By Tim Rich
I recently caught up with Smarter How’s Randall Eng, who is a Jeopardy Champion and longtime OQL Player. Randall and I have interacted a lot in Friendlies and I was thrilled to meet him one Wednesday fall evening at Slattery’s MidTown Pub for Trivia with a few other OQL players as well. He works in the Big Apple so I chatted with him over virtual brunch while having eggs benedict.
Rich: How did you first get into OQL? Who invited you and how has it affected your life?
Eng: Until I found OQL, trivia was something that I enjoyed but had very few outlets for, and was entirely a solitary activity. None of my friends were interested in it, and I didn’t have the self-confidence to just show up at things like bar trivia on my own. Quiz Bowl didn’t exist at my high school, so when I discovered that that was a thing in college, I was very excited to go try it out. But I went to the first meeting and the people there were awful, just insular and unkind and proud of it, and I got out of there as fast as I could.
So I went back to watching Jeopardy on my own, tried out and got on in 2008, but did very little else in trivia until a friend told me about Learned League. I really loved doing LL, and then the pandemic hit and I read about OQL on the LL message boards.
At that point I was about to turn 50 and looking for ways to push myself out of my comfort zone, so I signed up for a scratch team which turned out to be Threat Level Midnight. I was terrified of that first match--not only had I not done trivia with other people before, but I had almost zero experience interacting with people online. But everyone on my team, especially our captain Jack Lewis, was so friendly and welcoming, and I just had the best time. Then I started playing friendlies and met more people, and signed up for Pop Solos and many other online things and then before I knew it, I was both getting much better at this hobby and making real friends and feeling like part of a community of people that I cared about. My life before getting into trivia was great--I have a job I love, a family that I adore, and I am generally pretty content. But the people that I’ve met in OQL and in trivia in the past few years have enriched my life and opened up a part of me that I didn’t realize I had, and I’m so grateful to have found them. I often think about that first OQL game, and what would have happened if my scratch team had turned out to be as unpleasant as the people at that college Quiz Bowl meeting--I’d have missed out on so much.
RIch: How did you first adopt trivia as a hobby? What bars do you play at regularly?
Eng: I would say that I did not really adopt trivia as a hobby until finding OQL. I live in New York, and sometimes do bar trivia with OQL pals. I’ve tried a couple of different places--One Star Bar is very convenient for me, but I’ve enjoyed the difficulty level and standard of question writing of Pete’s Candy Store. Film is one of my favorite subjects, and I recently discovered Nitehawk Cinema trivia in Brooklyn and am hoping to go there more regularly.
Rich: What are your top 5 Trivia highlights either as an individual or as part of a team?
Eng: In no particular order: 1) winning a game of Jeopardy, 2) making TOTW in both OQL/USA and OQL/UK in the same week, 3) writing my first Pop Solos friendly, 4) making it to Division 1 with my OQL team Smarter How? and doing well enough to feel like we kind of belonged despite being relegated, 5) an epic Pop Solos match where I pulled into a four-way tie against Susannah Brooks, Jeff Frank, and Jack Rousseau on the very last question of regulation and then won the four-headed tiebreak.
RIch: Besides trivia, what are your other hobbies and interests?
Eng: I’m an opera composer and teach in a graduate program devoted to training composers and librettists to create operas and musicals, so I’m pretty immersed in the arts. I’m at the opera or a concert or the theatre a couple of times a week. I’m also a fan of what my daughter calls “pretentious film” and I really love jazz, which is a big influence on my own music. People expect me to be very strong in these categories in trivia, which is not always the case--I can tell you a ton about classical music after 1945 or jazz after 1959, but the kinds of questions that come up in quizzing are usually about much older works. Oh, and I try to play tennis once or twice a week.
Tim: Who are your top three composers of all time?
