Tag: silly

December 26-29, 1997. I made another movie. (#157)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

Author’s note: I’m back.

I don’t know if I’m going to be able to post weekly, like I’ve always tried to. I don’t want this project to become stressful. But I’ll do the best I can, and hopefully my small handful of loyal readers will stick with me even I take a week off here and there.

A month ago, when I went home to Santa Lucia County for Thanksgiving, I showed my family the Dog Crap and Vince movie that I had made with the kids from the youth group at church.  I first created the characters from Dog Crap and Vince when I was still in high school, with a lot of input from my brother Mark, and I have always credited Mark as a co-creator of Dog Crap and Vince.  They all enjoyed the movie.  Mark said that when I came home for Christmas, we should get together with his friends Cody and Boz and make another movie.

We did not own a video camera.  I had always wanted one growing up.  I had tons of silly ideas for TV shows and movies, sometimes Mark and I and some combination of his other friends would even act them out and even record the audio, but we never had the capability to record video.  Video cameras cost a lot of money back then, and it was never a priority for my parents to have one.  But Mark said that Boz had one we could probably borrow.

It was now the Friday after Christmas.  I was planning on driving back to Jeromeville either Monday night or Tuesday morning.  I was getting bored at home.  Three and a half years after graduation, I had lost touch with all of my high school friends.  There was not much to do at home except hang out at home.  The closest thing I had to friends at home were Mark, Cody, and Boz.  I was going to graduate from the University of Jeromeville in six months, and they were sixteen, still in high school.  This was less of an age difference compared to when I was seventeen and they were twelve, but they still did not feel like a primary social group for me.

Despite how bored I was, I had made no progress on this movie that Mark and I were supposedly going to make.  I had not done much of anything the whole time I was home.  We had our family Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa and the Lusks, who were in the area for the holidays.  Jane Lusk was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister; she visited every Christmas with her husband Darrell and their children, nineteen-year-old Rick and seventeen-year-old Miranda.  Uncle Darrell’s family was also in Santa Lucia County, so they spent a week going back and forth visiting both sets of their relatives. 

Mark had a new game for Nintendo 64, GoldenEye.  The game follows the story of the James Bond movie of the same name, which I had seen once.  The most well-known feature of this game was a multiplayer free-for-all mode, in which two to four players battle each other.  Rick and Miranda and Mark and I spent many hours of that winter break playing GoldenEye, as well as Mario Kart.  In both games, Mark almost always won, and Miranda almost always came in last place.

In those days, Mark would often record what he was watching on television on a VHS tape, so he could watch it again.  He watched Saturday Night Live regularly, because in the 1990s it was actually funny much of the time.  Whenever the show would run a sketch that was not worth rewatching, he would back up the tape during the next commercial and record over it immediately.  Whenever I would go home, Mark would share with me his Saturday Night Live highlights.

Saturday Night Live had been in the news recently because Chris Farley, a cast member on the show a few years earlier who was also in a few movies after that, had died of a drug overdose a couple of weeks earlier.  Two months before his death, Farley had returned to SNL as the weekly guest host, and Mark saved that entire episode.  Earlier that week, I had watched Farley reprise many of his past recurring characters.  He also portrayed an exaggeratedly intoxicated Hank Williams Jr. and the weather phenomenon El Niño, acting like a professional wrestler.  Throughout the whole time Mark and I watched the episode, Mom kept interrupting, commenting on Farley’s visibly poor health.

The next day, Mark and I watched other things he had recorded since then.  We watched what was then considered the final episode of Beavis and Butthead, although unbeknownst to anyone at the time, the show would be revived in the 2010s and 2020s.  After this, we watched another SNL in which a Bill Gates character announced that Microsoft had bought Christmas, and that Mac users were now Jewish.  Bill Gates then proceeded to spy on Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who was dancing to the song “Tubthumping.”  Oddly random, but hilarious.

Mark got home from basketball practice while I was eating dinner Friday night.  Mark got all of the athletic talent in our family.  He also had a great deal more artistic talent than me, and he and some of his teammates had begun a new tradition of drawing temporary tattoos on each other with permanent marker.  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the tattoo that someone had drawn on Mark today.

“A polar bear,” Mark explained.  “John McCall drew it.”  The polar bear on Mark’s arm was floating on a piece of sea ice, with the letters POLAR BEAR underneath in a style imitating the Old English blackletter font.

“And why do you have a tattoo of a polar bear?” I asked.

Mom and Dad were in the room with us.  “That’s the nickname the others on the team have come up with for Mark,” Mom said.

“And why is Mark’s nickname ‘Polar Bear?’”

Dad answered this time.  “Because he’s big and white!”

I laughed.  “That does make sense.”

Later that night, Mark and I were playing Mario Kart, and Mark said something that reminded me of something from Dog Crap and Vince.  As my brain started thinking of related things, I said out loud, “We never made that movie we were going to make while I was home.  Do you still want to?”

“I don’t know,” Mark replied.  “Do we have time?  How long are you gonna be home?”

“I’m leaving probably late Monday night or early Tuesday morning.  So we’d have about 72 hours.”  As I continued steering Luigi around the course, throwing banana peels behind me, I got an idea.  “I think this sounds like a challenge.  We have 72 hours to make a movie.  And we’ll call our production company ‘72 Hour Films.’”

“Sounds good.  I’ll ask Boz in the morning if we can go get his camera.  Boz was probably going to come over this weekend anyway.”

“Great!  And if Rick and Miranda are around, we can get them in our movie too!  So what’s it going to be about?”

“I don’t know.  This was your idea.”

“Well, you’ve been saying this whole time that you want to make a movie.”

