Celebrity

I learned this great parlor game from my colleague Kristen. Here's what you do. You get together a bunch of friends (or random people or relatives.) You cut up paper into small pieces. Everyone takes a pile of paper and writes down as many celebrities as they can think of, one per piece of paper. After writing on each paper, they fold it in half and put it in a bowl. Everyone keeps writing until the bowl is full. The group should define what "celebrity" means before you start writing. Generally, well-known actors, political figures, authors, sports figures. It depends on your group. Students getting their advanced degrees in literature could probably have an entire game full of obscure literary people/characters. Divide up into teams consisting of about three people and grab a watch or timer that can count off one minute.

The first group picks a person to go first describing. They draw a name and start describing who the person is. For example: "He wrote a lot of books with not many descriptive words and killed himself in Ketchum, Idaho."

If the group consists of anyone literary or with knowledge of Idaho suicides, one of the teammates will shout out, "Ernest Hemingway!" At that point, the person describing sets the name in the team pile and start the process over again. They keep going until one minute has elapsed and the time keepers call time. Then the bowl gets passed to the next time who chooses a describer.

The turns rotate between teams and the person describing rotates within the team so every person has to describe. If the describer is mid-description and the time runs out, they return that name to the bowl. When all the names in the bowl have been described and correctly named by the teams, the winner is the team with the most slips of paper.

Often times, what makes this game so funny is the way people get summed up. Like, "Football/murder guy" (OJ Simpson!). The other thing that happens is that sometimes a team won't be evenly matched. The first time Matt and I played this, Matt was on a team where he was the only one with television/actor/movie knowledge. I was quite impressed with how well he could describe names phonetically as with this interchange:
Matt: Her sister is on Bones and she is an actress.
Team: Huh?
Team: Was that just English?
Matt: Never mind. It's up on the hill over there.
Team: The zoo!
Matt: Right. Now turn that into a girl's name...
Team: Zoo, zoo, zoe!
Matt: a little bit more
Team: Zoey!
Matt. Right. Now, it's a perfume that old women wear.
Team: Obsession
Matt: Older than that.
Team: Chantilly
Matt: Nope, try again
Team: Oh! Chanel.
Matt: Right. Now. It's what the French use for "the"
Team: The?
Matt: Yes, "the" What do French people say instead of "the"?
Team: De
Matt: Not quite
Team: Des?
Matt: Yes! Now put it all together.
Team: um, Chaneldes?

At this point the time ran out and I gasped for breath, wiped the tears from my eyes and eventually stopped laughing. I knew who he was talking about from his first clue (mostly because I wrote the name in the first place.) and it was amusing to watch him try and pull the name out of his teammates. When I pulled the name later in the game, I said:
Me: Starred in Almost Famous and that movie with Will Ferrell and she sings.
My team, who were much more pop culture oriented and who also had been primed by Matt's clever description before said:

"Zoey Deschenel."

Another favorite interchange: My brother draws a name, looks relieved and turns to my Aunts, one of who attends church every week and says, "He's the son of god."

The Aunts gave him a blank stare.

Chris continued "Um. Okay. Made loaves and fishes feed an entire crowd?"

"Oh!" My church-going aunt cried, "Jesus!"

It's also interesting to see which names pop up several times. Based on the two games I've played we all are thinking a lot about Julia Child, George Clooney and Hilary Clinton.