Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 13, 2010
Are we there yet?
Not so newlywed game
Jay Edwards
Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
– Horace
Instead of getting married again, I’m going to find a woman I don’t like and give her a house.
– Lewis Grizzard
I think the question should have been, “What is one thing about your husband that drives you crazy?” I know what most of you ladies are thinking, “Just one?”
It doesn’t really matter how the question was phrased, the point is it was loaded with potential disaster. It was asked at a family event. You know about those I guess, having probably been to a few yourselves. Ours was a 4th of July get together with couples from my wife’s side; however since I have known them all for 35 years, we pretty well have blended together to where there are no sides, just a top and bottom. But I’ll get back to the question later.
Peggy, the sister from Atlanta who possesses more than her fair share of outgoing personality, was designated the creator of games and entertainment. So after a morning of sweating on the golf course, the men took showers and we gathered behind the condos, next to the 5th hole at the Red Apple Inn.
The first game was a beanbag toss into the mouth of a hog – more specifically, a Razorback. Spouses were paired up for the horse-shoe like competition and Kathy and I won our first match but lost in the semis, putting the hosts, Bob and Lisa, against John and Don (who are actually brothers, not spouses; although they were called much worse by everyone during the heat of battle).
When the smoke cleared it was, in fact, those non-spouse brothers who had come out on top. Which proves many things about that particular game, and about competition as a whole, none of which I will mention here on the grounds that it would cause me severe physical agony.
Next, we thankfully moved from the heat of the outdoors to the Freon-filled inside, where it was time for round two. This was a game of questions made up by Peggy about things only people who had been brought up, as one of the ten siblings, could possibly know. Kathy, the youngest, was born in the last weeks of December 1956, and I wasn’t introduced to everyone until the summer of ’75, so I didn’t have much hope in getting any right answers. Therefore I focused on sarcasm, which would win me a dollar for, as Peggy announced, having the most creative answers. The eventual winner of this game was in fact Kathy, nicknamed “Precious,” for family functions such as this.
Then it was time for the third and last game, called something like, “How well do you really know the person you are married to?” A better name would have been “Guys, get ready to be killed tonight while you sleep.”
The girls were the first to leave the room while the boys got to stay in with the AC and answer questions. This would be a cinch, or so I thought.
1st question. “What is your wife’s favorite food?” (Tough start, I said coconut cream pie, but Kathy would later answer spaghetti. We were already behind).
2. “What is you wife’s favorite movie?” (Not sure I would have known this either but just before the women left the room Kathy whispered “To Kill a Mockingbird,” so either she brilliantly assumed this would be a question, or she cheated by sneaking a peek beforehand, which I’m all for, of course).
3. “What did you do on your first date?” (I nailed it – we saw “Shampoo,” at the wonderful old Heights Theater).
4. Name something less than honest you know your wife has done. (See answer number two above).
When it was the guys turn to leave the room our team was in the middle of the pack and needed to get every one right to have any chance. I tried peeking through the window (making Kathy proud) but got caught and scolded by the more honest and boring ones in the group.
We came back in and were asked pretty much the same questions with a few different ones thrown in, like – “What is your favorite part of your husbands anatomy?” Kathy said, “his legs.” Let’s just say we were 0 for 1 after that.
Next they asked, “If you could get rid of anything that your husband owns what would it be?” I thought I might know but after thinking a bit came up with a whole list of things and began stalling. Finally pressured to give an answer I blurted out, “GUS!” who is my Cairn terrier. That was not her answer, which at least made me happy for Gus. No, her answer was – “Your white bucks.”
It was shocking and sad and I haven’t worn them since.
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