“I do, but I don’t know what it’s about!”

I saw the GoldenEye cartridge sitting next to the Nintendo console.  “What about a spy movie?  Like GoldenEye?”

“Maybe, but it seems like that might be too hard if we only have 72 hours.”

I thought about other things I had done at home during previous school breaks, and suddenly it came to me.  “Moport,” I said.  “Let’s make a sports movie about Moport.  Like, maybe, there’s a Moport team that’s terrible, they finish last in the league, so they get the number one draft pick, but the player they draft ends up just making things worse.”

“That could work.”

“Ooo.  Better idea.  They accidentally draft the wrong player.  Like, the general manager gets the name wrong at the draft, and the player they pick is this weird crazy goofball.”

“But all the goofy stuff he does is so crazy, they still end up winning!” Mark said.

“Yes!  Perfect!”

“As long as we get Boz to play the goofy guy.  He’d be great in that role.”

“Definitely.”


Moport was a game my brother and I invented, based on a game I played in PE class in high school.  The game I learned combined elements of football and soccer; Mark and I added hockey sticks to the mix, and Moport was born.  For the last few years, we had held a two-on-two Moport tournament in the front yard with Cody, Boz, John McCall, and some of Mark’s other friends.

By the time Mark and I went to bed that night, we had a workable script, and we had decided to title the movie #1 Draft Pick.  I suggested that the team in the movie have a geographically appropriate, yet ridiculous-sounding name, like many actual low-level sports teams.  The Gabilan Valley in Santa Lucia County is known for growing vegetables, so we named our team the Gabilan Fighting Salads.  The movie would open with the Salads losing badly, finishing in last place again, giving them the number one draft pick for the following year.  After drafting the wrong player, as we had previously decided, we would show scenes of this player, whom we had named Evan, practicing and playing and still somehow finding ways to score.  We added implied references to Evan being on drugs.  I suggested that Evan played college Moport for North Coast State, because that was a well-known hippie stoner school, and it was also where Rick went, although Rick was not at all a hippie or stoner.

After the Salads’ first win, the team practiced the next day, and Evan accidentally kicked a ball that left the field and hit a supervillain-like bystander in the face.  The villain vowed to get revenge on the Salads and sabotage their season.  He sent a henchman to break into the locker room and plant drugs on Evan.  When Evan’s name was cleared, the villain hired another henchman to shoot Evan.  Mark and I both agreed that Rick should play this other henchman, since Rick’s side of the family were gun enthusiasts.  “But we should use the Nintendo Zapper as the prop gun,” Mark suggested.

“That would be hilarious,” I replied.

We continued brainstorming the ending of the movie.  Evan survived the shooting, so the villain drove his car onto the field and ran over Cody’s character, whom we named Bob.  Cody did not look at all like someone who would be named Bob, so we thought that was funny.  Bob needed to play injured since the Salads were out of replacement players, and they managed to score a goal on a ridiculously improbable shot.

“Then we should end by showing Fidel Castro dancing,” Mark said, laughing, referencing Saturday Night Live.

“Let’s name your character ‘Castro,’” I suggested.  “And at the end, you’re not there, and Evan and Bob talk about how you went to visit your Uncle Fidel in Cuba.”

“Yes!”


My least favorite part of doing a creative project with other people involved is getting everyone together at the same time.  Fortunately, the Lusks were already planning on coming over today, as was Boz.  Mark called Cody, and he was free to come over as well.  Ronnie and D.J. Lusk, Rick and Miranda’s other cousins on their dad’s side, lived about an hour drive away, and they were also in town for the day.  That gave us two more people to use as extras in the movie; Ronnie and D.J. played one of the opposing teams.

“Dad?” I asked as we started filming Saturday morning, shortly after Boz showed up with the camera.  “Can you be in our movie for one scene?”

“Ahh,” Dad grunted as he got up from the couch, faking being annoyed although I knew he was going to enjoy helping out.  “What do I have to do?”

“You’re the general manager of the Salads, but you get the player’s name wrong at the draft,” I explained.  I placed the script on the table where he would be sitting in the shot, so that he could glance down at his lines if he needed to.

I sat next to Dad, in character as Coach McAfee.  Mark and Boz faced us, with Boz holding the camera.  “Where’d you get the camera?” Dad asked.

“We’re borrowing it from the Bosworths,” I explained.

Dad turned to Boz and asked, “That’s your camera?”

“Yeah,” Boz replied.

Dad played his part perfectly, speaking in an absent-minded manner that would make it believable that he would select the wrong player.  As an added bonus, he called his own team the Lettuce instead of the Salads.  To this day, I do not know if that was intentional, adding to the mood, or if that was just Dad being Dad and actually getting the name wrong.  After Dad called Evan’s name, Boz ran into the scene, in character as Evan, doing a silly dance and hugging Dad’s character.  Evan wore a sleeveless top with his arms covered in tattoos, drawn by Mark with a permanent marker.

Next, we went outside and set up the Moport field in the front yard, with the same scoreboard and goals that we used for the actual Moport tournament.  When we got to the part with the supervillain getting kicked in the face, we filmed Boz and Cody, in character as Evan and Bob, kicking the ball around in practice.  Evan then kicked the ball so hard it flew off camera.  My plan was to have the villain, played by me in a different costume from Coach McAfee, looking out of a second-story window with the ball coming in from off screen to hit me in the face.  But I had to change clothes for this.

“What are you gonna wear?” Mark asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let me go look.”  I went inside to the closet in my old bedroom and dug around, not really sure what I was looking for, but hoping I would know when I found it.

