Barry Roy
United States
Montclair
New Jersey
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My wife, an ardent non-gamer, will occassionaly play Time's Up - actually she loves it. In fact, she insisted we bring it with us on our big family vacation to the North Carolina outer banks. That being said my wife is that she is a featured columnist on a hilarious parenting website called offsprung.com. She writes under the name Hausfrau - anyway, in a recent column, which can be read at length here - http://www.offsprung.com/profiles/blogs/closing-the-book-on-... - she described a session of Time's Up as follows:
* Famous people are not, in fact, famous. We played a game called "Time's Up" every night of vacation. The object of "Time's Up" is fairly simple: each team of two has to describe to each other the same 40 famous people, whose names are listed on individual cards, with one team member giving clues and one guessing. Subsequent rounds of the game require team members to describe/guess those same 40 names first using only one word plus pantomime and, lastly, using just pantomime. While Rounds 2 and 3 are definitely challenging, Round 1 is pretty straightforward.
It's not, however, if these so-called "famous" people aren't so famous after all, or at the very least are known only to the two eggheads among the twelve players. As mentioned, my father, Mr. Mr. Monopoly, and I are nerds, big juicy nerds marinating in our own nerdiness. When we're feeling frisky, we venture into geekdom, even. We were, for example, the only two people on the trip who felt the need to visit the Wright Brothers memorial and museum in Kitty Hawk, which kind of floored me; I mean, this narrow strip of hurricane bait we were visiting is famous for exactly two things: the lost colony of Roanoke (which, when all is said and done, is lost); and the site of the first manned flight. And yet we couldn't conjure up enough excitement for a "good for you" side trip amidst all the Jet Skiing and golfing and go karting and boogie boarding. And while I digress, my larger point remains: intellectual curiosity will get you everywhere, at least where "Time's Up" is concerned. Absent that, the game turns all wack-a-doodle, with, for instance, the following exchange between me and Uncle Little Eddie when the "Al Jolson" card came up:
ME: "OK, he starred in The Jazz Singer! The first talkie! Uhh....wore blackface...'My Mammy [bad impersonation included]'!"
ULE: [Blank stare]
ME: [Looks at timer, gets creative] "OK, his first name is our dead uncle who looked like Squidward."
ULE: "Al!"
ME: "Yessssss!! OK, his last name rhymes with...uhhhh...the last name of my high school boyfriend!"
ULE: "You had a boyfriend in high school?"
ME: "The guy with the stutter!"
ULE: "Ohhhh, Eric Olson!" [Triumphant smile]
ME: [Three seconds left, desperate] "Right, but that's not whose name is on the card!"
ULE: [As timer runs out] "I got it -- Al Molson!!"
Other games were highlighted by my mother, Mr. Monopoly, describing "Strom Thurmond" to Gross Uncle Gary not as "Racist old senator from South Carolina who ran for President as a Dixiecrat in 1948" but as "What it's called when it's thundering plus the Yankee who died in a plane crash!" And then she argued that we should accept GUG's answer of "Stormin' Thurman Munson." She also, another night, came up with this gem for "Ed Sullivan" in Round 2 (only a single one-word clue allowed for each card): "Gepetto Pepetto." And then, to my dazed and confused father who was her unfortunate partner that night, she actually roared, "Gepetto Pepetto! Come on!" OK, (a) she meant "Topo Gigio," and (2) neither "Topo Gigio" nor "Gepetto Pepetto" is a one-word clue. Oh, and my so-called "husband" has no idea who Mary Baker Eddy is, even though for three years he lived two blocks from the Christian Science mother church in Boston.
They all should've come to the Wright Brothers museum.
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