Blogger Meets Blogger: Doing Dinner and Detention with DerryX

It’s Monday night, and I’m at Brown’s Brewing.  Yes, it’s time for my Monday night trivia game, and prior to the event I had a dinner meeting set up.

See, I’ve been enjoying the Detention with DerryX weblog, and my guest for dinner tonight was Jerry Papandrea, the ubiquitous DerryX.  And I gotta tell you, we had a great time talking about blogging and common interests and all that (he and I both appreciate the fine art of professional wrestling – classic pro wrestling, which as far as I’m concerned ended after the Chris Benoit tragedy).

I actually met Jerry a few months before at the All Over Albany birthday bash; we kept in touch through Facebook and Twitter, and I asked if he would like to join my Street Academy trivia team on Monday for dinner and trivia.  He was interested.

By the way, if you haven’t had a chance to check out the DerryX website and weblog, take a moment and go over there and read it.  It’s fun, it’s entertaining, and his attempt to conquer the Wagon Train Restaurant’s “Graveyard Challenge” is a tour de force for anyone who thinks they can conquer digesting the unconquerable meal.

We discussed our approaches to blogging – what we want our readers to take from our blog posts, what inspires us to write, what keeps us going when we can’t think of a topic to broach.  Just before trivia started, my teammate Jeremy arrived – his Ultimate team didn’t win – and he and DerryX got to meet each other.  Alexis was running late – she was at another Ultimate game at another part of Albany (her team lost as well).

DerryX stuck around for a few questions, and he saw the interplay between trivia teams – he understood that it wasn’t just answering questions correctly; that there was an entire culture and interpersonal relationship involved with competitive team trivia.  “It’s just like karaoke,” he told me.  “I’ve gone to karaoke on Saturday night and there are people who will get absolutely hostile if you go to the mike and try to sing their song.  Like they wrote it and they’re getting a royalty for it.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.  “Isn’t the fact that the song is being performed in a karaoke setting automatically branding the song as being performable by everyone?”

We chatted for a few more minutes, then DerryX unfortunately had to leave.  He would have preferred to stay for a while longer, but he had prior commitments to address.  We’ll get together again some time.  It was definitely fun spending dinner with DerryX, and I hope our paths cross again very soon.