Next Friday, I will be hosting the first ever pub trivia night at the library where I work part-time. Actually, I will be hosting my first Quizzo night. Quizzo is a style of pub trivia that is popular in eastern Pennsylvania. It consists of about 4 or 5 rounds of play, with each round having 10 questions. Quizzo is played with teams and is meant to be a communal activity. It is about getting together with friends or acquaintance as much as it is about trivia, so it can be fun for people to play who might not even consider themselves to be good at trivia.
Quizzo is usually played on a regular schedule so often the same teams play against each other week after week. In my experience, team names are often funny names or pop-culture inspired, thought if your usual team can’t make it, you might join up with other teams you sometimes play against and form sort -of-a superteam. Some examples of teams I have played against during my Quizzo playing days include: Castle Greyskull (a name inspired by He-man), The Handsome Boy Modeling School (a hip-hop collective inspired name), Who Are Those Guys, Murder of Crows, and The Douche Canoes. Based on those names, as you might imagine, there were a lot of guys who played at the trivia where we played, once upon a time.
Hosting and organizing regular Quizzo night has been a dream of mine for sometime now. Actually, it was a dream for both Mr. Katie and me. It is hard to overstate just how much Quizzo meant to our lives during the years of 2012 and 2013. It kept us afloat when we were newly married and living in a new town and helped us make friends when we needed them most.
Three months after Mr. Katie and I got married in May of 2011, we moved two hundred miles away to a small town close to Penn State University so that Mr. Katie could pursue graduate work. We were living away from family and friends for the first time in our relationship. Mr. Katie started his graduate program before we even completely moved in and life started moving quickly with me starting my new job less than a week after moving in. Fairly quickly, it became apparent that Mr. Katie’s graduate program was not what he thought it would be. I also struggled with making friends in small-town central Pennsylvania. At my previous job, I had many friends but I had also worked there for five years. It had taken we a while to make those friendships and I knew that friends weren’t made overnight.
By the end of 2011, Mr. Katie had decided not to continue with his graduate program which meant that he would now be out of a job and without insurance since his work as a teaching assistant provided those things. Early 2012 looked bleak and felt break. This is where Quizzo stepped in to provide a ray of hope. In March of 2012, a friend of mine from summer camp, who is a pastor who lived in the State College area, invited us to a Quizzo fundraiser for his church. We joined his team and won first place! We not only had a good time but we also won tickets to a small nearby amusement park, pretty sweet we thought!
Not long after that, our pastor friend invited us to play Quizzo in State College with him and some of our teammates from the trivia night. We ended up winning again! Hazzah! The entire team had a lot of fun that night. We ended up staying at Zeno’s, the Quizzo bar, chatting and hanging out long after our game was over.
My pastor friend suggested we meet up again and play and so we did. We found out that the person who hosted the Quizzo night was a local classic rock radio DJ and in the evenings he worked for a company that hosted several Quizzo games in the area throughout the week. The Quizzo company even had a weekly Quizzo game right in our very town at the new brewpub within walking distance of our rental house.
During the late spring of 2012 Quizzo became a weekly part of our routine. We made new friends thought Quizzo. We influenced people (well maybe that is taking it too far). I approached my co-workers and asked them to join me, and sometimes they did. I approached a colleague from another library who I met at a library professionals event and asked her if she thought she might like to join Mr. Katie and me and play together sometime. She and her husband joined us and the four of use became the core members of a team from that spring until the next summer when we moved out of the State College area.
In the meantime, Mr. Katie found work at Penn State with one of the professors who he met while he was part of his graduate program. It seemed that everything in our lives started to get better once we started playing Quizzo. We didn’t always win, but we sometimes won and sometimes we won more than one week in a row. More importantly, we made friends and started to feel like we were part of a community by playing Quizzo.
I started seeing some of the people from Quizzo around town when I would walk to and from work. They would honk or even stop and talk sometimes. I met the friends of my new Quizzo friends and I would become friendly with them and thus my circle expanded. I even asked some of my new Quizzo friends help judge a young writers contest that I was co-organizing at my library.
