The volunteer choir director hosted her annual Christmas caroling gathering. It starts out with singing Christmas carols at the local nursing home, followed by appetizers and games at her house. I enjoy quite a few of the people that I knew would be there, so I decided to go. It was a good time, and the residents of the nursing home really do appreciate that we came to sing to them.
Afterwards, at the choir director's house, we were eating and then someone pulled out the game Moods. It's a fun game. In the middle of the board are ten rectangles in a grid. In a circle around the grid are the squares on which the pieces advance from start to finish. The way it's played is each player has four tokens, numbered 1-4. Then, there are mood cards and phrase cards, and a little cup with a ten sided die. The mood cards each have different emotions on them, such as silly, or sleazy, or amused, or triumphant and are placed on the rectangles in the middle, face up. The player who goes first shakes the die in the cup, and doesn't let anyone else see it, then takes a phrase card and has to read the phrase with the emotion that matches whatever number they rolled. So, say the rolled a 5 on the die, and sleazy is the emotion on the five rectangle in the middle. And the phrase is, "Stop staring at the monkeys." (By the way, that's an actual phrase from the game) So the player has to say "Stop staring at the monkeys, " in a sleazy manner. Then, that person counts to three and every other player puts one of their tokens on whatever emotion they think the person portrayed. If they are very confident that they know the mood, they place the #4 token, and if they have no real idea, they place the #1 token. If you guess it right, you get to move as many squares as the # of your token. The person who says the phrase gets to move as many squares as there are correct guesses. So, anyway, now that you know how to play, here is where it gets embarrassing.
It was my turn, and I rolled the die, looked at the number and the corresponding emotion. By this time the other conversations in the house had died out and people had wandered over to watch the game as we were making quite the commotion. So we had quite the audience. I said the phrase, trying my hardest to convey the appropriate emotion. I counted to three and people placed their tokens on their guesses. The one that got the most guesses was "silly." There were a couple other guesses, which I don't remember. The thing is that none of them were right. Not one token got placed on the right mood. And then, I had to reveal to them what the intended emotion was. And do you know what it was? Romantic. Yeah. Romantic.
Well, the people just thought that was hilarious. There was riotous laughter. I joined in, I mean, it WAS funny. And then I said, "And you wonder why I'm single!" And people laughed even more. Then, I said, "Why couldn't it have been sleazy? I mean, I wouldn't mind if you went away from here saying, 'Our pastor's not good at acting sleazy.' But, NO! It has to be romantic." Then I turned to the person next to me and said, "We should just move along. It's your turn. Go now!" One of the guys who was watching still thought this was funny, and asked, "So what do you do if no one guesses it right?" To which I replied, "You just move on to the next one as fast as you can." Then, he made some joke about how at seminary they need to let us get out more and interact with people.
Yeah, because not being able to interact with people was my problem at seminary . No, my problem, evidentally, is when I try to be romantic it comes across as silly.
Now, in my defense, there was nothing romantic about the phrase I had to say. I think it was something about paper being stuck in the photocopier or something ridiculous like that. Definitely not romantic. But still. That's all we need people to be talking about around church...
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