In eleventh grade, five years earlier, I had to do a group project for history class, a presentation on one decade in American history.  My group got the 1950s.  We talked about President Eisenhower, the war in Korea, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.  We also included some references to the culture of the 1950s, which my classmates decided would include getting me to dress up as Elvis Presley and lip-synch and dance.  Mom got in on this, decorating an old thrift store shirt with fringe and sequins for my Elvis costume.  When my classmates recorded me for the class project, I could not keep a straight face for more than ten seconds, but we decided that would be enough, because the stuffy 1950s father would turn off the television after ten seconds and refuse to let his children watch that garbage.

I found the Elvis shirt in my closet, along with a trucker cap printed in a cow pattern, which Dad had gotten from a local auto parts store, and a pair of oversized sunglasses.  I walked to the window where my villain character would get hit in the face and opened it.  “I’m ready,” I said to Mark, Cody, and Boz, still outside below.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Mark shouted.

“It’s my villain costume,” I replied.

“How is that a villain costume?  You look ridiculous!”

“Hey, we’re not exactly trying to win an Academy Award for costume design.  I was going for something that would look different from my coach character.”

After we finished, I went downstairs, taking off my villain costume as I walked outside.  “Is that the Elvis shirt?” Dad asked as I walked past.

“Yeah.  You’ll just have to see the final movie when we finish.”


We had just as much ridiculous fun for the rest of that Saturday and Sunday as we finished filming.  For the scene where Rick’s henchman character shoots Evan, Rick wore a black cowboy hat and boots, with an actual holster on his belt.  We all had a hard time keeping a straight face as Rick, trying to be serious, pulled the Nintendo Zapper, the gun from the old Duck Hunt game, out of his holster, complete with cord dangling from the bottom.

Although we kept the plot basically the same, we added two scenes that were not in the original script.  In one, Boz, in character as Evan, wakes up in the middle of the night and has a vision of two-time Moport champion Mark Dennison giving him encouragement.  Mark Dennison was, of course, just Mark playing himself, wearing his Ice Monkeys uniform from the Moport tournaments.  Since this was an extremely low-budget film, many of us were playing multiple roles, and the audience would just have to accept the fact that Mark Dennison looked exactly like Evan’s teammate Ben Castro.  Although Mark Dennison had some encouraging words for Evan, he acted kind of obnoxious, eating Evan’s food and sitting right on top of him on the bed.  Pee-Wee the cat was in the room at the time, and Mark picked her up and started petting her.

The other scene that we added happened after the villain’s plan to plant drugs on Evan failed.  Boz played a double role as the henchman who planted the drugs, and only Boz and I were in the room when we filmed this scene.  The camera did not need to move, so I just placed it on a table.  On Monday morning, when I had finally finished editing, I watched the final cut of #1 Draft Pick with my family and the Lusks, and I had not yet realized that none of them had seen this scene, not even Mark.

“The plan didn’t work!” Boz’s hunchbacked henchman character shouted on screen.  “Evan was proven innocent, and he’ll be playing in tomorrow’s game!”

On the screen, in character as the villain with the Elvis shirt, I looked directly toward the camera and said, “Then it’s time for Plan B.”  The henchman walked off screen, tapping his fingers together.  A few seconds later, the villain reached over and pressed Play on a portable CD player.  Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” began playing as the villain began doing some kind of dorky, ridiculous dance.

As my family watched this scene, hysterically laughing, Mark looked at me, confused.  “That’s Plan B?” he shouted.  “What is going on here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, laughing so hard I began crying.  “I was just doing something weird.”

“But… really?  That’s your Plan B?”

Mom and Dad laughed particularly hard at later scenes in the movie, like when Rick’s character shot Evan with the Duck Hunt gun, and when the villain drove his car onto the field.  “So that’s why you drove on the lawn the other day,” Dad said.  As the final scene played, with Mark and I in character as Ben Castro and Uncle Fidel, dancing to Tubthumping, then transitioning to the credits, I looked around the room to see everyone’s reaction.  “That was very good,” Mom said.

I made a copy of #1 Draft Pick to leave with Mark and packed the other one that night to bring back to Jeromeville with me.  Mark showed the movie to Cody and Boz the next time he saw them, and they both enjoyed it.  I showed it to a couple of my school friends over the years, but not nearly as many people saw this one compared to my earlier Dog Crap and Vince movie.  But, considering how quickly we had to put everything together, it turned out fairly good.  This was definitely the highlight of my winter break that year.

And of course, to this day, my family still laughs whenever we hear the phrase “Plan B.”

Rest in peace, Uncle Darrell. He lost his battle with cancer in 2023 as I was outlining this episode.

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October 10, 1997.  A silly party game at Scott and Joe’s apartment. (#148)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 2 Comments

As I walked from the parking lot toward Evans Hall for the Jeromeville Christian Fellowship meeting, I quickly realized that I was probably underdressed wearing just a t-shirt and jeans.  October days in Jeromeville were usually still warm and summerlike; I had worn shorts to class that morning.  But the nights were quickly becoming cooler, and the sun was setting earlier.  It was almost completely dark by the time JCF started that night, and I felt a chill in the air.  Once I got inside, though, I would probably be more comfortable.

I had more friends at this point of my life than I had ever had before, but I was definitely a follower, not a leader, when it came to socializing.  Although JCF was supposed to be a time of worship, prayer, and Scripture, one of the things I looked forward to the most was the possibility of people socializing afterward, whatever form that may take.  I did not typically initiate social activities; I was nervous, and afraid of rejection, and I was not always familiar with the kinds of things that normal people did for fun.  But I also did not want to be presumptuous and invite myself somewhere that I was not welcome.  And, of course, all of this socializing had not led to any better luck with finding a girlfriend.  I had never had a girlfriend, and I had never even so much as kissed a girl.

