One of the most obvious and somewhat disturbing differences between New York City and Los Angeles is SPACE. There's just more of it in LA, both inside and out. For this reason, people spend a considerable amount of time entertaining at home. Dinner parties and bar-b-cue's abound. The most appealing part of the evening for me is usually the game. Sometimes of the board nature (Balderdash is a recent obsession; one that I imported to NY for the Christmas holiday), but more often games are selected that require no tools other than your own physical being, for example Running Charades. It's like regular charades but on crack, which I find highly appropriate for LA. As if the dominant industry in this town wasn't competitive enough, now our "games" need to be cut-throat too.
It goes like this: Each player comes prepared with a list of ten or so books, movies, television shows, plays, songs, what have you. If you are already charade savvy, your list contains a theme (last time I played I devised a list made up entirely of films staring Burt Reynolds...it was the high point of my evening as I spent much of the rest of the time feigning both excitement and devastation as other people guessed correctly and bolted from the room). The person with the list sits in the hallway while players from opposing teams are located in separate rooms to avoid eavesdropping or more accurately answer-stealing. A player is sent (usually running) to the clue-giver for the first title on the list. Once a teammate guesses correctly (the same rules as regular charades apply) he or she runs full steam to retrieve the next title. And it goes on and on until all ten titles on the list are named and a winner is declared. The game remains oddly quiet but for the sound of feet running back and forth from the clue-giver or the occasional celebration of a particularly difficult answer or in some cases an unfortunate but frequent head-on collision in the hallway. Do not be fooled by the silence, the intensity is high.
The other popular game around these parts is MURDER. I kid you not.
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