Week Forty-Three: Cootie Party

Dolores does NOT approve

I have to wonder what would happen if you tried this kind of trick today:

While we are suggesting this party for an Armistice Day Party, it has no connection with Armistice Day with the exception of the familiarity of the solider with the military louse.

So it’s kind of like having a Vietnam War-themed party centered around napalm. Or a Gulf War party themed on spider holes. I kinda think somebody today, in our umbrage-filled society, would see something kinda wrong this this.

But Cokesbury tries to take the curse off it with its follow-up paragraph:

This party is suitable for any occasion. The game of “Cootie” is one of the most hilarious and exciting games ever invented.

Wait until the inventors of Pac-Man hear this blasphemy.

Yes, we are playing Cootie. But before you dig through your kids’ toys or head to the Goodwill for one of those plastic fantastic Cootie games, consider this: This is pre-Hasbro Cootie. This is practically pre-plastic Cootie. This is Cootie done by drawing bits of the bug with pencil and paper, viz:

Cootie was indeed around, in one form or another, before plastic. That’s kind of hard to fathom in this day and age, when even our cars are made mostly of plastic. Why, I remember my dad’s old 1948 Ford truck. Metal dash. Metal pedals. Metal ceiling. The only plastic there was the speaker grille for the old radio and for some of the buttons and knobs. It was so metally when you hit a bump and bashed your head on the ceiling, you knew it.

But back to the party. This is kind of like the progressive hearts party, in which competitors keep score and advance to the lead table as their scoring allows. There’s also a provisio for those whose friends may have failed the Cokesbury Dice Screening Test. And yes, more gum-wood is involved:

We wanted to use this game for a young people’s conference group and felt that there might be some criticism in the use of dice, so we went to the mill and had blocks sawed from gum wood three-quarters of an inch square. We had these painted black and lettered in white.

Such far-off, innocent and dice-free times, when one could wander down to the city mill and have blocks of wood made to order at little expense. Nowadays, nobody has a mill except in towns where if you’re wimpy enough to want dice substitutes you’re likely to walk out of the mill with snake eyes where the sun don’t shine.

But back to the party, and to the superfluous quote that allows me to use the whistle tag for this entry:

When the leader’s whistle blows, one person at each table takes the dice or lettered cubes and throws.

I’m sure, if this is a mixed dice-versus-lettered cubes crowd, you won’t want to mix the two. Dice-throwers and cube-throwers at the same table are liable to come to blows.

Of course you want your guests to concentrate on getting a Cootie so all your guests can tabulate their scores thusly:

As soon as someone completes his “cootie” he yells “Cootie,” and the game stops. The game will be so hilarious that it will be necessary for the leader to blow the whistle to stop the game. As soon as a “cootie” is completed, all count up their score for that number and write it in the number. For example, if “cootie” was completed when another player only had a “body,” that player would get “one.” If he ahd a body and a head and one eye and one leg, his score would be four. See the score card and study the marked card until this point is clear.

So I’ll repeat the image:

I do apologize for the smudged margin. Fragile book and cheap scanner.

Here's a blank card for those who might actually want to play the game:

Drill it into your heads. DO NOT GET THE SCORING WRONG, or the Rev. Bruce Gannaway of West Palm Beach Fla., will come to get you. (More on him later.) Also, “use” a lot of quotation “marks” at random in order to emphasize your complete misunderstanding of “their” use.

And I have to ask: Am I the only one who hears Mr. Burns saying “and for the second to last team to complete the race, we have an hilarious World’s Worst Employee trophy” whenever I hear or read the word hilarious?

Play twelve rounds of cootie. Then serve refreshments of doughnuts and coffee. Neglecting, of course, to realize that some of your guests might find doughnuts and coffee more objectionable than playing with (whisper) dice.

Now on to the Rev. Bruce Gannaway:

We do not know the origin of this game of “cootie,” but it was given to us by the Rev. Bruce Gannaway, of West Palm Beach, Fla., pastor of the Sarah Wagg Memorial Methodist Church. He tells us that he learned the game in Atlanta while a student of Emory. Reverend Mr. Gannaway wrote out for us a description of the game, which we are suggesting for this party.

Lest ye be concerned, Cootie is not the Rev. Bruce Gannaway’s only legacy:

The Reverend and Mrs. Bruce F. Gannaway and Miss Grace Gannaway Scholarship was established in 1989 by The Reverend Bruce F. Gannaway, Class of 1925, and Mrs. Gannaway. The scholarship is to be awarded, when fully funded, to upper class students who intend to become Christian ministers and is also open to students who plan to pursue lay careers in the church. The scholarship honors the donors and The Reverend Gannaway's sister, Grace Gannaway.

That’s it, until next week, and boy does Cokesbury have a good ‘un: A Tacky Party – a costume extravaganza – in which you’re to make yourself look ludicrous. If you’ve hung on at the Cokesbury Party Blog this long, that shouldn’t be hard.