These Old Charades

During the weekends, other gay boys get dressed, go out and shake their collective booty on the dancefloors to the boom-boom beat of the gay disco.

Me, I spend the time indoors watching my friends writhing and gyrating suggestively on the floors. Seriously. It can be quite entertaining. And that's when Zany Zinedine Zapple's not busy running in exaggerated slow-mo to stab, kill and toss angry combative Persians into the air with his imaginary 8-foot spear.

Before you lament the fact that I've fallen heedlessly into a group of cultish friends into crazed orgiastic escapades with gratuitous blood and gore, let me explain by saying a word.

Charades.


See. It's almost 300!
So the writhing bit over there ( just as inexplicable to the rest of us busy guesstimating! ), imagine rose petals falling gently onto an American Beauty! And Zinedine was trying his best to give a faithful re-enactment of the Battle of Thermopylae - minus the skimpy loincloth. Or at least the homo-erotic tale spun by the imaginative producers of 300.

Yes, my friends and I like parlour games. This time however I didn't get verbal diarrhoea and spontaneously blurt out incriminating taboo words such as pubic hair.

Came to realize that day that you'd need similarly attuned members of the team to come up with proper answers. Come to think of it, forget about attuned. Sometimes you'd need telepathy to figure out the cryptic pantomime :) Otherwise it usually takes quite a while to guess the correct answer ( finally! ). Still it was hilarious trying to come up with proper guesses especially with the other team busy spitting, heckling and pelting red herrings. I'd have preferred rotten tomatoes but I doubt Jaunty Jared would have appreciated the tomatina mess at his place.

The overly fussy neighbours didn't appreciate the maddening din we caused as well :p

Of course some randomly selected words and phrases are almost impossible to do. Like Jane Austen. Stared at it for half a minute wondering how the hell would I be able to pass on the message of Jane Austen. Holding a cup of tea whlie pretending to look uppity Regency belle wouldn't do the trick since it only made me look vapid. Tracing the look of a high-waisted Regency gown would make no sense to the rest - except maybe Zinedine. So I tried pantomiming the book Pride and Prejudice instead.

Turns out it's almost impossible to do pride. Trust me. Have you ever tried pantomiming those words?