Now that I was taking my Christian faith more seriously, I was constantly being told to pray about this and submit to God’s will, but so far God’s will did not involve a girlfriend for me.  Nothing had ever worked out with anyone from my year or the year behind me.  There were two cute sophomore girls at JCF whom I was interested in, Carrie Valentine and Sadie Rowland, but so far no opportunities had come up to make anything happen.  Maybe I would have better luck with this year’s new freshmen, although that might bring up questions of whether or not an 18-year-old was too young for me. I was a 21-year-old senior hoping to graduate in 1998.

Sarah Winters and Liz Williams were working the name tag table.  “Hey, Greg,” Sarah said, writing “Greg” on a name tag.  At the same time, a guy named Silas walked up to Liz’s table, and she filled out a name tag for him.

“Hey,” I said, noticing something interesting.  I pointed back and forth between Sarah and Silas and said, “We’re all in Math 115 together.”

“Oh, yeah!” Sarah replied.

“How do you like that class so far?” Silas asked.

“Seems pretty straightforward.  Unlike Math 150.”

“I know!  150 gets kind of weird.”

“What class is that?” Liz asked.

“Number theory,” Sarah replied.  Sarah, Silas, and I were all mathematics majors.  I found it noteworthy that Silas had already taken Math 150, since it was usually a senior class and Silas was only a junior, a year behind me.  But I knew that he was some kind of mathematical genius who had completed a lot of university-level coursework before beginning at the University of Jeromeville.

I looked around the room and found an open seat next to Scott Madison and Amelia Dye.  “Hey, Greg,” Scott said.  “What are you doing after large group?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“You’re coming to my place.”

“What for?”

“Just hanging out.”

“Okay,” I said.  Finding appropriate situations for socializing can be difficult and scary for me sometimes, but other times it was easy, like tonight.

After large group ended, Scott told me he had some things to get ready, and he reminded me to show up at his apartment in half an hour.  I walked around, looking for other people to say hi to.  I saw Sadie a few rows behind me; I walked to the aisle and back toward her.  “Hey,” I said after she turned around and saw me.

“Hi, Greg!  How was your week?”

“Not bad,” I said.  “We had a performance yesterday for chorus.  They’re renaming the drama building after a professor who was instrumental in founding the department, and we had to sing this weird-sounding modern piece with lyrics that she wrote.”

“That’s cool!  I heard about that in the newsroom.  Oh, yeah, did you see I got my first article published in the Daily Colt this week?”

“I did!  I saw your name on the article.  It was the one about the girl who didn’t know she was pregnant, right?”

“Yeah!  Isn’t that crazy?  How do you not know you were pregnant?”

“I guess it’s possible, if you don’t gain much weight during the pregnancy.  But still, her doctor told her multiple times she wasn’t pregnant.  Isn’t it your job as a doctor to know what’s going on with your patient?”

“I know.  At least she and the baby are okay.  And I didn’t really want to write fluff pieces like this, but it’s a start.”

“Yeah.  Put in your time doing this now, and then later you can write the kind of stories you really want to write.”

“I want to write about city news and politics.  Last year’s city writers were way too nice to the crazy liberals who run this town.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Someone needs to tell the truth, and not just suck up to them and their ilk.”

“Their what?”

“I never told you that story?”

“No,” Sadie replied.  I proceeded to tell her about the time I got into an argument on the Quad last year with a City Council member who was against a plan to widen an underpass.  Traffic backed up horribly at that underpass, but according to these elected officials, wide four-lane roads do not belong in a small town like Jeromeville.  “She told me that I was ‘of a different ilk.’”

“‘Ilk,’” Sadie replied.  “That’s a funny word.”

“Seriously.  Jeromeville has fifty-six thousand people.  That’s not a small town.  That’s big enough to have traffic jams.”

As the conversation paused for a few seconds, I contemplated whether or not to invite Sadie to Scott’s house, and if so, how to do so.  I did not feel right bringing an uninvited guest to someone else’s house.  But I really wanted to keep talking to her.  The point became moot, however, when Sadie said, “I should get going.  I’m really tired tonight.  I had a long day.”

“All right,” I replied.  “I’ll see you next week?”

“Yeah!  Have a good night!”  Sadie gave me a hug, then walked out of the building.


Scott led a Bible study on campus for freshmen, and when I arrived at Scott’s apartment that night, a good sized crowd had already shown up.  I recognized Tim and Blake, two freshmen from Scott’s study, sitting and talking to Scott. My Bible study that year was Joe Fox, Scott’s roommate; he was sitting next to his girlfriend, Alyssa Kramer. Kieran Ziegler, John Harvey, Brent Wang, a freshman girl named Chelsea, Silas the math major, and a few others were also there.

Blake and Scott were talking about weddings. Blake said that he had recently been to his cousin’s wedding, and Scott and Amelia were currently planning their wedding next summer. I walked to a couch and sat down, not in a mood to think about weddings. I would probably never have one myself.

After about twenty more minutes of mingling and snacks, Amelia began asking if anyone had ever played a party game called Psychologist.  “Have any of you guys ever played that?  One player is the psychologist, and he has to ask the others questions?”  One other person had some vague memory of the game, but most of us did not know this game.  Amelia continued explaining, “So the psychologist leaves the room, and everyone else decides that they’re going to answer the questions, like, in some certain way.  Not necessarily if it’s true or false, but according to something else.  We all know how we’re answering, and the psychologist has to figure it out.”

“I don’t get it,” Alyssa replied.

“It’ll make more sense when we start playing.  Can we try it?  It’s a fun group game.”  No one objected.  “Who wants to be the psychologist?” Amelia asked.

