At the magical Under a Harvest Moon dinner at Powell Gardens last Sunday, a friend threw out a challenge. &ldquo;Who said (blah blah blah blah blah)?&rdquo;</p><p>I quit listening after &ldquo;who.&rdquo; I&rsquo;m generally not good at &ldquo;name that tune&rdquo; type games &mdash; with music, movie lines or sports statistics. </p><p>Pop culture is not a category I would pick on &ldquo;Jeopardy.&rdquo; And that is precisely what intimidates me about playing bar trivia, the subject of today&rsquo;s cover story by Mar&agrave; Rose Williams. Although apparently, The Star&rsquo;s team fares fairly well in this nerdy form of recreation. </p><p>But back to the conversation at the botanical garden. When nobody could immediately attribute the quote, my friend offered up a hint that snapped my attention back into place: The person, she said, has three names, and the first one is a state.</p><p>Now that is information I can work with. Despite having zero retention of the quote itself, my mind started shuffling through state names. Not in alphabetical order, but in a sort of geographical sweep starting with Florida and moving northward and westward from there.</p><p>Nobody&rsquo;s name starts with Florida. Sweet Georgia Brown? No, the <em>first</em> name is a state. The Carolinas are out &mdash; nobody&rsquo;s name starts with &ldquo;North&rdquo; or &ldquo;South.&rdquo; Alabama? Mississippi? Louisiana? No, no, no. </p><p>Then, before I had any idea what was to follow, I blurted out &ldquo;Tennessee.&rdquo; My friend nodded and waited for the rest.</p><p>I was a third of the way to the answer and also stuck. What wanted to roll off my tongue next was &ldquo;Williams,&rdquo; but the playwright didn&rsquo;t use a third name. </p><p>But before I even had time to think some more, my brain came through, and I said &ldquo;Ernie Ford.&rdquo;</p><p>My dinner companions looked surprised and said, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re not even old enough to know him!&rdquo; </p><p>Actually, I&rsquo;m only eight or 10 years younger than they are, but they were right. I have no idea who Tennessee Ernie Ford is or was, but at some point in my life I had heard the name. In other words, I didn&rsquo;t actually know the answer to the question, but I was able to crack the clue.</p><p>That&rsquo;s the funny thing about brains. They all work so differently. Take my husband and my best friend. They are both walking repositories of different types of information. </p><p>My husband is money in the bank when a question involves history, science and math. </p><p>My best friend knows the artist and title of every country, pop and rock song ever recorded, as far as I can tell, and just as much about movie casts and directors. </p><p>They both astound me. </p><p>My encyclopedic knowledge is limited to weird categories seldom called for on &ldquo;Jeopardy&rdquo;: French &ldquo;nouveau roman&rdquo; literature, East Coast oyster varieties, the newest shades of Opi nail polish</p><p>I watch Netflix movies constantly (especially classic and foreign titles), and I remember a great deal about the cinematography and dialogue. But, unfortunately for my chances at trivia games, the titles, actors and directors fade quickly from my memory. </p><p>And that&rsquo;s really the point. We all have obscure information stored up. It stands to reason that we have offsetting gaps in other knowledge. Some people know Greek mythology inside and out; other people know vintage motorcycles. </p><p>That&rsquo;s what makes conversation so much fun. No matter how deficient you may be in a particular subject area, you have very specialized knowledge in others. For that, I say, &ldquo;Bless your pea-pickin&rsquo; heart.&rdquo; (That was the Tennessee Ernie Ford quote I missed the first time around.)