Julie Covington – "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" (1976)

Don’t cry for me Argentina . . .

Don’t keep your distance

DO cry for me, loyal 2 or 3 lines readers!

And DO keep your distance!  (At least six feet!)

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If not for the coronavirus pandemic, you’d probably be watching the NCAA men’s basketball championship game tonight.

That game was scheduled to be played at the 75,000-seat Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia.  Did you know that the coronavirus is so small that if a single human cell was as big as that stadium, a single coronavirus would only be as big as a basketball?  

The coronavirus pandemic forced cancellation of “March Madness” – meaning no play-in games, no “Sweet Sixteen,” no “Elite Eight,” no “Final Four,” and no championship game for all the marbles.

Not this year!

No brackets, no office pools, no buzzer-beaters, and no 14-seeds upsetting 3-seeds.

“We should all feel for the players first, foremost and perhaps only,” Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “They’re the reason the tournament exists. They’re the reason we coach and compete.”

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The NCAA cancelled “March Madness” on March 12.

That evening, I and my teammates were competing in the weekly District Trivia event at the True Respite brewery.

The original “Einsteins”

Did the “Einsteins” win?  (Our team was named after the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company’s trivia team, which famously blew a question about – you guessed it – Albert Einstein in a 2012 episode of The Office.)

 You bet your sweet *ss we won – although it was a close one.

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We were playing for free beer that night – also pride, but mostly free beer.

But most of the time, we are playing for a lot more than free beer.

District Trivia runs weekly trivia events at hundreds of restaurants, bars, and breweries in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.  

There are two regular seasons each year – a summer season and a winter season –each of which is followed by several rounds of playoffs, which culminate in a finals event with thousands of dollars in prize money. 

For example, this year’s regular winter season included the weekly events that took place in October, November, December, January, and February.  March was reserved for the playoffs. 

To qualify for the playoffs, your team has to win one (or more) of the five regular-season months at your trivia venue – that is, you have to have the highest cumulative score for a calendar month’s-worth of weekly competitions.  

The first round of playoffs matches each of the monthly winners from a particular venue.  The highest-scoring team that night goes on to one of six regional tournaments, and the top scorers at the regionals go on to the finals.

But if your team has the highest cumulative scores in each and every one of the five regular-season months, you skip the first playoff round and go straight to the regionals.  

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Back in October, I set a goal that the “Einsteins” would score highest in each of the upcoming five months.

This is easier said than done.  For one thing, there were as many as 22 teams competing at the weekly True Respite events.  For another, not every team – much less, every player – shows up each and every week for five months.  (I did BECAUSE I CARE!)

We cruised through the first three months of the winter season without too much trouble.  My self-confidence knew no bounds, and I got more and more obnoxious each week.  (At True Respite, the weekly winners get free pints of beer, while the 2nd-place finishers win smaller-sized glasses of beer.  I once asked the District Trivia guy who asks the questions and adds up the scores if it would be considered bad form for the “Einsteins” to split into two teams so we could win both the 1st-place and 2nd-place prizes.)  

But we hit a rough patch in January, finishing out of the top three finishers a couple of weeks in a row.  Somehow we ran up the score enough in the other weekly events to finish first for the month.

And after a bad start in February, we came on strong and took the crown for that month going away.

Winning five months in a row felt good.  Besting our bitterest rivals (the “Trivia Nomads,” who allegedly play at different venues of different nights in hopes of gaining an advantage) in each of those months – which ensured they wouldn’t be going to the playoffs – was the icing on the cake.

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Here are just a few of the questions we’ve had to answer:

1.  Paul Newman won his one and only Oscar for his performance in what 1986 movie?

2.  Was it Siegfried or Roy who was mauled by a white tiger in their Las Vegas act?

3.  What do the letters in the title of the Wu-tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” stand for?  (I was SO proud that I got this one right, while none of my millennial teammates had a clue.)

4.  Who was the quarterback in the Detroit Lions’ last playoff victory?  (“Who cares?” is not the correct answer.)

5.  What is the name of the green train in the popular kids’ book/TV series, “Thomas & Friends”?  (The morning of the trivia event that included this question, I had read this book to my two-year-old grandson – otherwise, I would have had no idea.)

Name that train!

6.  Who was the first Pope to tweet?

7.  Within five years, when did McDonald’s introduce “Happy Meals”?

8.  What is the largest U.S. lake other than the Great Lakes?  (Easy-peasy, but we missed it because my teammates didn’t listen to me!)

9.  What children’s fairy-tale character’s name is used to describe planets that may be capable of supporting life?  (Here’s a clue.  Such a planet must be neither too hot nor too cold – the temperature must be just right.)

10. What is the name given to a seven-line poem that has one word in the first line, two words in the second line, three words in the third line, four words in the fourth line, three words in the fifth line, two words in the sixth line, and one word in the seventh line?

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If we had not swept all five monthly crowns, March 12 would have been the night that we would have been fighting it out with the other monthly champions for the right to advance to the regionals.

As I noted above, March 12 was the day that the NCAA pulled the plug on “March Madness.”  But we “Einsteins” barely noticed the NCAA announcement.  We were too busy crushing the competition at the very crowded and very noisy True Respite brewery. 

Trivia night at True Respite Brewing

We knew about the coronavirus that night.  But we didn’t know about the coronavirus, if you catch my drift.

A few days later, all upcoming trivia events were cancelled – including the regionals, which we had qualified for on the strength of FIVE LONG MONTHS of crushing it.

March 12 was the last night I’ll be playing trivia for a long, long time.  In fact, it was the last night I’ll drink a beer at a brewery for a long, long time.

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So when you shed a tear for those poor college basketball players who missed out on “March Madness” this year, maybe you can shed a tear for me and my fellow “Einsteins.”

After all, a lot of those will end up getting megabucks for playing a game.  And those who don’t go pro will still have enjoyed years of privileged status as scholarship athletes – which qualified them for free tutoring for their joke classes, not to mention CHEERLEADERS. 

Compare their life to the life of a broken-down 67-year-old guy with very little else going on in his sorry life.  Who should you feel sorrier for?

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The musical Evita – which opened in London in 1978 and moved to Broadway there next year – was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who had previously written Jesus Christ Superstar.

Julie Covington

The original recording of today’s featured song was sung by Julie Covington and included on a concept album that was released before Evita opened on the West End.  Covington turned down an invitation to appear on stage in the London production of the musical because she didn’t like Eva Peron.  

By the way, Covington played Janet Weiss in the original 1973 production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Click here to listen to Julie Covington’s recording of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: