Becoming the Event

Denver is nothing if not a city of city of participation. And we, being residents of Denver, had a full weekend of activities planned. However, given the nature of the challenge of participation we decided to turn things on their head. Instead of just going to these events, as we would have normally, we decided to become part of the events themselves.

We got a theater full of midnight movie goers to play games, we drank absinthe with patrons during an art opening, and hosted a round of trivia at one of Denver's most popular bars.

We integrated ourselves into each event and made it something larger than it originally was intended to be, therefore enhancing the community's experience and our own.

It was fun.

The NeverEnding Story

It began with a lot of bunched up faces and empty thought bubbles, so we did what any self-respecting team on a mission would do. We went out for pizza. It was good, plain with a wheat crust. It filled our bellies, but didn't fill our heads with a great idea, so we headed home to stare at each other for a bit longer. We bounced around a lot of ideas: perhaps we should set up a booth in town and challenge people to thumb wrestling; maybe we should try to break a world record, a world record that would need a lot of people to finish it. We thought about creating a group play, written by the participants and then acted out by us. Each idea was thrown out for one reason or another. Reasons like, our thumbs would get tired and world records are for sissies.

J, our resident Oh Don Piano assistant, thought that maybe we should go learn from the kids who play Yugioh at the local comic book store, but we are pretty sure he was angling for a few hours of uninterrupted browsing time while we talked with the kids. However, we thought he might be on to something with that one. It made us think about other events going on over the weekend. Events that we were already planning to attend.

The NeverEnding Story was playing at the midnight movies on Saturday. Being adults who were once kids who loved a good fantasy movie about dragons and shit, we couldn't resist going to see the movie once again on the big screen. So considering the challenge of participation, we wondered how we could take a simple night at the movies and morph it into something that we actively participated in. Since none of us have projectionist experience we thought perhaps the key would be trying to interact with the audience before or after the movie.

Step 1: Penetrate the Perimeter

We called the theater and were told a guy named Matt ran the midnight movie and he would be the one to talk to. However, since he slept most of the day (he is, afterall, the midnight movie guy) we had to wait until he woke up to call us back. So we had to continue with the plan without the guarantee we would be able to get into the theater for our plan.

Step 2: Sweeten the Deal

After some thinking we decided most people would be more apt to interact with us if we offered some sweet sweet goodies. Being good theme party hosts from way back we knew there was only one way to go when offering up snacks - they had to be themed. So after some quick thinking we came up with Swamp of Sorrow cookies, rock biter candy, and some awesome DVDs snagged from an undisclosed source.

Step 3: Wait for the Signal

While we were standing in line at Big Lots we finally got the call from midnight movie Matt. He had just woken up; it was 4 PM. He sounded a bit muddled, but after we explained what we wanted to do he agreed to let us take over hosting the event since it would let him take care of other things during the day. We assume he needed some more sleep.

Step 4: Learn as Much About the NeverEnding Story as Possible

Thank goodness for IMDB.

Step 5: Action

We arrived at the Esquire Theatre at 11:30 PM. We met with Matt and discussed our plan, shook off our nerves, and then waited. At 12:00 AM Matt introduced us to the audience and then we were on. We introduced ourselves and the crowd couldn't have been more awesome. They were totally into it. We asked trivia questions and then got one very brave girl to come up and sing The NeverEnding Story theme song with us in front of the entire crowd. At one point most of the crowd was singing along. We achieved our goal of turning the passive movie watching experience into something where people actively participated and had an enhanced experience. Not to mention we got to see a kickass 80s movie for free.

You might have noticed absinthe on that list...

Komar and Melamid Gallery Opening: The Absinthe Drinkers

Being fans of the artists Komar and Melamid, we had already planned to go to their art opening - American Dreams - at the Mizel Center here in Denver, but knowing our plan was to somehow actively participate in the event, we were almost afraid of what that would mean in terms of the quiet observational atmosphere of an art gallery.

Step 1: Get Outfitted

We go to the liquor store on a mission to buy absinthe. Now, we love to get stinkin' drunk just like most crazy hoes, but we usually stick with the vodka, whiskey, tequila route. We don't know anything about absinthe other than it used to get people crazy addicted. We didn't even know if a regular liquor store would carry it. Luckily, the sprawling Argonaut Liquors carried one brand and we went to pick it up. All of a sudden a black clad, gauge-eared Goth guy was standing behind us. "Don't even think of picking that up," he warned. "That stuff is crap. Not even close to the real thing." Well. Apparently, we needed to get the good stuff online right from the Czech Republic. We told him we didn't have time to wait for anything, but if he wanted to sell us some (very black market of Team Oh Don Piano) we would take it. Unfortunately, he didn't have any (er, maybe that was a good thing) and we made do with the non-hallucinogenic American version.

We also picked up some sugar cubes and plastic cups. This show was going on the road.

Step 2: Get In There

We enter the gallery at 4 PM, our canvas bag of supplies tucked safely under our arm and did some recon. There were a lot of people milling around, but no sign of Vitaly Komar, who was supposed to be speaking later that afternoon. The crowd was big, but subdued. Suddenly, the probability of our plan happening this Sunday, in a sophisticated gallery housed in a Jewish community center, seemed to diminish before our eyes.

Step 3: Just Do It

We bided our time for awhile, but then we decided it was do or die. We worked up our nerves and went to speak with a man in the corner, who had an air of authority about him. It might have been the fact that he was standing in front of a giant portrait of himself. We explained our plan to him and he amazingly didn't see anything wrong with it, but told us we really needed to speak with Simon, the gallery director. So that's what we did. We walked over to Simon and told him our plan. You could have knocked us over with a feather when he seemed intrigued and said, "Sure - go ahead!" Yeah!

