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There are prizes and money at Soma 36 for people who can match the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to their bandana colors or know what “LED” stands for. At Trivia Night, every Tuesday at 9 p.m., area college students and recent graduates looking for social time i.e. for Bear Brew Pub gift certificates.
Les Rhoda hosts the night, a job which includes making up questions, gathering supplemental film clips, spinning records on the turntables, mixing visualizations with the music and hosting the competition. Rhoda calls Trivia Night, “One of the sweetest gigs I’ve ever had,” as well as his most challenging.
“It gives me an opportunity every week to plan and work up a little multimedia throw down,” Rhoda said. He plays supplemental videos for some of the questions to entertain the players. Once, a question about Dan Quayle was followed by a series of clips of Quayle’s dumbest quotes.
Participants can quickly learn the rules on their first night. Teams may have up to five people, and each member pays $2 to play. There are five to seven teams on an average night. Rhoda asks about 20 questions divided into four rounds. Topics range from music to politics to fashion. After the question, Rhoda spins records while the teams write answers on slips of paper and pass them in to him. Teams can bid points on each question depending how sure they are of their answer.
The prize isn’t much. The members of the first-place team each receive $12 gift certificates to Bear Brew which must be used at a later date. Second-place team gets $7 gift certificates. Teams who come back, however, have a chance to win all the admission money of the month if the sum of their nightly scores that month beat the other teams.
Kyle Grey, who books Trivia Night for Soma 36, said the idea came from a bartender he knows in Boston. Grey said Rhoda, who has been hosting Trivia Night since September, was a natural fit for the job. “He was on the same page as me” as far as what Trivia Night should be. “Making it a multimedia event really brought it to a whole other level.”
Rhoda, a DJ by trade, said that before hosting he used to attend Trivia Night himself. “A lot of these people have been doing it way longer than me,” he admitted. Still, Trivia Night’s crowd seems to appreciate him, as long as he doesn’t make mistakes. “They can be pretty merciless when I ask a bunk question or mess up their scores,” said Rhoda.
Bartender Mike Towle is in Soma 36 Tuesday nights and has grown familiar with the crowd. “We’ve had the same group of teams since the beginning of the semester,” Towle said. Trivia night is also two-for-one pizza night so many customers come for pizza and stay for trivia. “It’s not your usual Thursday night cheap-drinks-get-really-drunk crowd,” Towle said.
Travis Fearon of Hampden has been participating in Trivia Night for more than a year. He said it’s a great social activity, and he keeps coming back even though his team never won. “We’ve come in second a few times,” he said, but winning is secondary: “It’s a good place to see my friends and drink.”
His team, Buck Fusch, won later Tuesday night after a surprise upset during the bonus round, knocking the Jug Band Hitlers down to third place. Fearon had already left, however, when Rhoda announced the winners. The Jug Band Hitlers won the previous month’s jackpot, taking home more than $160 to split among team members.
Rhoda graduated from the University of Maine in 1998 with a degree in mass communication. He calls the hosting job his “big personal project.” He spends all week making an entertaining show, and participants seem to agree their $2 was well-spent.
After a question about G.I. Joe, Rhoda played a video from the Internet with video from an old G.I. Joe cartoon. The audio had been changed so that when a young football player was tackled, a G.I. Joe character came up to inform the child, “You got served!” Rhoda laughed along with the audience and went into the next question without missing a beat.
Bangor Daily News