Summers in State College we found were wonderful. Many of the students would be gone for the summer so we “locals” could always find a parking space and move through State College with ease. Both summers that we lived in State College, Mr. Katie and I would have one week where we would say to each other, “Let’s see if we can play Quizzo every night this week.” Quizzo only happened Monday through Thursday and four nights in a row of Quizzo always seemed perfectly reasonable to us before we began our quest. However, both times we understood this quest the same thing would happen. By mid-day Wednesday we would say to ourselves and each other, “I don’t want to go out again tonight because I am not that young anymore.” Still we would persevere, being the troopers that we are, we would finish our four night streak of playing.
In the spring of 2013, I even organized a 6 member team to travel an hour away to Williamsport, PA to participate in a regional Quizzo tournament that was put on by the company who hosted the local trivia nights. This contest was serious business with an entry fee and more strict rules about the number of people on a team. Some of the teams even came in costumes such as top hats, monicles, and fake mustaches.
We ended up finishing 4th out of 20 teams who played that day. We even were in first place until the final round which was a picture round where we knew almost none of the answers. We made a crucial mistake and did not opt to double our points in an earlier round which caused us to have to double the points on a round where we knew almost nothing. However, we only feel to 4th place and we still won a $50 cash prize plus we felt we could hold our heads high after the competition was complete.
In the end, we ended up moving away from the State College area in late July of 2013 because Mr. Katie found a job in his field but we played quizzo almost every week until the very end. I remember walking home from our brewpub with Mr. Katie after one of the last nights we played quizzo in our town and saying to him, “I don’t think we should move, we have friends here now and look at all of the fun we are having.” It was ironic for me to say that because almost as soon as we moved to central Pennsylvania in 2011, I felt like we had made a big mistake and I verbalized my interest in moving away as soon as possible.
After we moved, we struggled to find any good places to play. One night we drove 20 miles away to Lansdale only to listen to the worst host we had ever heard mispronounce works like “avian” and accidentally tell the answers to the questions while she was reading them. We played a few times at the local Applebees restaurant that was near our place but we were the best team by far in the establishment and it didn’t have the community feeling of teams coming back week-after-week the way the pubs near Penn State did.
Eventually, we learned about a trivia night at a brewpub in the town where Mr. Katie worked. We started going there and playing regularly. It had the vibe we were looking for with teams playing regularly and the host was very good at his job. Any host worth his salt knows that you can’t allow teams to cheat by using their phones to look up answers. I even started inviting friends from my new job to join us at our new trivia spot. We had a lot of fun playing with my new co-worker and her husband. Eventually, though we decided to start a family and I got pregnant with Mr. Man. I played Quizzo the week before Mr. Man was born and even made tentative plans with my team to play again next week if I didn’t have a baby, even thought that day, November 5th would have been 2 days past my due date. The following Thursday on November 5th, Mr. Man was born.
I have played a trivia type game at a few parties and I play Jeopardy almost everyday with our Amazon Echo but I haven’t played Quizzo since that last Thursday at The Perk in Perkasie on October 29th, 2015.
I miss it. I sometimes tell people about those nights spent playing Quizzo and I don’t think they understand the magnitude of what Quizzo meant to my life during that time in 2012 and 2013. When Mr. Katie and I moved away in 2013 we used to talk about how we would start our own Quizzo company because we couldn’t find a decent game until we found the one at The Perk. We talked about what we would have to do to start a business. We didn’t do any of those things. My biggest concern in late 2013 was finding a full time job. Then we wanted to buy a house, so once I found a full time job, I thought a lot about my job and deciding what town we should buy a house in. By then we found the trivia night at The Perk and we stopped talking about starting our Quizzo company.
So I am very excited to host my first Quizzo Night at the Indian Valley Public Library next Friday, January 25th. If you need any details, reply below or send me a message.
What companies or dream have you always wanted to bring to fruition?
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Best wishes, Katie! This sounds so exciting!
I want to release a podcast series.