew it would be a fun chance to dress up (something that doesn't happen very often in Tucson, the most casual "city" on the planet). And it was being held at a super swanky resort in the foothills. The next morning I googled this event just to see what I could find out about it, only to discover that the tickets were being sold for $125 each. That means we won $1000 "worth" of tickets for listing the most elements of the periodic table. Who says this stuff doesn't pay off??

The second time we won, the category was countries who have placed 1st, 2nd, or 3rd in the world cup since some random (as far as we could tell) year a long time ago. The prize that time was an admit 2 pass to the classic film series at the Fox Theater downtown - certainly not so valuable, but still cool and something I'll definitely use. And then this past Monday we won for the third time, the category being European countries. We listed 30, and we forgot Ukraine and Romania. The this time the prize was completely and utterly lame. :( $1 off coupons for a smoothie. Seriously? We go from $125/head fashion show tickets to $1 off smoothie coupons? WTF. Lame, trivia night, lame.

Anyways, the Mrs. America fashion show was every bit as through-the-roof ridiculous as we'd hoped. The free food could have been more extensive (just veggies and cheese and crackers, although much nicer cheeses than normally fall within a graduate student budget), but there was more than enough free alcohol. The pageant was emcee'd by one of the local weathermen (hilarious, but even funnier was his inability to pronounce the word "bodice"), and there was an auction in the middle and at the end. The last auctioned "item", was the opportunity to be a judge for the costume portion of the actual Mrs. America pageant! Priceless! We were totally out of our element, surrounded by super rich people who could afford to spend $125 for this thing, not to mention bid thousands (literally!!!) on some of the auction items. When the resort donated the tickets for the Lightning Round! prize I'm sure they were just looking to get bodies in seats to make the event seem more successful, and not looking for poor graduate students who would make fun of everything they saw that night. During the auction our jaws kept dropping further as we calculated what percentage of our annual salary people were bidding!

I'll finish this post with some of the more amazing costumes from the night. The first 25 contestants walked in evening gowns, while the second half walked in their "state costumes."

Mrs. Maine - the only contestant I really couldn't make fun of - she's a doctor and a mother of 4, and she made her own dress in the color of her favorite charity, the American Heart Association...