“I’ll do it,” John said.  “I feel like I should, since I’m a psych major.”

John stepped outside and closed the door behind him.  Amelia explained, “So the way I learned the game is that you answer the questions as if you are the person on your left.  So, for example, Brent is sitting to the left of Greg, so if John asks, ‘Greg, are you a math major,’ Greg would say no, because Brent isn’t a math major.  If John asks, ‘Greg, do you play piano,’ Greg would say yes, because that’s Brent’s answer.  Brent plays piano.  So do we all understand?”

“What if you don’t know the answer?” Brent said.  “Like, what if he asks me, I don’t know, ‘Have you ever been to France?’  I would answer for Scott, but I don’t know if Scott has ever been to France.”

“Just say I don’t know,” Amelia explained.  “I’ll go get John, and we can start playing.”  Amelia went outside to tell John to come in.

“It’s cold out there!” John said.  “You guys ready?”

“We’re ready,” Amelia replied.  “Just start asking yes-or-no questions.”

“Okay,” John said.  “Joe, is it cold outside?”

Joe appeared confused.  “Yes?” he replied.

“You should probably ask people questions about themselves,” Amelia explained.  “That’ll make this easier to figure out.”

“Okay,” John said.  “Amelia, are you getting married next year?”

Blake was on Amelia’s left.  “No,” Amelia replied.

“Hmm,” John said.  “Greg, are you tall?”

“No,” I said.  I was six foot four, but Brent, to my left, was shorter than average for a male university student.  A few people giggled, and Brent gave me a look as if to express humorous annoyance at me calling him out for being short.

“Chelsea, are you female?”

Tim was sitting to Chelsea’s left.  “No,” Chelsea replied, trying to hold back giggles.  A few others laughed.

John continued asking questions that had very obvious answers.  “Brent, do you have dark hair?”

“No,” dark-haired Brent said, with blond Scott to his left.

“Joe, are you a man?”

“Yes,” Joe replied.  I was on his left.

“Hmm,” John contemplated.  This was the first time someone had given an answer that was actually true.  “Greg, are you a man?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Alyssa, are you a man?”

“Yes,” Alyssa replied emphatically, with Joe to her left.  John continued this pattern of asking the same question to multiple people, and after about fifteen minutes, he figured out that we were all answering as if we were the person sitting to our left.

“I wanna play again,” Blake said.

“We can’t really play again, because everyone knows the secret now,” Tim replied.

“We could just think of a different way to answer the questions,” Amelia explained. “Who wants to be the psychologist this time?”

Silas volunteered to be the psychologist; he went into the bathroom and turned on the fan, instead of going outside in the cold.  “Anyone have any ideas of how to answer the questions?”

“We could answer for the person sitting, I don’t know, three to the right,” Alyssa suggested.

“That’ll be too easy to figure out, after we did the person to the left,” John replied.

“Hey, I have an idea,” Blake said.  “We all pick someone, and we look at that person’s hand.  If the hand is palm up, we say yes, and if the hand is palm down, we say no.”

“That’s a great idea!” Amelia said.

“I’ll do the hand,” Kieran said.  “I’m sitting in an armchair, so it’s easy to see.  If my left hand is palm up, say yes, and if my left hand is palm down, say no.”

We called Silas back into the room.  Kieran sat in the armchair with his palm down.  “Tim, are you a freshman?”

“No.”

“Greg, are you in my Math 115 class?”

“No.”

“Kieran, are you a man?”

I looked around the room, where I could see people trying to hold back laughter.  Kieran’s own left hand was the only thing requiring him to claim that he was not a man, and Silas had unwittingly exposed this just three questions into the game.  But Kieran had the perfect response.  “Hmm,” he said loudly as he furrowed his brow and scratched his chin with his left hand, palm up, as if pantomiming being deep in thought.  “Yes,” he said while his palm was up.  A ripple of giggles flowed through the room, since everyone but Silas knew exactly while Kieran moved his hand that way.  Kieran then put his hand back down, palm still up.

Silas, confused about why everyone was laughing, asked, “Tim, do you wear glasses?”

“Yes.”

“Greg, do you wear glasses?”

I did not.  “Yes,” I said.

“Brent, do you wear glasses?”

Brent did wear glasses, but Kieran had switched his hand to the palm down position as Silas was asking the question.  “No,” Brent said.

The questions went around in circles for almost an hour, with people occasionally laughing when humorous answers were given.  At one point, Silas asked me if I was tall; Kieran’s hand was palm up, so I said yes.  Next, Silas asked Chelsea if she was tall; she was five foot two, but Kieran’s hand was still palm up, so she said yes.  That made people laugh.  Kieran switched his hand as Silas was asking other people if they were tall, and he inadvertently asked me again with Kieran’s palm down this time.

“No,” I said.

Silas paused, realizing what had just happened.  “Wait,” he said.  “Earlier, you said you were tall.”  I smiled silently, wondering if he was finally figuring this out.  “Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“No.”

Silas thought about this.  “Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“No.”

“Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“No.”

Kieran switched his hand, grinning.  “Alyssa, do you have brown hair?”

“Yes.”

“Greg, are the Captains your favorite football team?” Silas asked.  I was wearing a Bay City Captains shirt that night.

“Yes.”

“Greg, are the Captains your favorite team?”

“Yes.”

Kieran switched his hand.  “Are the Captains your favorite team?”

“No.”

This continued for another several minutes.  Silas seemed to be counting how many times we answered one way before switching to the other answer, and Kieran wisely switched his hand after inconsistent numbers of questions and answers.  Silas began watching things in the room more carefully, and he eventually noticed Kieran’s hand and figured it out.

