Janet Lee and her family, top right
How did you get involved in trivia?
I think I saw on social media that Fullsteam [Brewery] was doing virtual trivia. This was back in the earliest, dark days of COVID. We really weren’t seeing a lot of people. It seemed like a fun thing my husband and I could do from home. We did it once or twice on our own and then had so much fun that we started inviting other people.
What is it like doing virtual trivia?
[Our team’s] not all local, so we’re usually all watching the video feed or, often, somebody will take screenshots of the question and post them to a group text. Then the rest of us communicate via group text. [The team is] a big mix. Some of the people are people I work with, some of them are friends from high school, some are friends from college.
What’s your team name?
We come up with something different every week [but] we almost always are named something that has to do with “Chalupa Batman.” During the course of this whole pandemic, I got pregnant [and] my husband bet naming rights to our child on an answer to a question. He was right, but that didn’t stop the rest of the members of our group from running with this. So my then yet- unborn kid became known as “Chalupa Batman.” Since then, there’s been other kids in the group who have been born, so now there’s some more variability in the team name.
What is the key to winning bar trivia?
There’s not really a strategy, it’s just about the mix of people you have. Some of us are in science and medicine. There’s a social studies teacher who is a huge history buff and entertainment connoisseur. There’s people who like a lot of different things, and we have a range of ages too. One of our older players has a 14-year-old daughter and she is instrumental to our ability to win sometimes. I’m the food person. Questions about food, international ingredients, weird fruits and vegetables, that is totally my jam.
What’s your favorite thing about doing this every week?
My favorite thing about [trivia] has been reestablishing friendships and communication with people I didn’t talk to a whole lot. It’s fun to see people pop in and out that I had not spoken to in years. It’s been a really good social support system as I was going through pregnancy and postpartum. Over the course of trivia, there’s been at least three kids born in this group. It’s become something where we don’t just talk on trivia nights, there’s all sorts of other things that happen in the group.
An earlier version of this interview mistakenly stated that Lee was going through pregnancy and postpartum depression. Lee contacted the INDY to clarify that she was not experiencing postpartum depression. We have amended the interview and we regret the error.
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