Couples Party Breaker

I went to an evening of "secret creativity", in which volunteers were supposed to bring their creative work. Being the hippie dippy group that we are, everyone was sure to be accepted, regardless of quality. Everyone had only 5 minutes.

There were several moments of music, reading from poetry or short stories, the intro to a book, and art passed around. There would have been dance, but the dancer had hurt her back.

I brought a game, of course, and it was the opener to the evening.

The question is what to bring to a group of people vastly uninterested in traditional gaming. The answer: a hippy dippie social game.

I brought pens and index cards. I asked everyone to write down a famous couple, real (dead only) or fictitious, with one on one side of the card and the other on the other side. I then took half the cards, tore them up, and randomly handed out singles of each couple to each person.

The game: find your partner without mentioning names. It was a quick game, around 30 seconds. There were 15 of us, so one person was without a partner. And one couple (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) had been repeated. As an aside, all the couples ended up as same-sex. :-)

Call it an icebreaker.

Doing it gave me several ideas for improvement. First of all, we could do it next time with pantomimes, only, although how you would pantomime Simone de Beauvoir is beyond me. Another idea was to use animals, and you could only speak your animal voice.

Which gave me an even better idea: Have Adam be the only one without a partner, and then dramatize his falling asleep and waking up with an Eve next to him.

Yehuda