“Finally!” Silas said.  “That was a good one.”

“I know,” Kieran replied.  “I thought I was in trouble when you asked if I was a man.”

“That was hilarious,” I said.  “Brilliant performance.”

By the time our second game of Psychologist ended, it was getting late, and the crowd at Scott and Joe’s apartment began dispersing.  I drove home, quietly unlocked the door because I did not know if any of my roommates were asleep yet, and went to bed.

It took me a while to fall asleep, and I thought about the events of that night as I drifted off to sleep.  Psychologist was a fun game.  I wondered if I would ever be able to introduce the game to a new group.  I never did, though, and to this day, I have only played it that one time.  The game was fascinating.  At first, everything looks like nonsense, but after asking enough questions, and making enough careful observations, some order begins to emerge in the players’ replies.

Would I really never get to experience my own wedding?  I did not know, but it sure felt like it.  Everyone else was getting into relationships.  Scott and Amelia were getting married soon, and so was Josh, one of my roommates.  I knew plenty of girls, but I did not know how to make anything happen.  Sadie was lots of fun to talk to, but she always seemed too busy to do fun things after JCF.  Carrie Valentine was not even at large group tonight; I had not talked to her all week.  When would it be my turn?  Maybe life really was like a game of Psychologist.  Maybe God was working behind the scenes in ways that I could not understand.  Things happen to everyone that make no sense.  But after asking enough questions and enough observation, an order begins to emerge.  It takes time to understand what is happening, sometimes decades or more, but God has a plan, and someday it will all make sense.

Readers: What’s your favorite party game? Tell me about it in the comments.

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June 18-21, 1996. The time my brother and I turned a bunch of silly inside jokes into a board game. (#88)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 23 Comments

It had been two years since I graduated from high school, and I had only heard from two high school friends in the last couple months: Melissa Holmes and Rachel Copeland.  Neither of them was in town during the week that I came home, after the end of the school year at the University of Jeromeville and before the start of my summer class.  Plumdale was not exactly the world’s most exciting place; neither was Gabilan or Santa Lucia or anywhere else in Santa Lucia County.  Santa Lucia was on the beach, but it was usually windy and not very warm, not what I call beach weather.  Gabilan had a low-level minor league baseball team; in the long tradition of unusual team names in Minor League Baseball, the team was called the Peppers.  I went to one Peppers game with my family that week.  The Peppers lost.

Usually, when I came home on school breaks, the only friends I saw were my brother Mark’s friends, who were all 14 and 15 years old.  There was Cody Kaneko, a teammate and opponent of Mark in baseball and basketball whose parents had known mine for decades.  Another one was Matt Bosworth, Boz for short, a unique combination of silly and intellectual who also had no sense of smell, so we could fart in front of him all we wanted.  Mark and his friends and I had a lot of inside jokes.  Many of them came at the expense of Mark’s other friends, like Ryan Lathrop, who always seemed a bit out of it, or goofy Eric Kingston.

Eric Kingston came over one day during the time I was home.  I was in Mark’s room playing Donkey Kong Country on the Super Nintendo, alone, while Mark and Eric played basketball in the backyard.  After my game ended, I went outside to watch them.

“For three!” Mark shouted, shooting the ball some distance from the court. The ball cleanly sailed through the hoop.  Eric took the ball to the back of the half-length court, then he ran around the court, holding the ball instead of dribbling and flapping his arms like wings, making a vaguely bird-like noise that sounded like “Ba-caa!  Ba-caa!”

“What’s that?” Mark shouted.  “Traveling!”

“No, it’s not traveling,” Eric explained.  “It’s the Flying Bacaa.  That means I don’t have to dribble.  Ba-caa!  Ba-caa!” Eric shot the ball from just a few feet away; it missed.  All three of us started laughing hysterically.

“Ba-caa!  Ba-caa!” I crowed, running around the yard and flapping my arms in imitation of Eric.  Eric and Mark started laughing harder.

After Eric and Mark got tired of basketball, all three of us went back inside to Mark’s room, trying to decide what else to do.  I saw a Monopoly game through the open closet door, and suggested, “Let’s play Killer Monopoly.”

“Okay,” Mark said.

“Killer Monopoly?” Eric asked.

“Yes,” I explained.  “It’s like Monopoly, but with a few extra rules.  We use the house rule about getting money on Free Parking.  And also, there’s no limit to how many houses and hotels you can build, and you can build more houses after you build a hotel.”

“Can’t you always do that?”

“Not according to the actual rules.”

“Well, that’s how I’ve always played.”

“But the most important rule change is, when you land directly on Go, instead of the two hundred dollars, you get a bomb.  And if you land on someone’s property and you don’t want to pay rent, you use the bomb to blow up their houses and hotels.  And if you use two bombs, the whole property goes back to the bank.”

“That sounds cool,” Eric said.

We began playing, aggressively buying property.  After a few times around the board, Mark had all three of the light purple properties.  He landed on Free Parking on that round and used the money to put two houses on each property.  Eric landed on Go on his next turn, just as Mom opened the door to check on us.  Julio, a large orange and white striped cat, one of four cats who lived here, walked into the room when the door opened.

“I got a bomb!” Eric said.

“A bomb?” Mom asked.  “In Monopoly?”

“Killer Monopoly,” I corrected.  “I tried teaching it to you a few days ago, but you weren’t interested.  You just said you hated Monopoly.”

“I do!” Mom said.

“No, no, Julio,” Mark said, pushing Julio away to make sure he did not walk across the board and knock over pieces.

