Adult Game Brings Out Child in Us
/The Boston Herald
The masks stumped everyone. They were beautiful, artfully decorated, thoughtful, clever representations of who we are. They had been our pre-party assignment. Ellen had bought them, full-faced white things, and given them to us with instructions to decorate them, in secret, in a way that would say something about our inner selves. We were then to bring our finished product hidden in a paper bag to her annual neighborhood ladies night, which took place every year on the last Friday of January.
Decorating the masks was only Part One of THE GAME. Part Two began at Ellen's house shortly after her ten guests arrived. She placed the masks side by side on a long table and asked us to guess whose mask was who’s.
Not one got more than three right. We were surprised and intrigued as we listened to the explanations for the half-man, half-woman face, for the gold mask, for the clock on the forehead, for the flowers in the mouth.
I assumed the game was over when the last mask had been identified. But, in fact, Part Three, the best part of the game, had yet to begin.
I think I was 10 years old the last time I played a game in earnest, hide-and-seek, where you really hide and you really seek. Or freeze tag, where you stand so still a bird might land on you, or Simon Says, or One, Two, Three Red Light, or Red Rover, Red Rover. Where the game is everything.
Somewhere around the age of 12 the games changed. There was softball and basketball and field hockey, at which I failed miserably. And there was Spin the Bottle, at which I also failed.
Then suddenly we were grown-ups, too old for kids' games. We played Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit and these were fun, but they weren't kid fun, not I-think-I'm-going-to-die-laughing-right-here-on-the-spot fun.
Ellen turned us into kids again. She divided us into two teams, assigned each a tee-totaling driver, who also served as the group photographer, (Polaroid cameras for all!) then allotted each team one hour to complete its mission which was - to get our pictures taken 1.) with our masks on, 2.) holding our party invitation, 3.) in designated places, 4.) with specific people from all over our small town.
The more difficult the assignment, the more points we got for completing it. We also got points for each random person in the picture, as well as for random animals. There was also a clause about innovation. The cleverer the shot, the higher the score.
So off we went, grabbing our coats and our cell phones, in search of an elected official, an Elvis look-alike, a police officer in a cruiser, a pharmacist, a male neighbor with his shirt off (thank you, Al) a firemen (as many as possible standing beside a firetruck), a florist, a hairdresser, a seedy bar and a urinal.
The list was long and time was short and there we were, grown women, mothers and grandmothers, racing through Shaws, grabbing shoppers, standing under a street sign, accosting strangers, posing with a shirtless Al.
And what did we learn from this quest? Two things: That kids have all the fun because laughing and playing and making a fool of yourself and not caring that you're making a fool of yourself is about as good as it gets. And, that young women in search of nice men should hang out at the produce section of a supermarket. Really.
My team made it back to Ellen's beating the other team by a good five minutes. We also beat them in points. But as for creativity? They crushed us.
Later in the night, we sat at the dining room table and ate dinner and drank wine and behaved like normal adults. At least we tried. The kid in us, allowed out for the first time in decades, begged to remain out. The kid in us could not stop giggling, could not stop talking about the outrageous things we had just done, could not stop looking at the photographs, which were proof of these outrageous things.
And which will remain proof that no matter how old we grow, there is a kid still within each of us.
