Trivia night at Barney's Beanery in Westwood is always packed. Well, I imagine Barney's is packed every day of the week, but on trivia night, seating is at capacity and we always have to scramble to find a seat. Last night, we sat at the bar. The bar seats are old car bucket seats, which while comfortable, made me feel incredibly short as my feet did not touch the step. Also, the mid-level bar (walk in, up the stairs to your left) is served by the downstairs bartender who CLIMBS A LADDER TO SERVE THE DRINKS!! I kid you not. She has one of those sliding ladders like you find in the library (or as our bartender pointed out, Beauty and the Beast) and she climbs the ladder then leans down to pick up the beer and then reaches up to serve it. How is that even remotely safe? To make it worse, the mid-level bar patrons are provided a variety of tools to summon the bartender, such as bicycle bells, hotel bells, and the super-annoying old car horn. That poor girl. We tipped her well.
But this post is not about the bartender or the crazy mid-level bar. Christina and I (there were only two of us) sat at the bar and chatted with a lovely young Brit before trivia started. She was Asian and the accent kind of threw me (yes, I know that's incredibly racist), kind of like the first time Cho Chang spoke in the Harry Potter films. She was sweet and we broke the sad news to her that she could not use her old iPhone from England on her new T-mobile plan. Anywho, trivia started, her friends arrived, so our conversation stopped.
A round or two later, a British accent on my right said, "So, 'ow you doing so far?" I turned, expecting the sweet girl from before, and was faced with an extremely inebriated
Camilla Parker-Bowles the early years. I recovered quickly and said, "well, we're sucking right now, but there's time to catch up." To which Camilla replied, "Sometimes sucking is a good thing, eh? Know what I mean?" with an elbow to the ribs. "These questions are too American, but if anything British comes up, you come to me (wink)." Suddenly she became Eric Idle and I was in the middle of a Monty Python skit--as the straight man! I'm never the straight man. I smiled, nodded, and turned away giving Christina the "save me" eyes.
Drunkmilla turned to some hapless man on her right and I was safe. Although, we still sucked royally for the night. I won't tell you the score; it was humiliating. So much so that we considered leaving before the last round because it wasn't going to help our score any, but stayed because the last round was a music round and we always do well with those. It didn't help.