“You come with me,” Mom told Julio, picking him up.  She patted him on the head, saying, “You feel better now, don’t you.”  Turning to Eric, Mom explained, “He had worms in his butt.  But the doctor gave him medicine, and now he’s all better.”  Eric got a horrified look on his face.  He looked at Mark, then back at Mom.  “Oh!” Mom said, laughing.  “You thought I was talking about Mark!  No, I meant Julio.  The cat.”

“Oh!” Eric said, laughing.  I laughed too.

“I don’t have worms in my butt!” Mark shouted.

After Mom left with Julio, I took my turn and landed on Mark’s St. Charles Place, with two houses.  I begrudgingly handed over the rent, leaving me with very little money left.  “I wish I had a bomb,” I said.  “Maybe we need something so you can escape paying rent, but without blowing up the property.  I know!  We should make a Community Chest card that you can keep, like the Get Out Of Jail Free card, and when you play it, you just run away and reappear somewhere else. Like, it takes you the space farthest away from where you are.  It can be the Flying Bacaa card.”

“Ba-caa!  Ba-caa!” Eric squawked.

“We can use the ‘You have won second prize in a beauty contest’ card for that.  I always thought that card was silly anyway.”

Eric went home late in the afternoon.  Mark went out to the living room and put in a VHS tape of shows he had been recording.  First on the tape was a recent episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a popular sitcom starring Will Smith as a city kid who moved in with wealthy relatives to keep him out of trouble.  Will’s cousin Hilary had gotten a job hosting a television talk show, and the family was talking about William Shatner being a guest on the show.

“Have you seen this one, Greg?” Mom asked me.

“No,” I replied.

“It’s hilarious!  We have to watch it!  You know the show ended this season, right?”

“I don’t know if I knew that.”

“Mark?  Do you have the last episode on this tape?”

“I think so,” Mark answered, sounding annoyed.  “I’ll look for it later.”

I continued watching as Carlton embarrassed himself trying to impress William Shatner, accidentally breaking his tooth with a pool stick and taking him to the dentist. William Shatner got doped up on laughing gas just in time for the interview on Hilary’s show.  Mom and Mark and I laughed hysterically through the entire episode.  Mark pressed fast-forward to look for the finale of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but stopped when an episode of Beavis and Butthead came on.  “This one!” he said.  “Plant Man!”

“Yes!” I shouted. The show Beavis and Butthead alternated between a silly story involving the two teenage boys of less than stellar intellect and scenes of the boys watching music videos.  In this episode, they were watching a very strange video called “Plant Man,” by Gary Young.  One part of the song featured Gary Young banging on the drums, and Beavis commented that he could play drums like that.  It was not the first time seeing this episode for any of us.

“Beavis and Butthead sure do watch the strangest music videos,” Mom said.

“I know!” I replied.

Mark found the other episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on the tape.  While he fast-forwarded to skip commercials, I said, “I like that idea of adding a Flying Bacaa card to Killer Monopoly.”

“Ba-caa!  Ba-caa!” Mark said.

“We also need to get Plant Man in that game somehow.”

“Maybe Plant Man should fight the Monopoly guy.”

“That would be funny,” I said.  “Or maybe we should leave Killer Monopoly alone and make a new game with the Flying Bacaa and Plant Man.”

“And Erzix,” Mark added, using an old nickname for Eric Kingston from a few years ago.  Eric was playing a video game that asked for your name, and he started entering Eric but finished with nonsense letters.  Erzix was pronounced “air-zicks,” with the first syllable pronounced like the first syllable of Eric.

“Yes!” I said.  “The Adventures of Erzix.  You have to go around the neighborhood fighting Plant Man and a bunch of other weirdos.  And you can get items to help you win a fight.”

“If you land on the same space as another player, you have to fight the other player.”

“But first, you have to ask them, ‘Pardon me, sir, but do you have any Grey Poupon?’” I suggested, quoting a TV commercial.

“Yes!”

“Let’s go work on this!”

We went back to Mark’s room with a pen and paper.  I began drawing four glorified stick figures resembling Erzix wearing a basketball jersey and colored them different colors.  “Don’t forget, he has an earring now,” Mark said.  I drew an oversized hoop earring on each of the four Erzices.  (Since I was one to use irregular plurals facetiously, I had decided years ago that the plural of Erzix was “Erzices,” analogous to the plurals of “matrix” and “vertex” being “matrices” and “vertices.”)

“Who else should you have to fight besides Plant Man?” I asked as I drew Plant Man.

“Putnam,” Mark said.

“Who’s Putnam?”

“You don’t know Putnam?  Let me bring you up to Putnam.”

“Huh?” I asked.  Mark told me about some funny-looking annoying kid at his school named Putnam, then proceeded to draw a caricature of a face with a bad haircut and exaggerated features. I cut out the Putnam picture and glued it to the front of a playing card, from a deck that was missing cards anyway. Those cards would become the cards for the Erzix game.

Mark had a stuffed figure of Pepe the Pepper, the mascot of the Gabilan Peppers baseball team, on a shelf.  Pepe was an anthropomorphic jalapeño with a mustache and baseball cap.  As I stared at that shelf, I asked, “What about Pepe? Should he be one of the enemies?”

“No!” Mark said.  “Pepe is awesome!  He should be on your side instead!”

“What about, you can go to the stadium and get Pepe, and then he follows you and helps you in the next fight?”

“Yeah!  Let’s do that!”


The next day, I typed the rules for The Adventures of Erzix on the family computer.  When I went to print the rules, I noticed the printer was not working, so I asked Mom about that.

“We just got a new printer,” she said.  “And we haven’t set it up yet.  We were waiting for you to come home so you could help.”

