Last Saturday was Mer’s day, and she had a very full day planned. We were up early and headed north to downtown Cleveland, to a TV studio, of all places. I was not expecting that. Once inside, I saw a bunch of teens dressed in suits, and then I remembered that CVCA’s Academic Challenge Team was going to be on the Academic Challenge TV show. Our team showed up a few minutes after we arrived.
Academic Challenge is a wonderfully nerdy team competition, where teams square off to answer academic trivia, science, math, history, and literature questions. It’s like a school-sponsored version of Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy. It’s pretty great stuff. Normally, teams compete at local high schools, but each week a local television station broadcasts three teams of three students each. This was CVCA’s first appearance on the program in over a decade. Mer had wanted to see it, so we were there to be in the audience.
CVCA’s taping slot was second, so we got to see the first show being taped; we got to sit in the next (empty) studio over and watch the show on monitors. We had to be very quiet so that we would not be heard in the next studio, but that was okay – it was fun to see how things worked.
Once our session was ready to go, we filed in to the studio to watch. Mer and I sat with Dubbs, who was also there to cheer the kids on. We had two guys and a girl on our team, and we faced off against another private (Catholic) school and a public high school from a wealthy district. It seems there is a tie-in between academic excellence and money, which does not really surprise me.
The competition was much fun. The Catholic school was very fast, and they ended up winning the game. Our team came in second, and Mer was pleased that they did better than either of the other teams in literature and mythology questions. I kept informal track, and I think there were only three or four questions that were asked during the show that I did not know. That made me feel smug, although I’m not sure I could have rung in first on all of the questions that I knew. In the whole show, I think there was only one question that was missed out of all the questions asked to all three teams – it was impressive. Mer and I were pretty sure that any of the three teams in our game would have won the game we saw being taped earlier. It was a pretty great time, and I hope since we did pretty well that our team will be invited back.
After the taping, we mingled with the students. They invited us to lunch, but since we were still on our Clean diet program, we declined. We got back in the car and headed west, to Strongsville, to the Cleveland Metroparks tobogganing chutes. Mer had “won” tickets to the chutes at CVCA’s auction last year, and this was the last day to use them. We used the restrooms, handed in our tickets, and grabbed a toboggan. This presented the first challenge. The toboggans are four-person sleds made of wood, so they are large and heavy. We tried carrying our sled together, but Mer was not tall enough to keep the sled up as we climbed the four or five flights of stairs. So, I had to figure out how to carry it. We took a total of four runs, and for runs three and four, I finally settled on grabbing the sled by the lowest hand ropes, and then leaning it on my back so that it went straight up over my head. That worked pretty well, although I’m not sure it did my back any favors.
The tobogganing run was a blast. The chutes are refrigerated, and so they were fast even with it being about 35 degrees out. The attendant at the top told us we were probably going about 35 mph, but had said they can get over 50 mph at night when it is colder and the ice is faster. The hill is really, really steep – it very much feels like going over the first big hill of a roller coaster, except you are sitting on the rails (as it were). We could only take four runs – Mer had evening plans that she wanted to do, and the schlepping the sled up the hill is tiring. Still, the all-day tickets only run $8, so I expect we’ll be back next year.
We went home and I made lunch and supper, and I took a short nap while Mer went and bought groceries for the first time in a month – since we were finishing out February diet on Tuesday, we needed normal food back in the house again. After supper and an episode of the TV show Doctor Who, we headed south to Canton, to the Civic Center, where we went to the small “bare bones” theater where the center does its smaller plays. I was very pleased to see we were there to see The Elephant Man.
The Elephant Man is a play based on the true story of John Merrick, who suffered from extreme deformities, and he lived in London back in the 1880s. He was attended to by a London doctor, and the play looks at their relationship over several years. I had seen it years ago at Porthouse Theater, and I thought it was a great piece of theater, so I was happy to see it again.
As an added bonus, the doctor was played by a CVCA graduate who graduated about four years ago. He did an excellent job. The actor who played John Merrick also did an amazing job, and the female lead, who played an actress who visited John over several years, was quite good as well. The play was as moving and thought-provoking as I had remembered, and the director did some very interesting things with the play. He decided to keep stripping the stage of props, especially toward the end of the play, as John and the doctor kept stripping back to more and more honesty. The director also used actors in double roles to bring out the parallels of the main characters. It was very effective.
Mer had managed to plan quite a fun little day that still did not involve going out to eat. That was quite a feat of planning – for us, at any rate.