Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Then and Now

It is sad and pathetic when your own parents can out-party you.

As Tim and I and my parents rang in the New Year, then toddled off to bed, exhausted, my father reminisced about how they used to spend the holiday, when he and my mother were our age.

Then:  Every year, my parents hosted the same six couples for dinner.  Per our Irish heritage, somewhere in the hour or so before they arrived, there was at least one really loud "discussion" about how much ice we needed for cocktails, whether the roast should be rare or well-done or how many different kinds of bread should be served with dinner.  All vitally important matters upon which the fate of the free world hung.

Now:  We don't eat red meat, we only eat whole grain bread, and the only one using ice is the dog, but she's a mean drunk, so we cut her off after one cocktail.

Then:  After a fairly raucous dinner, the midnight toast, and enough alcohol consumed to keep Charlie Sheen making YouTube videos until his kids are all old enough to collect social security, the real fun would start.  Charades. Boys against the girls.

The guys would stay in the TV room, while the girls retired to the living room to come up with their clues.  Dumb.  Dumb.  Dumb.  What were we girls thinking???  TV room???  Where the TV guide was???  Left to their own devices,  the guy's clues would have been easy to guess.  In those days, there were only three channels plus PBS, so how hard could it have been to guess all the sports shows?

But no, with access to information provided by the guide, they cheated their pants off.

"Oh ho!  You girls couldn't get Two Mules for Sister Sarah?   Starring Shirley MacLaine?  How could you not have come up with that one right away?    It's a classic.  And everyone knows Dora's Dunking Doughnuts featuring the always adorable Shirley Temple.  That one was a gift.   The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse is so a movie.  It stars Edward G. Robinson.  Gheesh.  You girls really should get out more."

We finally figured out how they were able to come up with a movie title besides Planet of the Apes, and began removing the TV guide earlier in the day when we were cleaning.  And that was the end of their vast movie knowledge.  Thank goodness they never tumbled to the fact that there was an entire set of encyclopedia in the room.  They might have actually won a game or two.

At first, we girls were coming up with book titles we were sure they hadn't read like Gone With the Wind, or The Old Man and the Sea, or musical groups like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, you know, obscure stuff.  After we thwarted their little crime ring however,  they had nowhere to turn but to the world of sports.  They began throwing at us the names of every athlete whose name exceeded eighteen letters, only one of which was a vowel.  In retaliation, we mined  my mother's knowledge of music and began throwing dead Russian composers at them.  That went over well.

As some of the arguments got fairly heated, it was a good thing that my parent's house was bordered on one side by woods and another by a cemetery.  Actually,  in retrospect, it was probably a miracle that on the first of the new year, we didn't have a crime scene unit scouring the woods and excavating a freshly dug grave.  It was also a miracle that the divorce rate among the couples didn't skyrocket.

Somewhere around 4am, after losing five or six games in a row, the sore losers, er I mean guys, would have sobered up enough to drive the girls home, then, we would all tumble into bed, hungover and exhausted.

Now:  Somewhere around 5pm, we began consuming our bodyweight in food, ending around 10pm when we threw ourselves in front of the TV and, realizing that with 800 channels, nothing good was on, flipped back and forth between American Pickers and the food network until 11;30.  At that point, we roused ourselves from our food-induced comas, wiped the sleep from our eyes, the drool from our chins and the crumbs from our sweatshirts and tried to stay awake until midnight.

No sooner had the ball dropped then we all dragged ourselves to the stairs, stumbled up them and tumbled into our beds, totally drained from our rigorous workout.  Fork to mouth.  Wipe mouth with napkin.  Repeat.  Paaaaartay!!! Woo-(four-letter word beginning with f)--hoo!

Yep.  That was a trip down memory lane I could have lived without.

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