I rolled my eyes.  The directions for setting up a printer were not difficult.  You plug it in, you put the CD in the computer, and you follow the prompts it gives you.  I did exactly that.  About halfway through the installation process, I said, “It wants you to name the printer.  What do you want to name it?”

“Carlton!” Mom said, after the character from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

“Really?” I asked.  “You’re gonna name your printer ‘Carlton?’”

“Sure!  Why not?”

I typed “Carlton” in the box and waited for the printer to finish installing.  When it was done, I printed the rules to The Adventures of Erzix; it worked.  “Printer works!” I called out.

“Good!” Mom replied.”




Later that week, Cody and Boz both came over on the same day.  While waiting for a turn on the Super Nintendo, I said, “We should play The Adventures of Erzix.  All four of us.”

“Yeah!” Mark said.

“We should play what?” Boz asked.

“The Adventures of Erzix.  Mark and I made a board game.”

“You made a board game about Erzix?” Cody asked.  “I gotta see this.”

I unfolded the game board and set up the pieces as I was explaining the rules to Cody and Boz.  “I have the rules right here,” I said, holding up the typed rule sheet, “so you know I’m not making anything up.”

We began the game, taking our turns and drawing Item cards when we landed on certain spaces.  Boz was the first to land on a Fight space.  He drew an Enemy card.  “Putnam,” he said, laughing at the drawing.  “The items that say ‘roll 1 to win fight,’ I can play that now and I also win by rolling a 1, is that how that works?”

“Yes,” I said.  “With no item, you have to roll higher than whatever the card says.”

“Then I’m going to play this Giant Otter Pop, and hit Putnam with it.”  Boz rolled the die; it was a 1.  “Got him!”

Cody took his turn next.  He landed on an Item space and drew a card.  “Go to Ryan’s Fart Station,” he read aloud.  He laughed, then asked, “What the heck is Ryan’s Fart Station?”

“One time we were playing Legos with Ryan Lathrop,” I explained.  “He found a piece that said ‘STATION,’ it’s supposed to be for a train station, and he goes, ‘I’m going to build a fart station!’  I have no idea what it means.”  I pointed to Ryan’s Fart Station on the board, and as Cody moved his piece there, I added, “You have to shuffle your items and discard the top one.”

“What?  Why?”

“Because Ryan’s Fart Station stinks so bad, it makes you drop something!”

“Like this?” Mark said.  He farted loudly, and the rest of us laughed.

“Eww!” I screamed as the smell of Mark’s fart hit my nose.

“Boz!” Mark exclaimed.  “You’re lucky you can’t smell that one!”

Just then the door opened.  “What’s going on in here?” Mom asked.

“Mark farted, that’s what’s going on,” I said.

“Whew!  I can smell it!” Mom exclaimed, and the four of us all started laughing again.  “Are you actually playing that Erzix game that you’ve been working on?”

“Yes!” I said, proud of my creation.

“I want to see how this works.”

“Okay.  Whose turn was it?”

“Mine,” Mark said.  Mark rolled the die, moved, and landed on Flying Bacaa.  “Ba-caa!  Ba-caa!” he shouted, flapping his arms, as he moved his Erzix token across the board.

“Wha– what?” Boz asked.  “What even is a Flying Bacaa?”

“Some weird Erzix thing,” I said.  “My turn.”  I landed on a Fight space and drew an Enemy card.  “Ogre,” I said, as I drew a card with a drawing of myself on it, complete with Jeromeville T-shirt.

“Ogre, like the nickname that Mark’s baseball team used to call you when you worked in the snack bar?” Mom asked.  “You’re in this game?”

“Yeah.  It was Mark’s idea.  But my Erzix doesn’t have to fight Ogre, because I have this,” I said, playing an Item card from my hand.  “I’m going to use the White Bronco to drive away!”

“Yes!” Cody said, laughing.

“White Bronco?” Boz asked.  “Like O.J. Simpson’s car?”

“Yes!” I shouted.  “My turn is done!  Your turn, Boz.”

Boz drew the Item card that says to challenge another player to a game of one-on-one.  He took Mark’s piece and moved them both to the Basketball Court space. Mark rolled higher, so Boz had to give Mark his last two Item cards.

Cody took his turn next.  He landed on a Fight square and drew an Enemy card.  “Plant Man!” he said, laughing at the drawing resembling Gary Young in his furry green suit. Cody pulled an Item card out of his hand, saying, “I’m going to use this Picture of a Butt, to get an extra chance to win.”

“What?” Boz said, reading the card to make sure he heard right.

“You guys are silly,” Mom said.  


A couple weeks after I moved back to Jeromeville for my summer class, I heard from Mom that Eric Kingston had come over and played The Adventures of Erzix with Mark.  He got a good laugh out of the whole thing, although he said that my drawing of him did not look like him.

We dragged the game out a few more times when I came home on school breaks.  After that, it spent twenty-four years in a closet at my parents’ house, where it remains today.  The game was not a regular activity for our family for long, but it had an important legacy in my life.  It served as a sort of first draft for another silly board game I would write a couple of years later.  The later game had a very similar style of play to The Adventures of Erzix, but with the game rules reworked and improved a little.  Over the years, I taught that later game to many other groups of friends, and I was still playing it regularly for most of my adulthood.  One of my friends who now lives in another state just recently, a few days before I wrote this, dragged out her copy and taught it to some people she knows now.  That other game is another story for another time.

This story has had one more lasting legacy in my life.  In the years since I helped Mom set up Carlton the printer, I have bought three more printers, and every one was named after a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air character.  I keep print copies of all of my writing, so if you will excuse me, I need to go print this on my printer, Aunt Viv.