By LEAH WEATHERSBY

I'm not telling my companion, but secretly I have high hopes for this evening.

All the signs are against getting lucky. It's a week night and I should be asleep already. The air is filled with cigarette smoke, and it's headed my way, somehow secretly realizing that I'm in my newest, dry clean-only sweater. I made a fool of myself last week doing the exact same thing.

But darn it, I can't stay away from the Globe Ale House's trivia contest on Thursday nights.

I'm not alone, either. The Globe's trivia night has been around for about five years. Jim Hamil, the Globe's current owner, inherited the event from previous owner Russel Pearson who started the weekly event. The weekly event has become The Globe's biggest night, drawing 55 to 85 people every Thursday from all over Seattle and the Eastside. Pearson himself is hanging out at the bar on this particular Thursday.

"We were the first to do a quiz night ," claims Pearson. "Now everyone does it." Pearson says that he and a former business partner from Britain, where quiz nights are popular, came up with the idea.

My teammate and I each put in a dollar to play, as does everyone else in the bar. We do it in the hopes of winning the whole pot at the end of the night. Globe "quiz masters" are strict about collecting one dollar per teammate - maybe you have to be when both money and the player's sense of their own intelligence are on the line.

We receive our trivia worksheet and start on the first of three 10-question rounds. Though he's not working on this night, veteran quiz master Andrew Ritzinger is hanging out, visiting with friends.

"I've always been a trivia head," Ritzinger explains when I ask him why he's drawn to the role of inquisitor and master of ceremonies. "I can remember when Trivial Pursuit first came out. The thing I liked best was being the quiz master. It's a little like doing stand up because its a very lively crowd."

Ritzinger is right. These people aren't shy about talking back and even complaining about the questions on occasion.

One important quiz master job is to make the rounds between each of the three sets and ask if we need any questions repeated. Unfortunately, that won't help our team. Hamil says one of the keys to trivia success is diversity.

"The thing about winning at trivia," Hamil explains, "is having a broad range of people on the team."

I suppose this would have helped us - we're two people of about the same age and with many of the same interests. What we need is a third person who remembers the '60s and follows sports.

Three rounds are finished, and now comes the truly painful part. The teams have to trade their answer sheets and correct each others work. Not only were we stupid enough to think the name of Thomas Jefferson's estate was "Tom's Place," but now other people are going to know it.

After a few minutes of comments like "Oooh, I knew that was it - we should have put that" and "Well, you shouldn't have listened to me," it's time to trade our papers back and it's clear we didn't win. In fact, our score of 14 out of 30 is just pathetic. But it doesn't matter, I think, as we pay for our last round for drinks. We'll be back soon.

The Globe Fine Ale House is located at 9736 Greenwood Ave. N.