Keep the Party Keen!

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27272, 24 December 1949, Page 5

Keep the Party Keen!

The party season is on and, next to the provision of glasses—with something to go in them—and food, a hostess’s biggest headache is keeping her party going. For the benefit of those who cannot rely on the appearance of The Man Who Knows All The Games, enough are detailed here to keep things moving for hours.

Have you ever played Tribunals? Your success at it will depend on your general attitude to leading questions. Are you good at proving that it is impossible for you to have been doing a certain thing at a certain place on a certain day at a certain time? If you are, you’ll be good at this game.

The “crime” can be anything you fancy: kissing a total stranger in a public place would do as well as any other. One of the guests—a convincing talker preferably—is chosen as the culprit and is given an accomplice. They leave the room to concoct their alibi. Then one returns for cross-examina-tion and is questioned about his movements.

Allow five minutes for this, then bring in the accomplice for similar examination. If you can’t catch them out in a fib they are aquitted. If you can (and generally you can), you pronounce on them any sentence your ingenuity can invent.

Try a twist on charades which we might call Belinda. Split into two teams, one of which goes out of the room. The other thinks of some piece of mime, such as mending a bicycle puncture. One of the “ out ” team then comes in and is told what he has to do. Another comes in, and the first goes through the motions of mending a puncture, but must not speak. Then the third comes in, and the second goes through the mime (without speaking, of course) of what he thinks the first player was doing. And so on, until the last of the “out” team is shown the mime and has to guess what it is intended to be. By that time it probably looks like somebody committing hara-kiri.

A lively way of finding supper partners is called Trouble-shooting —a trouble-shooter being an American telephone linesman who sorts out crossed wires. It requires advance preparation, but, is well worth the trouble. You need an even number of players and a ball of string for each two players. Start with one ball and, securing the end to something in, say, the hall, walk wherever you will in the house unwinding the string as you go, twisting it and tying it round banisters, chairs, door knobs, the legs of upturned tables, anything your fancy dictates. Make sure that the ball finishes in a different room from where it began. Then take the other balls in turn and, sta, .ing them in the same room as the first, do the same sort of thing, tangling the lines with each other

Ann Hollis offers help to the hostess in the way of fun and games

until the whole affair looks like a gigantic map of bus routes. When you are ready, start all the girls in one terminus room and all the men in the other, letting them choose their lines since there is nothing to choose between them. All start together, winding their lines up to balls, getting terribly in each other's way, and finally meeting the Other half of their particular line. It is quite riotous.

While you have partners ready picked you could stage a Pantomime Horse Race. Each couple stands back to back with arms linked, so that as the front end of the horse runs forward the rear has to run backwards. To complicate matters still more, arrange the course so that it includes a hairpin bendy Then watch the fun.

Murder and Sardines both have their points of appeal for teen-agers (and most other agers) and some of the advantages are found also in Searchlights. A circle is formed of all the girls and inside this a circle of the same number of men. All the lights are switched out and a gramphone or radio is played. The circles move in opposite directions until the music is stopped, when each girl clutches the man nearest to her. The game gets its name from the fact that someone is perched on a chair inside the inner circle and flashes a light on one couple. You simply take tne chance. The couple “ spotted ” each time has to leave the game.

If you have the Balloons, there is a simple nonsensical game that produces a lot of fun and laughter. On. the word "Go,” each guest must eat a cracker biscuit (if you have the biscuits). Whole biscuits for men, half biscuits for girls. Then they try to blow a balloon until it bursts.