Pub Quiz

A triumphant return to Pub Quiz tonight - the trivia game downtown where my office's team was knocked out of the standings after placing first, third, first, third over the past four weeks. Tonight - we had our revenge. Categories usually include things like movie quotes, who sings that song, "Istanbul or Constantinople" (i.e. after or before 1930), bras (e.g. how many times does the average woman change bra sizes in her life?) the team is very serious. i am the only girl which makes me sad. I try to make up for my incompetence with movie quotes with extra knowledge about history and bra sizes. at least one fully-grown person in our office (non-intern) used to play but he got so competitive about it that he decided he had to stop. next week is the "birthday of pub quiz" - each participant puts 4 dollars in the pot isntead of two, so the winnng team can actually walk out with more than 100 dollars. It's going to be fierce.

Transcribed a great interview today by an old Jewish guy who was in the air force during WWII and was stationed in the Philippines. He grew up in the Jewish Children's home in New Orleans (an orphanage), which was so great and nice a place and the Southern Jews contributed so much to it, and its school attracted such great teachers, that the richest and most uppity of New Orleans families began to clamored to send their kids to school with the orphans. (They also had world-class athletic coaching and doctor-ing; this old guy told the interviewer that he had braces as a child -- in the 1920s!) The orphans also developed friendships and connections with New Orleans' most prominent Jews while they were there, and many were thus able to get good jobs even at the worst point of the Depression by calling on the goodwill of this caring Jewish community.

The orphan's home has since closed, but the school, Isadore Newman, lives on and is even today probably one of the top five private schools in the South although Jews are certainly no longer the majority there!

-M