Where Everybody Knows It All--and Your Name Too

When boy meets girl at this bar, he doesn’t want to know, “What’s your sign?” He’s apt to ask, “Who was President on the first day of the 20th Century?”

Welcome to the Silver Spoon in West Hollywood, the thinking person’s saloon, where regulars humiliate themselves over affable bartender Jim Field’s weekly killer quiz.

“It makes ‘Jeopardy!’ look like ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ ” says free-lance writer Rick Sandack, who lives in the neighborhood.

Consider these puzzlers:

Who turned down the Nobel Prize for literature? (Sinclair Lewis, of course)

What does inspissate mean? (to make thick)

Fleiss (as in Heidi) is a German word meaning . . . (industry)

There’s no big payoff here, no rooms full of furniture or spiffy vans. Patrons vie for free drinks, lottery tickets--and a chance to see their names on the wall behind the beer taps. Not to mention those fancy certificates proclaiming the winners to be members of the American Society of Nearly Exceptional Minds. (That’s MENSA backward.)

Says Phil Roth, an actor who also lives nearby: “You give it your best shot and accept your humiliation--or your glory--for a week.”

On any Tuesday evening, you’ll find grown-ups hunched, in turn, over the quiz folder, intent as college students taking a final.

Says journalist Jill Evans, a Silver Spoon regular, “You finish school. Then you reach middle age and you think, ‘Thank God, no more tests.’ Then this . . . “

The quiz began as a somewhat ragtag affair in 1958 at the defunct Raincheck down the street, where Field worked.

Moving to the Silver Spoon (then called the Theodore Cafe) five years ago, he brought the quiz--and the patrons--with him. Every week about 50 dedicated souls furrow their brows over questions such as “Who was the first guest on the Johnny Carson Tonight show?”(Groucho Marx)

But basically this is not a trivia test. Rather, it’s about “things we should all have learned somewhere along the line,” says Field.

Each Monday, Field, a high school dropout, pores over his dictionaries, encyclopedias and periodicals to create The Ten Questions. Early Tuesday, he picks up the last of the week’s entries, goes home and finishes grading papers. By 8:30 a.m., he is back at the Silver Spoon, posting the new quiz.

For kicks, he may throw in a Roman numeral question or a geography zinger. And, he says, “I have a whole list of exotic and arcane phobias.” Serious competitors tend to take the quiz on Tuesday knowing that, although it can be taken as late as Sunday, the early bird wins in case of a tie.

Field, 68, a former Broadway actor, insists, “My main purpose is to make it entertaining” but not simplistic. He admits, “I would be a failure at many of these subjects.”

Rarely does anyone score a perfect 10. All-time champ Jim Maxwell, 55, a carpenter who lives in the Hollywood Hills, has twice won five weeks in a row. He says, “Each time I retired, and the number of people taking the quiz shot up astronomically. I came back after a decent interval.”

In 1990, he went on “Jeopardy!” but made the fatal blunder of betting a bundle on a Final Jeopardy question bungled by all three contestants. (Do you know how many horizontal rows of stars are in the American flag?)

Maxwell looks around the Silver Spoon and says, “When you win here, it’s not like you walked over a lot of people. He mentions a lot of “very smart” people, among them his wife and arch foe, Alexa, a teacher, who says she “will do anything to beat him, except cheat.”

Cheating is almost unheard of, though quizmaster Field did catch a culprit once at the Raincheck:

“He’d look the quiz over and then he’d say he left his cigarettes in the car. He’d be gone 20 minutes. We found out he had all these books in the trunk--an atlas, an encyclopedia. . .”

(For the record, William McKinley was president on Jan. 1, 1900 and there are nine horizontal rows of stars on the flag.)

Men! You Can Live Without Them

Are you a woman who finds men clueless about what women really want?

You’re in step with 61% of females, finds a new national poll of a cross-section of 396 women conducted by McCall’s magazine and Yankelovich Partners.

Other data from “The New Female Confidence Report”:

* 94% of women believe they can do anything they really set their minds to.

* 90% think a single woman can lead a full life. (Though 70% think a woman who’s attractive to men has an advantage.)

* 76% feel confident to make financial decisions.

* 68% wouldn’t hesitate to dine out alone, 65% to go to a movie alone.

Said pollster Barbara Caplan at an L.A. poll-debut lunch, “Women are more confident than you ever imagined (and) this confidence exists in a world of confusion.”

Caplan and McCall’s publisher Barbara Litrell showed some poise of their own, carrying on smoothly despite a glitch in their slide show.

Poll results, suggested Litrell, don’t mean that women value men less--but that they value them in a different way: “We still look for the close, caring relationships.”

Added Caplan, “Confidence certainly does not mean serenity. One can be stressed to the gills . . . and nonetheless feel confident.” (In fact, only 41% think they are happier than their mothers were.)

The standout message, she said, is: “I understand myself and where I’m going.”

Litrell then announced a drawing for a dinner and theater evening. “Because it’s a confidence award,” she joked, “it’s going to be for one.”

Overheard

Cartoonist Charles Schulz, whose charitable giving is hardly “Peanuts,” explaining to an L.A. philanthropic conference his policy on giving original drawings to charities:

“The only (requests) we refuse to answer are those who send a form letter saying, ‘Dear Celebrity’ “--and those who misspell his name.