A Pleasant Little Game

The Thinker | History, Description, & Facts | Britannica

(Trying to remember where he left his clothes…)

Here’s a pleasant little game you can play solitaire while standing outside the doctor’s waiting room until The View goes off the air. Or you can play it with your friends, or at a family gathering. You won’t even need a scratch pad: you can keep score with your fingers.

All you have to do is change one letter, just one, of a famous person’s name to create a whole new character. A few examples:

*Duke Snider is transformed from a Hall of Fame baseball player to “Dupe Snider,” perpetual patsy and fall guy. (Gee, that sounds like one of Byron’s TV shows.)

*Movie and TV star Donna Reed becomes “Donna Weed,” something you keep pulling out of your garden.

*Harry Belafonte not only gets his sex changed, but turns into an annoying scold as “Harpy Belafonte.”

*Flip Wilson transforms from a beloved comedian (“The devil made me do it!”) into a pest control technician, complete with spray can–“Flit Wilson.”

*Actress Demi Moore becomes long-distance trucker “Semi Moore.”

Jimmy Carter becomes–well, never mind, I’d better not go there.

Hey, this could be addictive! I’d better stop before I miss my afternoon movie.

Any suggestions for more?

Memory Lane: A Mad Libs Christmas Party

Mad Libs – The World's Greatest Word Game

I don’t know why, but this happy memory washed over me this morning.

Family Christmas party, years ago, everybody still alive and healthy, the whole bunch of us crammed into Grandpa’s living room–to this day I don’t know how we fit. And just for the heck of it, we played some Mad Libs.

If you’ve never played this crazy game, well, it’s easy. You have a short story full of blanks, and the only thing the players know is vague clues to help them choose a word to go into the blank–like “noun,” “adjective,” “exclamation,” etc. All they do is supply a word for each blank.

And so you wind up with sentences like “Mikey hiccuped all the way to the moron‘s office and then asked to shame the bloated but still prehensile senator.

The story I read to my family at the party was about bird-watching, but by the rules of Mad Libs, they didn’t know that. I asked for nouns and adjectives and other details, and they provided them.

That’s how we wound up with a “ruling junta” in Baltimore pursuing a “yellow-bellied crotch sucker.” And other equally silly formulae.

And oh, did everybody laugh! I thought my mother was going to plotz. We laughed till tears ran down our cheeks.

I wish I could invite some of you over for Mad Libs. I could guarantee a good time!