My composition teacher in college was the opera composer Anthony Davis, and he has remained my mentor and the biggest influence on my music. I wrote a Pop Solos (!) quad about his operas, which are intense and propulsive but also sometimes very funny. Charles Mingus is the composer whose music I’ve spent the most time with, the richness of his harmonic language and the way that he can write heartbreak, fury, ecstasy, hits me so hard--his music to me encapsulates what it is to be alive. (I wrote a 1-Day Special on Mingus last year.) There are too many contenders for that third slot, but maybe I’ll shout out Julia Wolfe, who writes music that is tender and muscular and intensely personal. If I could pick one piece by each of them to single out, they would be X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and Fire in my mouth.
Rich: What movies did you watch in 2023 and which of them deserve Oscars?
Eng: 2023 was a big composing year for me, so I haven’t gotten to the movies as much as I’d have liked. I did quite like Past Lives and American Fiction, but the film that excited me the most this year was Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros. It’s four hours long and compelling for every second of it--the story of a family-run high-end restaurant that’s ready to be turned over to the next generation but the older generation is having difficulty letting go. There is a humaneness to all of Fred’s films that is startling, and this is one of his best.
Rich: What sports teams do you currently follow and what is your favorite moment as a fan?
Eng: I used to be a big sports person--when I was a kid I read Sports Illustrated cover to cover (which is why I can do well when Steve writes quads about 1970s quarterbacks), but I don’t follow it nearly as much these days. I do still keep up with baseball, and as a child of the late 1970s, the Yankees are my team. But my favorite sports moment is probably the magic couple of weeks of Linsanity in 2012. That story hit me from so many different angles, and I don’t think I’ve ever had as much emotionally invested in an athlete as I did that month in Jeremy Lin.
Rich: If you could play trivia and have dinner with any five people in history, dead or alive who would it be with?
Eng: I would be absolutely terrified to have dinner with as volatile a person as Mingus, but I would so like to know what made him tick. I can’t really imagine him playing trivia, but I can totally imagine him speaking truth to power about the trivia canon. As much as I find the deification of Steven Sondheim to be artistically unhealthy, he would be an absolutely fascinating dinner companion and an even more fascinating person to play trivia with. I’m writing an opera now about my dad growing up in 1940s Norfolk, Virginia, and though I have dinner with him all the time now, I’d really like to dine with the 17-year-old or the 35-year-old version of him. A pie-in-the-sky idea for an opera I’d like to do is an adaptation of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, and Perec would be absolutely killer at trivia. There are all sorts of secret hidden aspects about the writing of that book, and maybe we can get him drunk and reveal them to us. For our fifth, I’m going to pick Nick Salyers--not just because he will get all of the young-person questions that the rest of my team is going to miss, but as a representative of all of the people I’ve met in OQL who I would never have come across in my regular life, which is one of my favorite aspects of this thing we do.
Rich: What is your take on the Grammys and today’s music in general?
Eng: I have a similar feeling about the Grammys as I do about the Oscars--there are just so many interesting works that are never going to have a shot at these big awards for reasons that have nothing to do with their merit, and I wish that our culture, and especially our media (and maybe our quizzing world), would not give the Oscars and Grammys so much air. I’m not the right person to ask about today’s music in general--I have not really followed pop music since college--but if you are asking about what’s happening today in jazz, classical music, opera, and musical theatre then I will say that there’s tons of really great work happening, and that these fields are vibrant and overflowing with talent.
Rich: What Broadway and off-Broadway shows did you see last year? In 2024, can our local circle of trivia friends attend one together?
Eng: A lot! Some highlights: Morning/Mourning at the Prototype Festival, White Girl in Danger at Second Stage, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the Met, Buena Vista Social Club at the Atlantic, The Thanksgiving Play on Broadway, A Bright New Boise at the Signature, Infinite Life at the Atlantic, Poor Yella Rednecks at Manhattan Theatre Club, and a terrific production of Endgame with Bill Irwin and John Douglas Thompson at Irish Rep. And yes, I look forward to seeing a show with our trivia friends for sure!
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