Lizard Bingrich and Other Charades Failures

So, if you were in the midst of a fiercely competitive battle of charades (yes, there is such a thing!), and you had the founder of your county’s Republican party AND former governor Carroll Campbell’s director of health on your team, and you drew “Newt Gingrich” as the thing you had to make them guess, wouldn’t you think you’d been handed a gift from the heavens? Wouldn’t you be chuckling to yourself, as I was, thinking that you may set a new family charades low score record? Yeah, well, you know what they say comes right before a fall…

OK, so a bit of background to this whole sordid event…my entire family—meaning my parents, their three daughters, daughters’ spouses and children—all spent a week at the beach together. First time we’d all been together and it was fabulous. Many, many blog worthy events but for now I’ll focus on the one night “my” team tried its best to lose the family charades championship. See, every evening, we all rendezvoused at one of the two houses and each family was assigned cooking duties for one night. That was a FABULOUS idea and I highly recommend it. After dinner we divided into teams and played charades. Now, for the skeptics among you, let me just say that when this game was first suggested, I was not enthused. I could not have told you the last time I had played charades and I honestly had no desire to stand in front of my entire family and make a complete fool of myself trying to make them guess “Tess d’Urbervilles”. But ten minutes into the first round and I was a convert.

BRING IT, OTHER TEAM! We’ll take your “Great Potato Famine” and see you a “South Carolina Succeeds from the Union” thankyouverymuch!

Yeah, so things got competitive and fun and two of our four kids were totally into it as well, which brings us to night two and New Gingrich. I figured, in all of my charade-savvy arrogance, that if I got them to say “man” (they knew the category was famous people), and that his last name had two syllabus, the last one “rich”, which they got in less than ten seconds, that all I had left to do was to get them to guess “ging”…so I gave them the “sounds like” symbol and I pantomimed putting on a ring, which they said immediately…”Ring! Ring!…after that, the universe tilted on its access and nothing made sense. I spent the next minute and 20 seconds doing everything in my power to make my teammates—my political savvy teammates—say “Newt Gingrich” and the closest they got was “Lizard Bingrich”. Seriously? Who the hell is that? A professional wrestler?

The only silver lining of the evening was that my husband, who was on the enemy team, had a similar experience, that resulted in his team’s guess as “The Human Toe”, but that’s for another blog on another day…stay tuned!