The Mixed Up Brains of Lisa Weinstein

Game Night

In the early 1980s, a new type of board game landed in neighborhood toy stores across the country. A game where mindless bits of meaningless data burried deep in the recesses of your brain suddenly became the key to earning the title of smartest player in the room.

A game where the correct answer to a question earned you a "doo dad" which fit snugly into a circular token which looked very much like a pie. Fill in your pie with all 6 multi-colored "doo dads" and you held bragging rights forever, or at least until your opponents begged you to play again.

I am talking, of course, about the Trivial Pursuit craze of the mid-80s, when shoppers across the nation gobbled up an estimated 20 million copies of the game, giving them the chance to demonstrate that they knew exactly who lived at 221B  Baker Street in London (if you answered Sherlock Holmes, give yourself a brown "doo dad"). 

My college friends and I, circa 1985, jumped right onto the Trivial Pursuit bandwagon.  A typical Saturday night would find at least eight of us squeezed around my parent's kitchen table, munching on chips while desperately trying to out-wit each other in this tried and true trivia show down.

Thirty years later, I no longer remember who claimed the title of the smartest in the room...but memories of the resounding laughter that filled my parent's kitchen during those innocent Saturday nights has stayed with me through the intervening years.

While I can't pinpoint an exact reason why our weekend Trivial Pursuit challenges came to an end, I can blame a likely suspect....life.  You see, we graduated college, found jobs, planned weddings, and all too soon, our days were filled with soccer games and dance recitals, and PTA meetings, and last minute trips to the store to buy poster board for the science project due the next day.

We attempted to find those few fleeting moments to connect by phone or social media...and sometimes we even managed to get together for a rare Saturday lunch.  But our weekend Trivial Pursuit parties had become a part of our treasured past...never to happen again.

That is, until last weekend.

Since our college days we have collectively survived first marriages and second marriages, toddlers and teens, new jobs and lay offs, health scares, and money woes.  But there we sat, munching on chips, sitting comfortably around my friend's kitchen table, teamed up with our spouses, roaring with laughter, and once again reaching into the deepest bowels of our brains to remember which two actors starred in Gone With the Wind. (If you answered Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh give yourself a pink "doo dad".

I left my friend's house that night with a feeling of love and warmth that I had so desperately missed....but had never really gone away.

While my husband Bob and I didn't earn enough "doo dads" to fill our pie, I'm confident that the winner won't hold onto their bragging rights for long.  Because now that, 30 years later, we have resurrected game night, I can't wait for a re-match so I can try to fill my pie with "doo dads".....

and fill my heart with the love and laughter of good friends once again.

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