Okay, who needs another bottle of wine?
We keep getting bottles and bottles of wine as hostess gifts. Cabs and Pinots are piling up at our house, more likely to be stored than poured. I’m not complaining, just making an observation.
We Baby Boomers learned many nice lessons from our parents. They taught us how to be appreciative. How to say please and thank you. How to bring a hostess gift when we go to someone’s house. We pride ourselves on having lived lives in contrast to the ones our parents lived. But in the end, a tremendous number of their values rubbed off on us.
When we were young, a 6-pack was likely to walk through the door with one of our friends. We grew past that and started bringing house plants. Eventually, it became a two-horse race between an orchid plant and a bottle of wine. Orchids became ordinary, and a bottle of wine has been the standard for a while now.
We recently had two couples over for a socially distanced evening at home. One was a lifelong friend and the other a cousin of theirs who was visiting from out of town.
So, of course, we were surprised when they walked in with a hostess gift we would never have expected: a social board game. Not just any game, mind you, but one of mine! Literally, a game I invented. They brought us a copy of Taboo.
Obviously, the cousins did not know what I did for a living – but almost immediately we decided we liked them a lot. So we shared a stunned laugh as we poured one of those bottles of wine we’d previously received.
The idea of playing the game was perfect, an easy social way to hang out and get to know each other. It was the very foundation of my business, so I absolutely understood the inclination. But no one was going to play Taboo with me.
Since the cousins were of similar vintage I pulled out Boom Again, something none of them had seen since it had only been available for a little over a week.
The rest of the evening was a breeze. We laughed. We sang. We remembered stuff we hadn’t thought of in 25 years. I wasn’t allowed to play, of course – “No way. You wrote this.” So, I was assigned the job of reading the questions for both teams. Even while we spread out in a reasonable social distance it was easy to form two teams. The two cousins were teammates and the other three were the opposing team.
We had a great time and we thought the cousins were fun and easy going. They apparently had led parallel lives to ours because every pop culture experience and memory was the same for them back in St. Louis, as it had been for us Angelenos.
Okay, I admit it. I was biased to like them from the minute they walked through the door carrying a game … of mine. A game as a hostess gift. Fantastic!
Besides, who needs another bottle of wine?
– Brian Hersch
