TKOG Who plays games with you

On Secret Society of List Addicts, I temporarily stub out my cigar and give up my honorary chair at the Old Boys Club to reflect on a few everyday moments that make me feel divinely feminine.

NTKOG Year 2, #2: The kind of vivacious perma-hostess who halts your daily business and forces you to play a party game with her.

I am: an inveterate player of games. Not mind games, but old-school parlor games.

I am not: one to bring others into the madness. Unless you’re invited to one of my dinner parties, in which case, dude, you know what you’re in for.

The Scene: The Back Bay, a strange melange of snoots and tourists and, well, basically everyone else I’d never invite into my living room. Nonetheless, I shook off my usual standoffishness, and decided to engage the city at large in one of the all-time great party games: Mad Libs.

Purchased a bachelorette-party-gift edition of Mad Libs at Sugar Haven, and proceeded down the city streets with burbling cub-reporter earnestness, ready to coax every pedestrian who crossed my sight for a [noun], [adjective], or [part of body (plural)].

Flipped open the notebook to a page titled “The Ideal Mate,” and tentatively approached two dudes taking a bawdy smoke break on the Pour House patio. “Uh, hey,” I broke into the conversation. Alpha Smokebreak looked up — the type guy of who, were I a mid-level record producer, I’d hand twenty grand right there to grace the cover of my latest tweens’ll-buy-it pop-punk endeavor. “I’m, uh, I’m doing a Mad Lib. But I can’t do it alone? Can you, uh, help me?”

Requested an adjective and he immediately shot back: “cantankerous.” Multi-syllabic. Hot. He registered the surprise on my face and switched his cigarette to his non-dominant hand to go in for a well-deserved high-five. Three words later, I flipped the Mad Libs pad closed and he high-fived me again, then pulled his phone out.

“Sorry,” he said, texting rapid-fire with both thumbs. “I just really need to update my facebook status about this…”

Weirdly, the next half-dozen people I approached were no less chuffed with the random interruption. I’d anticipated people would be non-plussed by the random grammar lesson — hands up, guys, do you really remember what an adverb is?! — but of everyone I stopped, not a single dude denied me my random request.

The adorable college girl who stared up and sifted the stars for twenty minutes before deciding on “pendulous”; the Cactus Club bouncer who, when asked for a part of the body, immediately grunted “balls!”; the gaggle of techno-cuties clustered around the Apple Store who, pressed for a male celebrity, gave me an AP Euro crash course on the exploits of Hannibal.

With my Mad Lib half-completed, I paused briefly outside the fire station on Boylston, where four of Boston’s finest slouched on lawn chairs, staring over the velvety late-summer night. Gingerly, I approached and begged four words of them.

“Hell, honey, we’ll give you forty,” one of the guys grinned at me. “You want some cake? We’ve got some cake upstairs.”

Which is how, loves, I ended up spending thirty of the most utterly baller minutes of my life sitting inside a fire station, cooing over a gorgeous female pitbull, gathering increasingly risque [body part (plural)]s, and eventually being fed cake from the hands of honest-to-frig calendar-posing fireman.

Look, we may live in a world of “no,” but let me tell you, dudes, life never gets more exciting than when you decide to become an island of “yes.” It’s basically the most interesting word you can ever choose. Right after [body part (plural)], of course.

The Verdict: Say yes! Always say yes! Life is made of magic, and how the frig are you going to know that before you spend an evening inviting strangers to your phantom dinner party and being enchanted by every. single. one. of them?! Though I can’t guarantee that they’ll feed you cake. After all, not everyone’s life can be as charmed as mine.

[Edit: And for those of you who are curious, check out the completed Mad Lib here!]

Tagged as: "in which case dude you know for what you're in?" -- there's no way to fix this sentence, also if you ever want to flirt with like six forty-year-olds at once then get thee to a fire station, back bay, boston, c'mon someone please find a significant other through following advice from my blog. i want to be THAT blogger!, continuing the trend of people giving me baked goods, firemen, i'd estimate about a third of the mail i get on this blog is from Shy Boys who don't know how to meet girls. THIS IS YOUR ANSWER. get on it., madlibs, perfect ice breaker, posts i write while drunk on the train, sadly had to leave because i was running late for a playdate with kori of ohhayitskkblog.com, try this try this try this