Step 4: Make It So

We walked over to a nearby bench and started breaking out our booty. We opened our absinthe, cups, sugar cubes, and started pouring. The patrons might have been quiet, but our impromptu absinthe bar caught their attention. We poured the strong liquor over sugar cubes and started handing them out, explaining that we were offering absinthe, historically a drink of the art community in the 19th century France, and a beverage that Komar and Melamid used to bring to their events. We told the gallery patrons we wanted to bring them into the experience; instead of submissively viewing art, they were participating in an experience that artists had partook in for centuries. They were into the idea, and at one point during the evening, almost everyone there had our offering in their hand.

Circles began to develop between strangers, all discussing the drink. Then slowly, they began discussing themselves. The absinthe drinking broke down barriers between strangers. We met so many interesting people who we would have never spoken to if we hadn't asked them to participate. It turned out that Komar was unable to come as planned, and our absinthe drinking became the activity of the evening.

Quizmasters

We love a god pub quiz. Denver is rife with them, as the Geeks Who Drink brand of quiz night infiltrates a local bar at least once a night somewhere in the city, and other independent ones have been popping up. Usually, Oh Don Piano's participation is limited to sipping on beer and cider and wracking our collective brains for any remnants of knowledge linked to 80s hair bands, women's history, or comic book characters, but of course that wouldn't do during our weekend of participation. Naw, man: we had to become the quizmasters.

Step one: Appeal to the Master

The first task was to convince Marc Hughes, who hosts a pub quiz at the local hipster hangout, Sputnik to let us steal a round for the evening. While we worried that he would be hesitant to release the reigns for an entire round, he actually agreed readily. Man, everyone in Denver LOVES our participation! We promised we would provide glorious prizes and a fun round of trivia.

Step two: Find Glorious Prizes and Create a Fun Round of Trivia

Once again, we turned to our undisclosed source of dvd greatness and put together what could possibly amount to the best movie package ever. Hits like, Baywatch: Season 2, Alligator ("A vicious alligator named Ramon, who was flushed into the city sewer as a baby..."), and the Westminister Dog Show were included. And since Big Lots was practically giving away the "White 'n' Fluffy" popcorn and Mike & Ikes, we threw those in there, too. At this point, we were ready to win the prize ourselves.

Next up, the quiz. We batted around a few ideas for the theme before landing on the obvious: blogging! It was a risk, because not everyone is a huge internet nerd with lots of bloggy "friends" and "community members" they've never met. But we decided we'd go with it. We came up with an array of questions covering blogs in the music, political, techy, personal, and local realms.

Step three: Quiz Time, Yo.

We showed up at Sputnik feeling good. Our battles with group singing and absinthe distribution had left us pretty worn out, but we knew this participation project would be fun. It was a whole different world behind the microphone. Suddenly, instead of sitting quietly in a booth with just our friends, we were thrust into the spotlight, literally, and all eyes and ears were on us. And for good reason: they were hungry for our sweet ass movie package prize. We launched into the quiz, a little shaky. With Marc's guidance we slowed the questions down and learned to repeat when necessary.

And even though we were behind the DJ booth, this was some killer participation. You get it from all sides: teams yell questions and funny remarks at you, they leave little notes for you on the answer sheets, they come up to talk between rounds. While ostensibly about teams' interactions with each other, pub quiz is really a lot more about teams' interactions with the host.

Step four: Crown a Round Winner

Here's where the real world community differs most from the online community: nerdy blog knowledge. While you'd be hard up to find an active blogger who doesn't know who [answer to #1] is or read [answer to #4] or gather friends around to watch [answer to #6] every once in a while, this real world crowd was a little less blog-literate. But nonetheless, one team pulled right ahead and answered over half the questions correctly.

An excited team member ran up to claim the prize and brought it back to the table for sorting.

All in all our weekend of participation was a big success. Of course, we had to refuel after all that "outside" time with a couple episodes of "The Hills" and some "Rock of Love." We're all better now.

To continue the participation theme and bestow the quiz upon the true nerds, we offer here the questions from our foray into the world of pub trivia. The first person who is able to email us all the correct answers will win a dvd chosen randomly from our undisclosed source, and if they're lucky, some candy. Of course there's no way to monitor this, but the answers should come from your knowledge base, not Google's (except for the last one, which is a local-knowledge thing. We'll allow research on that one). Good luck!

All About Blogging Trivia

1. One of the best-known personal bloggers, this woman is famous for having been one of the first people fired for writing negatively about work on her blog. The name of her blog is now commonly used as a term to reference when this happens to others. Name the blogger or the blog.

2. Julie Powell got a lucrative book deal after blogging for a year about her attempts to cook every recipe out of a famous chef's cookbook. Whose cookbook was she using?

3. What is the name of the political blog, published by Gawker Media, that may be most notoriously known for publicizing the blog of Jessica Cutler, who worked on the hill and wrote about accepting money for sexual favors from a Republican senator.

4. Which award-winning group blog's tagline is "a directory of wonderful things"?

5. What celebrity gossip blogger made news for outing Doogie Houser and Lance Bass? He also recently appeared on MTV's Celebrity Rap Superstar.

6. This awesomely cool internet cartoon character has a blog-like page where he answers emails sent in by fans on his Lappy 486 computer.

7. What legendary musician and artist has a blog, but is insulted if you refer to it as such, insisting - don't call it a blog, call it a journal.

8. This Denver "scenester" blog recently changed its name when it became too popular. Name the original and new name of this blog. (2 points)