Times (and Games) Have Changed

Greetings from Poosey.

I miss charades. No, the world will not come crashing to a halt at the loss of this age-old parlor game, and I will probably live happily ever after if I never play it again, but I fear that the loss signals something a bit deeper.

If you’ve spent the last hundred years in a cave and aren’t familiar with the pastime, charades is a game where the group is divided into two teams, and one at a time a player will stand and mime a secret word or phrase, attempting to get his team to guess what he’s portraying. Veteran players of the game over the years have developed certain gestures to indicate whether it’s a movie, TV show, song, book, or whatever. The beauty of the game has always been the fact that anyone could play it, age makes no difference, it requires no equipment and no there’s no cost. I’ve never seen a game of charades fail to delight a group of willing partygoers. Until recently. . . .

It was family night at our church, a once-a-month gathering where our congregation simply gathers to eat, meet, greet and act a bit silly in the name of friendship and community. Each month someone is assigned to be head of entertainment and last week my turn had rolled around, so I stood up at the far end of our fellowship hall and announced, “Okay, you wild and rowdy Methodists! Tonight we’re going to play a good old-fashioned game of charades!” My proclamation got mixed reviews, all the way from delight on a few older faces to complete confusion in the countenances of the under-twenty crowd. “It’s easy and it’s fun,” I said, “and I’ll explain how to play it,” which I did.  I’d noticed that my old friend Marge winced a bit when I announced the game, so while the group began to divide itself into teams, I asked her what was wrong.

“You can’t do charades anymore,” she said.

“What do you mean you can’t play charades? It’s a fun game!”

“I know,” she said, “but I’ve tried it. It won’t work any longer. We’ve changed.”

Marge is a good gal but I assumed that she’d surely nipped a bit of cider that had been sitting around too long, so I ignored her and began the game. I’d prepared little slips of paper containing the names of movies, books, TV shows and songs, then held the little hat full of titles out to the first actor. It was our neighbor girl, Mindy Parsons. Mindy looked at the title on the paper and said, “I’ve never heard of this.” I took the paper from her and read the word, “Bonanza.” I whispered, “It’s an old Western. Here, draw another.” She picked another title from the hat and the same puzzled look came over her face. She’d drawn a song, “Dixie.” We stood there, Mindy drawing out one title after another, none of which seemed to register. Okay, I thought, she’s young. I’d drawn upon my life’s experience instead of hers, so I asked her mother to come up and pluck out a title. Mrs. Parsons stuck her hand in the hat, looked at the title then looked at me. She whispered, “What’s ‘Modern Family’?”  I told her to draw another and again the same look of confusion as she stared at a slip of paper with the name of a Taylor Swift song.

My buddy Marge glared at me. “I told you it wouldn’t work.”

How could this be? For nearly fifteen minutes the contestants drew titles out of a hat and time after time either the player onstage had never heard of the work or the audience was completely clueless when the answer was announced. Had the whole world suddenly turned stupid?

I sat down beside Marge as the group broke up for coffee and cookies. “It’s not your fault, Freida. We just don’t have a common language any longer. You used to sing the same songs your grandpa knew. It’s not that way any more. Back then we had two TV stations, three radio outlets, and we all saw the same movies. Now it’s 2000 channels, unlimited radio on the Internet, and we download our movies to watch on our computer. We used to have a common sort of social literature. Now we don’t speak the same language.”

A camp counselor once told me that singing around the campfire was pretty much a thing of the past since kids didn’t even have a knowledge of music in common. He told me, “Maybe it’s not that big of a deal, but I think it’s important that we can all sing the same songs.” I’m all for diversity but I wonder if when we become too diverse we lose something very precious. I took it upon myself to stop every little girl passing my house tonight and teach them the words to “Michael row your boat ashore.”

You ever in Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.