Thanksgiving, Addams Family Style

It’s time once again at the Cokesbury Party Blog to play Laugh at the Conservatives. Aiding and abetting us in this round is none other than Charles Addams’ The Addams Family, to wit, the Thanksgiving Play scene from Addams Family Values:




This is, of course, only a mild LATC, and actually plays well with many conservatives because it’s also a send-up of rich East Coast snobs. So it works both ways.

It also works to serve as an introduction to this weekend’s Thanksgiving Party, but mostly as an advertisement on the kind of party Cokesbury doesn’t want you to throw. Especially all that talk about highballs. Prohibition, you know.

Serendipity

Yesterday's post brought fans of the Cokesbury Party Blog, among other things, a Bloom County comic strip featuring Steve Dallas' tacky Sunday suit.

My brain, long ago, catalogued Opus' reaction to his suit ("Perfect! El barfo!") as an item worth remembering, so whenever I encountered tacky clothing, El Barfo immediately came to mind. I even briefly conteplated a novel with El Barfo as the unlikliest of superheroes.

So I knew I wanted to use the comic for the Tacky Party post. But I couldn't find it. My kids have glommed onto my comic books, rendering them into piles of unreadable pulp within months by wearing them out. So I'd been searching for that particular strip for about two weeks before I found it, in a most serendipitous way.

First, I had the strip linked to a court case in which assistant Opus wanted Steve to look his best. Leafed through my books looking for Dallas, Steve, court cases of. Found plenty, but couldn't find the strip. My brain latched onto the El barfo, could not recall anything else.

Then it came to me in a flash. Tess Turbo! He was going to star in a Tess Turbo video! So I Googled Tess Turbo. Nothing, until I got into "Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things" on Wikipedia. Then there the storyline was. Then I saw a link a few levels down -- Tess Turbo at GoComics! I went there. Lo and behold, the previous strip was the one I wanted.

So, to those who condemn the Internet for replacing our memories, I say phooey. The Internet is a resposity for memory, but it takes a good old-fashioned organic brain to be able to sort out the mess and find what is wanted. Even something as ridiculous as a 30-year-old comic strip. Take that, Socrates.

Week Forty-Four: Tacky Party

“Occasionally,” Cokesbury starts out its spiel on its Tacky Party, “we enjoy making ourselves ludicrous. So, let’s all come to the party in the queerest garb we can find and see who is the tackiest one present.”

It’s like they envisioned our present-day Internet decorum by 68 years.

Oh, wouldn’t they be shocked today.



So here’s your invitation:

A Tacky Party we’re having on Friday night,

And we want you to be there.

Dress up so tacky that you’ll be a sight,

And an evening of fun with us share.

Cokesbury, of course, won’t get as tackily dressed as Wesley Snipes nor Pat Swayze. This is 1932, remember, so the tackiness will be on, shall we say, a Pentecostal level:

The guests should be told in advance that a prize will be given to the “tackiest” person present. It would be well to give one for the women and one for the men. If desired, the prize list could be extended, and in addition to giving prizes for the whole tacky ensemble, separate prizes could be awarded for the tackiest hat, dress, or suit. Any sort of clothing may be worn, just so it is not the present mode of dress. In the days of long skirts, short skirts will seem tacky indeed. The girls could use all sorts of color combinations, with mismated shoes and hose. The old-fashioned clothes of our mothers’ day, some of which nearly every family has stored away, would furnish ideal costumes for the affair. The boys could carry out the same ideas in choosing their costumes. Coats, trousers, tied, shirts, and vets of former grandeur would again come into their won. A tacky effect may be created by a clash of colors, such as a man wearing dark trousers, white coat, and red necktie.

Just go to Steve Dallas' closet:

Games suggested for this party are inexplicably lame. I had to get to Item No. 7 on their list to find one even halfway decent (what you’re missing are the traditional mixers in which you’re forced to get to know someone else at the party than who you came with).

Buzz. The players are all seated in a circle for this game. The leader explains that they are going to count off and each time a guest has a number in it that has a seven or multiple of seven, must say “Buzz” instead. Players who fail to do this are required to sit on the floor in the center of the circle. The counting should go just as fast as possible.

Whoo! Really stretch your friends’ number-recognition skills. That always spells par-tee to me. Next up, calculus:



(Speaking of tacky, that hair net is just wonderful.)

Just in case you don’t want to come across as a total nerd, try this most excellent word game. That’ll assuage the English majors you’ve invited, at least.

One Word Suggests Another. The players are seated in a circle. The leader explains the game and suggests a word. Each player must then think of a word and keep that word in mind which the last work suggested to him. They call out the words as they go. For example, suppose the leader says “post-office.” To the next player, this may suggest “letter.” “Letter” to the next player may suggest “lover.” “Lover may suggest “girl,” “girl” “powder puff,” “powder puff” “powder,” “powder” “gun,” “gun” “war,” “war” “soldier,” “soldier” “Red Cross Nurse,” etc. when these suggested words have gone around the circle, start back and unravel. The last player tells the word that suggested his, and so on around the circle.

Confused yet? I think Bob Wylie is too (forward to 4:02).



Remind your friends that they’re just free associating freely, and they’ll get along with this game just fine.

So you’ve confused your friends with numbers and words. Now it’s time to mess with their physical and temporal placement:

Where Am I? One person is asked to leave the room. In his absence, the group decides where he is and what he is doing. For instance, he might be “in the gymnasium taking setting-up exercises.” He must guess on his return where he is and what he is doing by asking questions that can be answered only by “yes” and “no.”

And that’s it, aside from the apple cider and cake Cokesbury recommends for refreshments. Or get a completely wild hair and substitute hot chocolate and marshmallows for the apple cider. Remember, this is your Tacky Party. Get as tacky as you want. Maybe substitute Yoo-Hoo! Or tomato juice! Or Homer Simpson’s favorite, Royal Crown Cola! Let your imagination go wild!

But not too wild. You’ve got to save some energy for next week’s fling, the Thanksgiving Party. Call Massasoit and all the other folks and tell ‘em to come hungry. Well, puckish. Really, iron-stomached, because Cokesbury’s recommending plum pudding.

Tacky, Tacky

So, why is it whenever I hear the word “tacky” I’m always reminded of this musical?




There are certainly tackier things out there, to be sure: Most of the young up-and-coming stars and starlets in Hollywood, the entirety of the cities of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C., Canada (sorry, Canadians. I’ve been to that city and never have I encountered a more soulless place in my entire life).

Oh yeah. It’s because of this:



More tacky stuff next weekend at Cokesbury’s Tacky Party. Hope to see you there.

One Hundred Posts

For those of you familiar with my writing style, it should come as no surprise that I've been able to stretch out a 52-party book into more than 100 posts -- this is Post 101, by the way. Yes, I do tend to babble. But that's why the Internet is such a healthy outlet. It lets me babble and prattle and then, when it comes to my "serious" writing projects, I've got a lot of the bad writing out of my system. Not all the bad writing, mind you. But some. Enough, I hope, to make a difference.

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.

Cooties!

Parents, talk to your kids about cooties.