Winning

by: Sam

Allow me to explain Team Charades. This may be confusing, but if you pay attention and learn this game, it could change your life.

You have two teams. Each team has a separate room – or area of the condo, in our case. For us, one team hovers in the hallway near the door, and the other team is in one of the bedrooms, all ten people piling onto one king sized bed.

You also have a judge, who doesn’t judge anything but for lack of a better title, we’ve named this person the judge. The judge sits in a central room holding a list of movies that he has worked hard to make, hoping he will stump us with impossible movies and we will, at the end of the game, praise him for his brilliant movie choices.

One player from each team starts the game in the center room. The two opponents stand posed like runners ready to race, waiting for the judge to whisper the first movie in their ears.

Often, the first two people have similar talent levels. If 9-year-old cousin Richie starts for one team, the 7-year-old Philip will probably start for the other. If Kenzie’s boyfriend, The Incredible Mitch, starts for one team, I leave my team no choice and definitively tell them I am starting for our team.

When the judge whispers the first movie, chaos ensues: “Mary Poppins.”

The two players each race back to their teams and begin frantically acting out the movie. For this one, my cousin Heidi simply floated in the room on an umbrella. To her, this was obviously Mary Poppins. To us, she looked like a belly dancer.

Heidi looks at us like we’re stupid, while we look at Heidi like she is also stupid. Heidi stubbornly continues her Mary Poppins dance until we tell her to do something else.

As usual, we resort to a very organized form of charades.

For example, Heidi holds up two fingers. The whole teams shouts at the tops of their lungs, “TWO WORDS!”

Using sign language, Heidi brings us to the first syllable of the first word. Using the popular “Sounds like” gesture and then pulling at her hair, she tells us the syllable sounds like “hair.”

So we all start spitting out the alphabet as quickly as we can, until Heidi stops us at “M.”

We all shout, “MARE,” and start thinking to ourselves of all the movies we may know that contain the syllable “mare.”

“MARY POPPINS,” someone victoriously shouts as they run out of the room, sometimes kindly yelling to his own teammates to “GET OUT OF THE WAY!” (My 16-year-old brother Trevor is the only one guilty of this, actually. We Schotts have a problem.)

This person runs to the judge, who gives them the next movie on the list.

The judge’s role in this game is very easy and very hard. He must sit patiently in the central room, alone, waiting for the teams to guess the right movies. Then, when they come running to him in a frenzy, he must know where on the movie list they are and quickly give them their next movie.

The teams continue acting and running out to the judge, until one team has made it through the whole list of movies. This team then shouts obnoxiously and gladly tells the other team they lost, and we won.

The game is tricky, because no matter how good I may be at it, I am sometimes challenged by my teammates, who are sometimes terrible. A teammate may run in and simply stand there, paralyzed by his or her inability to act out any of the words in the movie’s title.

This fills me with pity and also outrage. As I sit there and watch in horror as time dwindles and my teammate just stands there, my blood begins to boil and I worry that I’m too competitive. I also worry – this worry is often more pressing – that I will lose.

Another popular strategy in the game is to consider who the judge is and/or what type of movies he will have written on his list. Sometimes, the judge puts a kids’ movie first, so Richie and Philip can go first for both teams.

For this reason, last night, my 16-year-old brother Tyler began shouting kids movies as soon as Richie got to the room. Richie held up two fingers – two words – and Tyler shouted “CARS 2!” Richie nodded in amazement, and Tyler raced from the room.

We have a most competitive bunch here this year.

Speaking of fierce competition, today is the sand castle contest that our resort (Silver Dunes) holds every week. My organized, detail-oriented boyfriend is meeting with his construction team – Richie, Philip and the 5-year-old Zac – planning a city surrounded by mountains surrounded by a drip castle. Andrew is even making a sketch, while the three boys look on in awe. The 5-year-old Zac just broke it to Andrew that this may be pretty hard to make.

Oh, and yesterday was The Beer Dig.

This famous competition happens every year. The guy in charge of Silver Dunes’ beach (George) organizes this, and we all eagerly await the day we get to dig in the sand for ten minutes, surrounded by many other sweaty people.

What happens is this: George buries a tennis ball early in the morning, before we’re awake to see. He then sections off a square of sand encompassing the buried ball. At 1 p.m., after paying a dollar to participate, we all gather around the orange tape, while George explains the rules. (Essentially, dig for the tennis ball. If you find it, you get an ice chest of beer. If a kid finds it, his parents get the beer.)

Eighty-four people dug yesterday, and my brother Tyler won. Tyler won a few years ago, too. Kenzie and my dad have also won, along with others in our extended beach family. (We come here so much and always bring so many people, our chances of winning are pretty decent.)

Trevor and I have yet to win, but I think our time will come. Until a few years ago, Tyler’s claim to Beer Dig fame was that he was RIGHT NEXT to the winner one time.

Anyway, I’ll let you know if Andrew wins the sand castle contest.