52Books - This is a story about how I tried out for VH1’s...

This is a story about how I tried out for VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture.

As the notable Zach Linder and my non-blogging roommate have pointed out to me, Chuck Klosterman is speaking at Barnes and Noble. I have only read one of Klosterman’s books but found it to be exactly my style. More importantly, I mention in the review that I once tried out for VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture. This is probably as good a time as any to tell you and Mr. Klosterman, should he decide to google his own name, the story because it was a fun time and influenced how I read his books. Here it goes:

My little sister and I were avid fans of the World Series and had watched from the beginning as Pat Kiernan schooled teams of three on everything from 80’s hip-hop to soap opera madness. Being that the two of us could easily answer questions from the comfort of our living room, we signed up to be contestants as soon as we had the chance. All it took was an an online questionare with attached pictures of ourselves. I pulled in a friend from college and we immediately had a team we thought could cover music, TV, and movies.

So we practiced a bit and after various team names were compiled, we settled on “Team Agrocrag”. My personal favorite of the name suggestions, ”Lisa Burned the House Down”, was nixed early on because my sister thought people wouldn’t get it. The response I had this was, “If they haven’t seen TLC’s Behind the Music, they don’t deserve to be on the show anyways!” But apparently my opinion didn’t matter and once we had a name, we had to go to Austin for the first round of competition. There we had to sit in a room with about 20 different teams and take a timed multiple choice test. Astonished, we learned every team member had to pass the written test in order to move on to the next round, no 2 out of 3 business. This whole time, we thought we had it covered. The plan was, each member would have a different specialty. Each member was supposed to help out the other. OOOHHHH but we were wrong. This strategy clearly hadn’t worked because on the test I could fill in Beyonce lyrics and I knew Elvis’s record label but I sure didn’t know that one quote from Jurassic Park. Turns out our individual strengths added up to make an overall weakness.

Afterward, we didn’t know who or if any of us had passed the test. The production assistant got up and said not a single team in the room would be continuing to the next round. NOT ONE! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? WE WEREN’T AS NERDY AS WE HOPED WE’D BE! NOT EVEN “JENNIFER GREY’S ORIGINAL NOSE” COULD PASS THAT TEST! I THOUGHT THEY LOOKED PRETTY INTIMIDATING! But alas, it felt nice knowing it wasn’t just our team who was let down. The trio sitting next to us had been dumb enough to fly from Arizona for this. All we had to do was drive 3 hours south on I-35. Plus, we had the luxury of treating ourselves to some Chuy’s mexican food as a consolation prize, so all was not lost. We just went home and back to school.

The story’s a bit anticlimactic, right? But whatever, I just hope Mr. Klosterman understands that not all pop culture people know how to use this knowledge for good. It’s like, I could try and try but unless I decide I want to date Bret Michaels, I’m never going to be featured on a VH1 reality show. So you know what? I’m going to go this event tonight, try to get a book signed, and go home. And it will be ok because just as I watched those crazy NYU kids win the World Series of Pop Culture I was supposed to be on, I’ll watch Mr. Klosterman shame me with his never ending trivia. It’s a sport for the indoor kids who always have fun learning just a little bit more.

Tags: #is this when i use the read more feature?