Bedknobs and what?sticks

Thursday night the following arrived at our house in quick succession:

1. A gloriously not-bent bed part. The correct one, even.

2. Weekend house guest, in town for a small and lovely Celebratory Pre-Birth Event held in my honor yesterday.

3. Saintly friend, inexplicably full of vim, vigor, and willingness to help Steve turn a very heavy assortment of bed parts downstairs into a solid, compete actual bed upstairs.

Saintly friend took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers in a dashing piratical style, then he and Steve set to work. I followed the traditional gendered division of labor, filling the time by staying well clear of all heavy lifting, feeding everyone, plying them with liquor, and advising house guest on her quilting project.

And now we have a BED, a real true bed, and though I am still not clear on what exactly makes it a better container for our mattress than the floor (beyond being pretty, which it is), I am pleased to report that whatever it is most assuredly DOES make it better. It is sunshine and lollipops and a happy lower back. Bed! Bed. Dear, wonderful bed.

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My fecundity and I have been fêted. F, who was hosting, entertained us with a remarkable booklet from 1946. This document came along with your set of silver, to teach you how to entertain in a suitably elegant fashion, although the silver company's idea of what constitutes suitable elegance was perhaps not the same as yours or mine.

A highlight was what we swiftly renamed "The Racist Pie Game." The idea is that they present you with a list of people and it is your job to determine what kind of pie each person or group of people should be expected to like. You are aiming to dredge up the "correct" answers, as provided by the wise authors of the game. So, for instance, Eve of Eden fame likes apple pie, Mark Twain likes huckleberry pie, and the undertaker likes berry (bury) pie. And then...

Q. "The Yellow Race"

and

Q. "A mulatto"

WELL GOSH! That certainly is a lovely complement to your fine sterling, Mrs. Higgenbottom.

The answers, incidentally, are that the Orientals like lemon pie, and biracial people like chocolate. Yellow pie for yellow folks, chocolate pie for brown folks. Obviously.

If that game doesn't do it for you, you could always try this one, also well suited to elegant gatherings of well heeled adults: Everyone takes a sheet of paper and writes a list of attributes down the side, beginning with "Eyes, Nose, Hair" and continuing on through "Hat" and "Sex Appeal" with any number of other things I no longer remember along the way.

Then you rate each person on each quality on a scale of one to ten, including yourself, gather up the papers, and read the ratings aloud, making the group guess which person each set of ratings is meant to describe.

Everyone will have a merry time. "No offense can be taken at low ratings, as all is in the service of good fun."

Indeed. How could it possibly go wrong? At least, I suppose, you could steal the teaspoons as restitution. And your hat got a ten, anyway.

Comments

[ben]

Does "Eyes, Nose, Hair" denote a single ensemble to be rated together? They're all facial, I guess, but why not just say "face" and be certain you're not omitting other rating-worthy features also found around there.

[redfox]

No, it does not, despite my confusing deployment of quotation marks.